I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #Nishida Higashi(2)

Nishida Higashi hit the ball out of the park with this one. Usually her yaoi, with its bickering McBickerson idiot couples and oneupmanship pissing contests, irritates me like chewing on food with eggshells in it. But I have to hand it to her, she kept her style but sanded off all the gritty edges. The men are still "all-male". The star baseball player Hidaka still thinks he's hot stuff as he plays around on his girlfriend and then, blames her when she dumps him for another guy at the start of a cruise. He still acts like a bear with a sore paw, aiming to make everyone around him as miserable as possible in order to punish HER. The ship's captain, Matsudo, pulls some really, really stupid stunts in order to protect his crew and, in his unreliably skewed eyes, his kid. But there's that kid, Yuuto ... soft, shy, wanting to make his friends happy. The things that Yuuto brings out of these men and the things these men bring out of each other, changes everything. It's so against Nishida Higashi's usual storyline and default characters, and it's so GOOD. Stick with this one, even during the goofy parts, because it's worth it.

1950s jazz standard "Mona Lisa" is the leitmotif for this crime thriller about two yakuza middlemen who fall madly in love with each other's *respectable* personnae, and can't let the delusion or deception drop even when they catch each other in the middle of an unwitting double-cross. The stakes are high and the reader is kept on the edge of her seat while these two men try to find a path through incredible opposition and peril back to each other.