I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #depression(3)

Udou's bitterness and breezy cruelty towards others is rooted in an unrequited love for Kiyotake, a basketball teammate from high school. His misery and jealousy has prompted him to commit despicable acts against the very person he loved, twice. Now, in college, karma has caught up to him and his feelings are revealed in all their rawness, but what does Kiyotake have to say about them? Here is how one man's kindness can redeem someone who has fallen so completely. Ogawa Chise's stories often go over the top into outright madness, but this story hits all the right emotional notes without going too far.

A former athlete falls into a depression so deep, after he is cut from his team, that he is willing to have sex with anyone in order to feel something. Hints of a failed romance indicate that the real reason for his anguish has little to do with soccer.

Inspired by ante-WWII western domestic architecture and gardens, Kinoshita Keiko daydreamed up a story about Yukiyo, the gay man who inherited one such home, where he lives with Takashina, his lover, and Yuuta, the son of his ex-wife and the man he once loved, who suffered from depression and commit suicide many years previously. Filled with remorse for confessing to his late friend, and muddled by disappointment and unresolved grief, Yukiya swings wildly between seducing and rejecting Takashina. Things remain in stasis until Yuuta makes a confession of his own, summoning Yukiya's protective instincts. A slow building emotional simmer with some very beautiful watercolour drawings.