I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #hurt/comfort(7)

A man is dumped by his gay lover on Christmas Eve and, suffering from loneliness and heartbreak, spontaneously rescues a vagrant and kitten who have fallen asleep in the front garden of his apartment complex. The vagrant is suffering from his own tragic loss, and the two of them slowly come to understand and love each other, but not before denying their true feelings.

Salaryman, Sanoshita, is in a quandary about how to thank Manaka, the mover who saved him when he accidentally bumped into a pile of boxes at his new apartment, but was, in turn, injured himself. Attraction develops into a caring friendship and a wonderful love affair, with a few bumps and rocky patches along the way. Not only has this manga got one of the best lines ever, but there is an entire wordless picture story section. Other sweet and sexy short stories round out the collection.

A series of oneshots in which violence and control are sub-themes: (1) an abused boy finds love in the arms of a kind widower with a baby daughter; (2) a middle manager who cannot smile falls for a new office worker who can't stop smiling; (3) a pair of salarymen negotiate their way through a master/pet relationship; (4) a pair of schoolboys with deceptive appearances negotiate their way through a master/slave relationship.

Volume 12: Mujihi na Karada "Ruthless Body" in Sakuragi Mei's extensive Warui series and sequel to Mujihi na Otoko and Mujihi na Anata. Primary couple: Kuon Aikawa x Nanao Shirohane. Moving in Together.

When Kaoru breaks up with them, his girlfriends complain that he doesn't desire them, and college friend, Masoto, always seems to end up with them. Masoto offers to comfort Kaoru after one such break-up "until the one he really likes" comes along. Kaoru's only issue is that Masoto leaves right after they have sex, but he can't seem to say anything about it. Slow-paced and set up for a classic romance with spare drawings beautifully rendered by Takamiya Azuma, this story is scanlated up to the point of heartbreak. We never learn the final outcome.

A cornea transplant leads to an entirely new existential paradigm for a young man, who abandons his fiancée, and their planned-out life together, to chase the doctor who performed his surgery to Norway. The corneas belonged to the doctor's former lover, but the spookier, supernatural elements of the story are less important than the man's self-realization.