I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #salarymen(22)

Hyper-competitive Touya Shinougi has always lost the top position to Kazuhiro Nagase, so he's horrified when his former rival suddenly appears as a fellow salaryman at his workplace. Nagase is clearly trying his best to seduce the prickly Shinougi, but so far to no avail. Presumeably this will change at some point.

Mishima, company president's son, thinks he has less talent and skill than his older brothers, so when he starts working at his father's company, he is slam-dunked under the care of the toughest boss in sales, Chief Kokubu. Kokubu is not only tough, but the leader in sales for the company, and he refuses to baby Mishima.

Stories about gay pick ups and the desire for intimacy to extend beyond the physical. (1) An actor has been thrown onto the street by a former friend who wants him to start being serious about a career, only to be picked up by a restaurant owner with a spare room and a customer who thinks the actor is just his type. (2) The actor has an identical twin brother who happens to be a hairstylist and has just moved to town. (3) Two salarymen from the same company seem to be on the same wavelength until an evening of hot sex backfires. (4) The couple from the second story resolve some more issues. (5) A man who was traumatized in middle school for being gay, is so fragmented, he retreats into the persona of a child until he finds someone who returns his love.

(1) An office worker seems to always be returning a colleague's lost items. They wouldn't be left behind on purpose, would they? (2) A café's owner goes to the hospital leaving his son and the waiter behind to man the shop. An unlikely fairy godfather shows up to nurture romance. Nice art and good stories, but it doesn't look like this scanlation's going anywhere fast.

Nakayama adores his former business mentor, Asuka, and moves to Nagoya to work in the same office under him. But something has happened to his boss, and he's a cold, impossible man. Asuka taught him too well. Big on tsundere.

Shinobu, on the rebound from his first big gay (unrequited, unconfessed) lurv, rebounds directly into impossibly hot and elite Kou at a gay bar. They share a night of hot sex, after which Shinobu scarpers off, leaving poor Kou stuck with room-money like he's nothing but a man-whore. Later that day, at work, the new president freshly returned from the States turns out to be ... surprise! Surprise! Drumroll, please! Wait for it! ... KOU, who takes to sexually harassing Shinobu likes it's Paris Fashion Week and Shinobu's bum-hole is a camera iris. Okeh, so far the story's a teensy bit predictable. Unpredictably, at the end of Chapter 2, Shinobu provides some refreshing honesty and a forthright explanation for his own behaviour, something which is almost unheard-of in yaoi. The rest of the story continues with this strong, new and interesting bend, with a very unexpected plot twist and reaction.

Don't let the sombre tone of the cover illustration fool you. So far (Chapter 1), this is a cute and well-paced story, which flirts with the edge of too much coincidence for realism without quite crossing over it ... yet. Yokoyama Naoki, a salaryman mired in gloom after his male partner and former colleague dumps him for a wife and child, keeps having fortuitous and random "meet ups" with Okada Yuumi, an eager and bright, young errand boy with romantic problems of his own. Is this a fluffy cure for heartbreak? Keen to see where mangaka, Hanakawa Chito, takes us.

Grumpy Mikado is Anezaki's office slave until the upstart underling films something that probably doesn't have as much traction nowadays since regular porn can be found everywhere and anywhere, but Anezaki gets some fine shots of Mikado's double life as a nerdy otaku, so tit-for-tat, and there was that one drunken incident together ... This leads to doing regular guy fun stuff together and—gasp!—actual friendship until an asshole comes sniffing around and interrupts a horrific scene which seems to belong to a whole other manga. Umm, yeah. Except this is quite a good little story and the characters are realistic, so read it anyway. It won't disappoint you.

A part-time, slackhanded customer relations employee falls for the terse, perfectionist manager of his call center, while being targeted by their jokey supervisor. There's the prerequisite caring for the cold scene, and a whole bunch of misunderstandings, but other than that, not too much plot.