I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #tragedy(15)

Haruna, a art student, picks up the injured stranger, Shiki, on the street and tends to his wounds because he reminds him of a stray cat he once rescued. Shiki has been driven out of the nearest town, and his arm is covered with intricate, traditional yakuza-style tattoos. When Shiki moves to leave, Haruna holds him in an embrace to stop him from going, but they really know nothing about each other and it ends tragically.

A tragedy places orphaned Tooru in the home of his grandfather and Uncle Yukihiko who has secretly nurtured a forbidden love. Shame and despair suppress the honest communication that needs to happen in order to sort the same feelings rising between Tooru and Yukihiko years after the grandfather's death. There are emotional casualties, but the story is sensitive and shows awareness, even if the subject matter is unusual.

A strange two-part short story by Yamane Ayano, whose two parts seem completely incongruous with each other. The first is almost comic, involving train chikkan and a heroic rescuer who is little better than the molester. The second is a touching and frightening ghost story which is almost too tragic to belong in such an otherwise light piece. In either case, it's engaging.

Yuki is the fulcrum between his childhood friends, Chihiro and Ryuutarou, in this love triangle soap opera by Hiro Reiichi. Yuki is also an amateur mountaineer amongst professionals in a dangerous sport, and it's on one of these expeditions that he receives and accepts a love confession, which has the expected consequence of banishing the third friend from their circle of intimacy just as tragedy strikes. But all is not fair in love and war when it comes to yaoi, so this otherwise perfectly structured yaoi romance acquires a sentimental and slightly clunky resolution. Even so, it's a lively story and one of Hiro Reiichi's better ones.

A boy at school tries to rise above his loser friends with dark and tragic results.