vignette00's manga / #oneshots(43)

The first story is about your run of the mill high school basketball athletes, one of whom is quietly and forcefully devoted to the other, and, well, to call it a homophobia plot would give it too much drama. The second oneshot is about a policeman and a runaway and a pair of old shoes. Both chapters are resting on pretty, i.e. Yamada Sakurako's art, which is fluid, dynamic, and attractive without too many flourishes. Overall, solid but not memorable.

5 stars for the NightS, probably only 4 for Reply on its own. NightS is my favorite of Yoneda Kou's works (barring wherever Saezuru is going to take us), as it perfectly encapsulates her ability to mesh plot with sexual/romantic tension. The relationship is consummated, but only superficially. Reduced to the tropes (sexy older knowing uke manipulates younger naive seme) it sounds silly and predictable, but Masaki is sexy/older/wary/flirtatious-but-dangerous honed to knife-sharp accuracy, and the dialogue between him and Karashi is endlessly entertaining. As always, Yoneda Kou is best with shadows/lightplay. The kind of oneshot that makes you wish it was a series. (Reply is good too, but more clunky because it's necessarily about two people who are bad at expressing themselves. The payoff is satisfying for someone who likes Yoneda Kou's aesthetic, but would be highly unsatisfying for a typical bl story. In some ways it has the atmosphere of Hidaka Shoko ("Arashi no Ato" in particular).)

Two stories (high school boys discover each other's feelings, man is reunited and takes in his former classmate). Both have the same "yearning for something very close to me and therefore distant" feel to them. Nothing very dramatic happens, and there's a rather touching ending scene for the second couple that takes the "less is more" route you rarely see in bl manga.

An excerpt from Dame BL, IIRC. Not much of a oneshot, more an essay from Yoneda Kou. She's self-aware enough to be able to pinpoint exactly what makes her aesthetic work, and in a few pages manages to summarize all of "Don't Stay Gold," "Saezuru," and "NightS."

Two (or three) longer stories and one true oneshot to close out the volume. The first is probably Kusama Sakae at her atmospheric best (c.f. Carnivorous Animal's Table Manners), about two soldiers learning to cope with the effects of the war ending. A two-parter about isolation and reintegrating into society, it lets the perfect amount of introspection remain unspoken, and the effect is heady, humid, and affecting. More disturbing if you compare it to the real life story of Hirou Onoda, but the privilege of fiction is that you can take and leave what you like of history. And then, the Between 1 and 2/ 0 and 1 stories. Between 1 and 2 is a classic "bl chara doesn't understand that childhood friend is a dude, not a lady" story, and skims lightly across the hinted-at dark sea of, essentially, childhood sexual trauma. Kusame doesn't do much with the implied sexual predator in the story, and so the effect is simply froth (well-executed froth, but still froth). As for Between 0 and 1, though, the rape is explicit, textual, and disturbing, made worse by the fact that the characters don't really address it. It's a little like that Ono x Tachibana dj for Antique Bakery that Yoshinaga drew herself, the one that breaks open their sexual tension, only Kusame doesn't make the characters sit down and talk to each other afterwards like Yoshinaga does. Instead both of them get lost in their own heads and then they yell at each other and then they start a relationship that mostly consists of goading each other on. I don't mean to be disapproving, and I think Kusame's liner notes at the end show what she's trying to do (the characters are a mended lid to each other's broken pot). It's thematically consistent with the first story and the last oneshot -- to wit, a broken thing becomes stronger and more beautiful when it is mended with love. Whether or not you buy it depends on how you feel about the use of rape in stories. I wouldn't say that Kusame is condoning the rape, but it's certainly not treated with the weight I would think it deserved. Overall, though, worth it for the first historical oneshot.