Despicable
Two stories, both about bizarre love triangles. In one, two schoolboys develop an unhealthy cat-and-mouse game of affections, which involves roping in third parties as bait. One of them manages, in a Psyche Delico kind of way, to rope in a third party who bites as well as he takes to being chewed. In the second, a man falls in love with his brother-in-law, who is afraid he used marriage as a way of binding himself to a man who refuses to be helped. After his death, the brother in law and a best friend reminisce, and it ends, in a Psyche Delico kind of way, poorly. I find Psyche Delico most interesting in what she doesn't say, rather than what she actually puts in the mouths of her characters. This isn't "Choco Strawberry Vanilla" levels of fascinating and fresh three person dynamics, but ultimately it's one of the better fictional representations of what separates a crush from true love. The two professors/schoolboys in the first story are too afraid of rejection to have a loving, mutual relationship with each other, so (spoilers!) when the confession comes at the end, it doesn't branch off into "old men finding each other" comfort and understanding; instead, it terminates the relationship and causes Okuzono to pursue the next thing -- which just happens to be Utsugi, a guy who is too much like him and Yamashiro both for their own good. Utsugi, too, was most fascinated by Okuzono when Okuzono was at his darkest and most untouchable, i.e. most obsessed with Yamashiro, so one can only guess what the consummation of that relationship is going to look like, now that he finally has what he wants. You know that bit in bl manga where someone realizes, "I only loved you when you were in love with someone else"? That's it, that's the whole story. The second half is interesting for the dissonant climax and conclusion. We're looking at three guys who keep settling for their second best because they think or know their first choice is out of reach, but it's a Penrose triangle of impossibility that feeds into itself: Masaki thinks Otohiko is only sleeping with him because he can't get Daigo, and Otohiko can't tell Masaki that he's using Daigo as a reason to sleep with him, because he really does love Daigo, and so on. An interesting enough set-up, but Psyche Delico balanced atmosphere with emotional development and slighted the latter to lean more heavily on the former.
Koi ga Bokura wo Yurusu Hani
When I first read this manga as a wee-child, this seemed the height of emotional and sexual mannerpunk, but upon rereading, Motoni Modoru's characters reveal themselves to be, well, Motoni Modoru characters. Jeanne of Aestheticism.com once wrote an insightful look into the kind of modern melodrama that Koi ga Yurusu Hani represents, but suffice to say, the crux of the plot revolves around the way the main characters Yamazaki and Fujio have twisted themselves into knots trying to justify their feelings for each other in spite of and because of their reluctance to sleep with each other. When their girlfriends (Reiko and Miku respectively) finally goad them into a sexual relationship, the thing comes to a head, in part because the characters keep arguing over whose feelings have been "raped" the most. Fujio and Yamazaki are less fully realized human beings than walking examples of overwrought ~feelings~. I have never once been able to follow Fujio's chain of thought, and it took meeting Imagase from "The Cornered Mouse…" before I was able to properly appreciate Yamazaki. Miku and Reiko fare slightly better as real human beings, though it's telling that because we see more of Miku, she also engages in the same emotional gymnastics that Fujio and Yamazaki do, whereas Reiko comes off as more "real" simply because we never have to scratch her cool, uncaring exterior. Equally telling is what happens to Katsumi, Miku's boyfriend on the side, who is introduced as an anchor but then rapidly becomes a deus ex machina for Motoni. He spends most of the latter chapters shouting at various characters and thus explaining the story to the reader, and without Katsumi, I have a feeling most of the last arc of the manga would be inexplicable. So, in the end, Koi ga Yurusu is more Tori Maia than Miyamoto Kano. A better comparison might be Nitta Youka's "When a Man Loves a Man" series, though directly comparing the two, I think, shows off Nitta's more even-handed, subtle approach to her characters. It's a fascinating enough melodrama, if you're into that kind of thing. If you're asking me, my final verdict is that all the characters would be too exhausting to be friends with in real life, the kind of people you'd always be texting, "for the love of god, go home, you're drunk."
See-through