vignette00's manga / #teacher(11)

Aijin wa Korosareru is, I think, less about love than it is about rejection and abandonment and the pure instinctual fear people have of not being wanted. That's what makes this story so strong. Hikari is deeply, deeply traumatized by his father's departure and his mother's insanity/emotional issues, and it makes him desperate for acceptance and love, so much so that when Kizaki reaches out even that little bit, Hikari grabs on. Which makes Haizawa and Hikari's relationship all that more painful, because Haizawa is one of those amazing characters that I think can only be found in sad, heartrending yaoi manga. Haizawa is sarcastic, and caustic, and manipulative, and mysterious from the beginning, and he probably has abandonment issues the length of his arm, but he thinks he's survived. He thinks he's over them, living his life, being a new man, and Hikari frightens him because Hikari hasn't. Hikari is a pure boy with pure emotions and he is at once drawn and repulsed by Haizawa, but Haizawa is scared and now I'm just psycho-analyzing this manga too much. Umetaro makes deeply flawed characters who are alive and emotional and filled with dimension, especially with Haizawa and Kizaki. I love how at first you think Kizaki is just going to be a minor character but then Umetarou draws Kizaki closer and closer to the heart of the story. Umetarou always gives Haizawa this subtly adult and mocking smile, which will become important later of course, and Haizawa is a man with so many faces and so many sides but the story makes them all believable. And this is a story about change, about growing up, about dealing with abandonment, about wanting just one person in the world to be happy that you were born, and I love it because even though there are not serious plot twists, what you think is going to happen doesn't. There is room for so many cliches, but the story doesn't go there. It takes middle ground, and takes you with it.

Main character Gin is from a rich family who refuses to accept his homosexuality. He strikes out on his own as a famous professor of archaeology, but has been for 14 years sex friends with his childhood friend Ei, himself a forensic scientist. Gin has been denying his feelings for Ei, but Ei is determined to prove to Gin that they, too, can find love. The story is ultimately about one person's (Gin's) dramatic reaction to the equally dramatic rejection of his sexuality. I love the story for Ei and Gin's relationship -- not because it is realistic, but because it manages to retread setups and ideas without feeling tired. There's a little bit of Koisuru Boukun (which I hate) and a lot of Junjou Egoist (which I'm fonder of) in the setup, but Ei has Nowaki's steadiness and Morinaga's devotion without Nowaki's inferiority issues and Morinaga's... everything else.... and that really turns the story around. He's not fazed by anything Gin throws his way, because he hasn't spent 14 years loving a difficult man for nothing. I want to love this story of human feeling transcending all else, but there's the issue of just how tried all the other components of the story are. It's not that these aren't real social issues gay men face every day (rejection by family, professional ostracization, sexual assault), but somehow throwing them together into the same story and giving it a rapid fire approach cheapens Gin's story. So ultimately but for the grace of Ei goes Gin -- this is a story fully saved by Amasaki's humanism.

Four stars for the understated relationship developments that, despite their tried and true nature, still felt real, two stars for the actual writing, which seemed not wholly fleshed out, so we get an average of three. It's not that the stories feel incomplete, but rather that they feel like they're all the first or second chapter of their own longer volume. We get a glimpse of the first couple's dynamic in the second couple's story, when one of them is trying to convince the other not to graduate, and we get a "holding your breath" sense with the second couple, who give this whole volume its name!! yet never seem to get more explanation than "they meet, find that they complete each other, continue to have sex after graduation." So, the rhythms of Fujiatani's storytelling make plenty of emotional sense, but the whole volume makes me feel dissatisfied, like I'm reading the first draft of a longer story.