Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson
The 'me' of the title (ore) is Takeru, the 'him' (that guy- aitsu) is his stepbrother Shin, only a few years older. Our story opens as Takeru, waiting for- well, not his girlfriend exactly, more the girl he screws, sees Shin picking up a client for the same thing, but paid. A bit of a shock for Takeru, but his stepbrother beats him to the punch when it comes to spilling the beans. 'Isn't first year high a little young to be taking your girlfriend off to a love hotel?' he asks in front of the parents, who promptly have fits. Shin then plays the responsible older brother ('This'll come better from someone closer to his own age') and carts Takeru off to his room for an older brotherly lecture of the kind so dear to Japanese hearts. Most older brothers, however, don't say 'Breathe a word about that and I'll rape you' to their snarling younger siblings. Ahh, but this is a Tohjoh Asami family, where togetherness pretty much begins and ends at home.
Takeru begins to wonder if his brother has a split personality, because next thing that happens is that rapist-wannabe Shin says it's ok by him if Takeru keeps the stray cat he's found. 'I hate cats. Just keep it away from me.' Since Takeru's mother said he could keep it only if his brother didn't object, this is a relief. But when he feeds it the wrong kind of food, it's Shin who saves the cat's life by giving it artificial respiration. At this point the reader too may wonder what's going on.
Takeru's mother has always worked and Takeru longs for a Hallmark card-
type happy family- lights on when he got back to his nice warm home,
pets running around the house, everyone gathered around the dinner
table for meals, a dependable big brother he can ask for help with his homework. It begins to look like we're
into a Japanese version of the Brady Bunch when Takeru agrees to Shin's wish and
begins to call him 'nii-san,' as the first episode ends.
Well, no. Tohjoh's families aren't Disney or even shoujo. There's a long way to go before the idyllic fantasy can be fulfilled, and the scenery is classic Tohjohland all the way. In the course of the first volume we learn the sordid background of this second marriage and the secrets in the past that have made Takeru long for a protective older brother and led Shin to become the unhappy complicated person he is: an honour student who whores on the side, a complicated mixture of idealism and cruelty.
Tohjoh's works, more than any other mangaka's I know, require you to read them to get the full effect. A bare bones description of what happens does a disservice to the experience. (Besides, there are some things English just can't convey. You have to be there.) To say anything more about the plot would spoil it. Be assured that the usual Tohjoh topoi are present in force- the sincere loving character, the concern for 'purity', the self-sacrifice and selfless devotion, and the vision of love as a refuge in the middle of a dirty and unpleasant world. I suppose her works are about redemption, of sorts, but in a fashion that strikes me as very Japanese. The love of the 'pure' character doesn't redeem the sins of the 'dirty' one, it makes him understand that he too is pure. It seems a bit odd, here in a new century at the dawn of a new millennium, to be talking about purity and salvation and such with a straight face, but in Tohjoh's world these ideas are as normal as drycleaners and convenience stores. And somehow she convinces even sceptics like this reviewer
Volume 2 contains a little stand-alone story, about a guy who goes back to his home town and his mother's marigold garden to confront the ghosts of his past. He's a haafu- half Japanese and half-blond something with blue eyes, and his hair is the same colour as the marigolds that his mother loved so much. (There's probably a genetic reason why I've never met anyone with a Japanese parent and a blond one whose hair was anything more than light brown but I suppose the myth of blond Japanese dies hard among the Japanese.) The ghost he most needs to confront is the younger boy who became his friend after his mother died, and whom he alienated later by a too premature declaration of love. He avoids meeting him by dyeing his hair dark and wearing coloured contacts lenses, and gets to meet his friend, now an adolescent of fourteen, as a stranger. Another story of romantic attachment and sins redeemed.
