Publisher: Biblos

Serialized in: BeXBoy (Three chapters, compiled into a single volume)

Reviewed by Nora Jemison

"Having sex is the first limitation of a civil spirit"

or

"The first restriction of civility"

Don't let the amount of difficulty I had in translating the title of this story scare you. "Ichigenme" (as I'll call it for short) may have been a major test of my (admittedly meager) translating abilities, but it's a very simple and sweet love story at its heart, and well worth the frustration. It's a story told in three longish chapters, compiled into a single volume under the name of the first chapter. While it's a little disappointing that the story doesn't continue beyond this, it's also a good thing, because the author plainly knows that a short, sweet story is sometimes much more powerful than something long and drawn-out. "Ichigenme" is very short, very sweet, and very powerful.

The story mostly takes place on the campus of a Japanese college/law school, where the main two characters, Tamiya and Toudou, are third-year classmates in the criminal law program. They're also members of the same research club. They've known each other the whole time, but their relationship begins on the night when they're inducted into the research club in a kind of friendly hazing, in which they have to do something completely bizarre and embarrassing in front of their classmates and professor. Toudou passes the initiation with flying colors when he whips off his clothes and shoves his penis into the teacher's glass of water. Really. He then helps Tamiya pass his test by planting a huge tongue-and-all kiss on him before Tamiya can do more than throw up his hands in protest.

This whole incident sets the tone for the rest of their relationship. Toudou, as the readers discover, is the more flamboyant of the two; he's tremendously confident and irreverent and very much the individual, one of the strongest personalities in the small group of friends that forms among the classmates. He immediately takes a liking to the much more restrained and reserved Tamiya, and from that night forward begins a campaign to make friends with the other young man---who, we discover, has no other real friends in the program. Tamiya's a guy with a few problems, we find out; a large part of his standoffishness stems from the fact that he's a repressed homosexual trying very hard not to be. The fact that Toudou is unashamedly relentless in his pursuit of Tamiya as both a friend and lover makes things harder for poor Tamiya. The story follows the development of their relationship as they go through their third year together, dealing with the typical trials of college life in Japan---which aren't so very different from the trials of college life in the West, it seems.

But before you dismiss this story as just another Zetsuai-like relationship between an aggressive popular guy and a repressed unpopular one---the relationship takes some surprising turns. Surprising for shounen ai/yaoi, anyhow. The friendship that develops between the two is real, and forms the basis for the more romantic part of the relationship---Tamiya initially rebuffs Toudou's efforts to make friends, but when Toudou's future at the school is put into doubt by a family scandal and money troubles, it's Tamiya who steps forward to help him, out of all of Toudou's friends. When Tamiya has to deal with a romantic advance by one of his (male) teachers, Toudou advises him and helps him work through the resulting confusion. Even the romance is unusual, for yaoi. Never once does Toudou push Tamiya farther than Tamiya is willing to go, even when they finally begin to explore their feelings for each other physically.

When Tamiya says no, Toudou stops. At first the relationship seems one-sided, with Toudou initiating all of the romantic/sexual moments, but gradually Tamiya becomes more willing to accept both his own sexual preferences and Toudou's friendship. The predictable (and very tender) consummation of this buildup is made bittersweet by the fact that their relationship seems doomed, because eventually the lovers are going to graduate and go their separate ways; this is a shadow that hangs over the whole relationship. I won't spoil the story any further by revealing whether or not they manage to get around this problem---but the ending is definitely a surprise.

The quality of the art is the one failing of "Ichigenme." The author, Yoshinaga Fumi, has a clean and deceptively simple, attractive style that nevertheless has some glaring limitations. She seems to be unable to draw faces in anything other than 3/4 and profile shots; while she handles those two perspectives well, with very detailed expressions, it does get monotonous after a while. She's still working on proportions; at times the characters look normal, but at times they have tremendously exaggerated torsos and limbs. Her backgrounds range from stark emptiness to beautifully-drawn scenes of the campus and the city---so she can draw backgrounds, but she rarely chooses to do so for reasons I haven't yet figured out. Sometimes the starkness is a nice effect, emphasizing the action of the characters in a given scene---but most of the time it gives the panels the feeling of an unfinished storyboard or photo stills. This is particularly noticeable during some of the dialogue scenes, when the repetitive shots of character/dialogue bubble/character/dialogue bubble get so monotonous that "talking heads" doesn't even begin to describe it.

However, these flaws can be overlooked. The story's interesting not only for its surprisingly realistic romance but also for its fascinating insight into Japanese higher education and student life (well, I found it fascinating, anyway). There's also a lot of humor in it, which can be a bit tough to understand because much of it relies on puns or subtle jokes in Japanese. The rest of it, though, is pretty easy to get. Toudou's got a weird sense of humor and Tamiya plays straight man to his antics. And some of the laughs are universal; it seems professors put just as many students to sleep in classes in Japan as they do in Western colleges.

So I'd recommend "Ichigenme" for people interested in seeing a realistic love story set in a realistic backdrop. It's got a bit higher level of Japanese and slang than I was used to, since it takes place in a college setting---there are many scenes, for example, in which theories and legal concepts are being tossed around (great insight into Japanese law, too, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat). But the lack of yaoi cliches makes up for the difficulty level. There are no wispy, weepy ukes here---or at least, when Tamiya cries, it's for a plausible reason.

No pushy semes. No quasi-rape sex scenes. No angst without reason. Not much sex, I should note; there's only one scene in which the sex is carried out to the satisfaction of both parties, and even then it's not particularly graphic (although we do get to see pubic hair!). So anyone looking for the standard yaoi formula of setup/graphic sex/resolution might be disappointed.

For anyone else, though... check it out.