Ichigenme wa Yaruki no Minpou 2

Author: Yoshinaga Fumi
Imprint:BBC
Publisher: Biblos
ISBN4-8352-1318-1

Reviewed by Nora

...And then they bumped into each other on campus a little while later. Toudou had come back to school as an engineering student. Tamiya was there as a grad student. And suddenly their "farewell" signalled the start of a whole new kind of relationship.

Volume 2 picks up an unspecified amount of time after the end of 1. Tamiya is teaching on campus (perhaps as a graduate assistant?), while Toudou works in a lab (perhaps as a research assistant?). In the evenings, they come home to one another and have sex. A lot. In an astonishing variety of positions. That's pretty much the plot of the whole volume.

I'm being facetious. It's not the content that matters in this case, it's the execution, and as usual Yoshinaga-sensei delivers with a skillfull titillation that's just... yummy. It may make a difference that this volume started life as several doujinshi which Yoshinaga-sensei self-published earlier; she always seems to get a little wilder in her djs than she does in the commercial stuff. In this case, it allows her to make up for the relative sex-austerity of volume 1, much to the joy of fans---and whoa, mamma, does she make up for it.

It's the details that do it for me. In one scene, Toudou comes home and finds Tamiya masturbating. Sweet-but-occasionally-slow soul that he is, at first he doesn't quite realize what his beloved is up to (Tamiya doesn't see him). But when Tamiya murmurs Toudou's name, all bets are off. Toudou stops him in the act, teases him about having impure thoughts, and then slides into bed with him---with a look on his face that I can only describe as a promise. If he'd spoken during that panel (and if he'd spoken English), he might have said, "Yeah. That's right, baby. If you thought the fantasy was good, wait'll you get a load of me..."

Fortunately, he doesn't say anything---certainly nothing so cheesy, which would utterly ruin the panel. As before, Yoshinaga-sensei makes good use of silence and facial expressions; she lets the boys' eyes speak volumes, and sometimes those volumes are pure poetry. Tamiya looks torn between terror and utter fascination when Toudou slides into bed, and boy do I envy him. Especially in the following pages, when Toudou makes good on the promise.

Something new in this volume---or maybe I've just noticed it more this time around---is that instead of silence, Yoshinaga-sensei plays around a bit with sound. I've never been big on sound effects in visual formats; too much exposure to the TV version of Batman during the Seventies. Usually this prevents me from enjoying most yaoi sex scenes to their fullest--- when you visualize the most unobtrusive "zuu zuu" as big day-glo "ZUU!!!! ZUU!!!!" it just doesn't come across the way the mangaka intended. I think that's why I liked volume 1 of Ichigenme so much; Yoshinaga is a minimalist when it comes to her love scenes, and there are few sound or movement effects and background details to distract from the men in motion. In Ichigenme 2, however, she uses a few more sounds---and instead of distracting, they enhance. In the aforementioned promise-keeping scene, for example, Toudou starts off giving Tamiya a leisurely blowjob. Interspersed with shots of Tamiya's face growing progressively more strained, we get first the wide view (a shot of both, Tamiya sitting on Toudou's face) with tiny sounds of sucking off to the side. Then we get a close-up (Toudou's face and Tamiya's only-slightly-fuzzy glowing cone), then an extreme close-up (Toudou's mouth, and Tamiya's not at all fuzzy cockhead). By this point the sound effects are obtrusive and explicit, pointing directly at the source, and forcing the audience to focus on that one point of contact to the exclusion of all else---as, no doubt, Tamiya is.

Later on in the same sex scene---several long pages later---we get another example of masterful use of sound, as both men come at the same time. We get the sounds of spasmodic jerking (pikuu pikuu pikuu),and then the sound of two men yelping, drawn in a little semicircular arc of sound bubbles as they come down from their high ("Ah!" "Ah!" "Ah!" "Ah!" "Ah!"), finishing up with a mutual sigh of relief: "Haaaaaaaa."

Echoed by the reader's sigh of bliss: "Haaaaaaaa."

This is not to say the volume is completely without plot. There are several---just not the single overarching plot that we had in volume 1. Instead we have vignettes. Toudou, ever craving more, wonders if Tamiya loves him and pesters him about it during their lovemaking (Tamiya waits until after the orgasm to beat him). Toudou's curly hair grows so long that it drives Tamiya nuts, and so Toudou cuts it. He's terrified at first that Tamiya hates his new look, until he realizes Tamiya's turned on and trying to hide it. The predictable follows, with a silly ending---after mind-blowing sex, Tamiya complains about Toudou's pubic hair. Toudou gets a gleam in his eye. "Tamiya... down there... shall I...?"

We get more of a plot with a surprise addition to the volume---the introduction of Toudou Takaaki's younger, cooler, smoother brother, Toudou Hiroaki. Hiroaki's also in university, and he's got a curious fetish; he likes older men. When he catches the eye of his shy teacher, Itou Hisao, the usual rules of cat and mouse are reversed. Itou strikes up a friendship with Hiroaki, wistfully hoping for more than friendship, and it's only a matter of time before Hiroaki---who's clearly made up his mind already about what he wants---reels him in. It's easy to see why these two like each other, and why Yoshinaga-sensei wrote them: they're Toudou Elder and Tamiya, with personalities and sex roles reversed. Hiroaki is what Tamiya might be like as a seme---cool and somewhat formal, quietly sexy. Itou is a hilarious uke version of Toudou Takaaki---eager despite his shyness and uncertainty, gleeful and goofy as a kid despite being older than Hiroaki. They're horribly sweet together.

We're treated, in the final chapter, to an extended flashback on Hiroaki's part, to an affair he had while still in high school with an older boy named Sasaki. This story brings an unexpected, though not unpleasant, serious note to the volume. Sasaki's into drugs and a generally risky lifestyle, which isn't a problem while they're young. But five years pass, and when Hiroaki meets Sasaki again, Sasaki's developed some bad habits, including harder drugs and rough sex. Their relationship eventually falters to a sad close, but not without leaving its mark---now we know why Hiroaki likes older men.

So for fans of the Ichigenme gang, volume 2 is a definite must-read, because it's got more of everything we love---more characters, more detail on the characters we already knew, more laughs, and (lots) more sex. Newbies can enjoy this volume too, thanks to the fact that it's more of an anthology than a story continuation, but I'd still recommend both. Knowing the depth of history between Toudou and Tamiya makes a difference, given that they spend so much of this volume horizontal and silent (well, except for sound effects). Plus, spending volume 1 hoping for sex will make the oodles of it that we get in volume 2 that much nicer.

Check it out!