Itooshiihito (The Beloved)

Author: Ikushima Miya
Imprint: Super BBC
Publisher: Biblos
ISBN: 4-8352-1011-5

Kitty review by Jeanne

Genre: lust among Meiji writers

Possible subtitles:
1) 'You may be a Meiji literati but you could damn well use a haircut'
2) 'You may be a Meiji literati but you could damn well use some manners'
3) 'You big brute, you!'

Plot and Theme:

Some enchanted evening,
You may see a stranger,
You may see a stranger with a neat and fuckable bum across a crowded gathering of Meiji intellectuals
And somehow you know
You know even then
That somehow you're going to screw his neat and fuckable bum again and again any time you feel like it whether he wants you to or not

Large obnoxious unmade bed of a novelist (Iwata) sees short bespectacled wombat of a novelist (Shinohara) at a lit.crit. meeting and decides, in the absence of any discernible evidence at all, that Shinohara is a) randy as a monkey and b) His. Turns out Shinohara is just a guy who can't say no, which is all that stops Iwata from being a stock raping seme. He still says 'Omae wa ore no mono da' a lot, and 'I'm going to defile you.' Also a few lines stolen from Arina's Psycho Kurama, like 'See only me' and 'Be angry at me. Hate me. Think only of me.' Iwata writes a book about his affair with Shinohara called, appropriately, Cold-hearted Lust. My cock, your bum, what's love got to do with it? (The novel, Hitodenashi no koi, is also the title of the first tankoubon about this pair.) Note, if you're interested, that most Meiji writers couldn't come up with an original plot to save their lives. They preferred to write thinly-disguised autobiographical novels instead, technically known as the 'I-novel' because it's about me, or rather, about Me.

'Itooshii hito' will appeal to fans of the Kouji Nanjou Seme Knows Best school, charter members of the 'That Poor Sweet Baybee Has Suffered Soooo Much of course he behaves like a dork' Taishakuten Marching Band, and anyone who's ever said about a boorish boyfriend 'But he's really very sensitive.' For once we have a mangaka who identifies with the seme. Ikushima kind of pounds it into us that Iwata is the essence of kewell. Iwata is a Wounded Soul (we don't know why, but it sounds better than saying 'Iwata has the manners of a cow.') Iwata's books inspire people with instant devotion to Iwata. Everyone lusts after Iwata, everyone wants his cock inside them, everyone wonders why he's taken up with a decent straightforward loving type like Shinohara who's so obviously unworthy of so wonderful a man. Do I detect a hint of 'authorial substitute' here? The 'I-manga'? Marty Sue, Marty Sue, Pretty pretty pretty pretty Marty Sue...

Iwata's second book is called, by a strange coincidence, The Beloved. It isn't about Shinohara, naturally. It's about Iwata's half-brother, the son of an Englishwoman married to a painter. Iwata's father raped her to vent his grief at his English wife's death- 'She was just a foreign woman, why not?' No comment.

Yaoi rating: 4

Silliness rating: 6

Unresolved plot point: Why does everyone want a guy who doesn't wash his hair?

Mitigating factor: Iwata's brother looks like the young Servis in the better Papuwa djs