Knock Three Times (Nokku wo Sankai)
ASAGIRI Yuu
Hanaoto Comics Special
ISBN4-8322-8024-4
Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson
Asagiri Yuu-land is a wonderful place. You know what you're getting
into with her. All the settled and secure pleasures of yaoi are there in abundance-
goodlooking men, round arching buttocks, lots and lots of 
sex. Asagiri's heroes
screw as a means of communication. Instead of talking, arguing, negotiating, or anything
tiresomely wordy like that, they out with the organs and up with the bums and go to it. As
a plus, the sex is actually variegated. Asagiri likes reversibles, so at least one
character is going to screw and be screwed within the covers of the same book.
This of course requires differing emotional states in the reversible character himself,
which is nice. One likes a little psychology with one's sex, as one likes salt on one's
eggs. A little, not too much.
In Knock Three Times, the reversible is the major character- an
alienated rich guy who advertises for a roommate when his cat dies and gets a black-haired
'pet' who's quite happy to be totally dependent on his owner. But when he's not being a
master, Reversible has uke longings in him. He wants to be fucked by the dark saturnine
character with the dangerous and cruel streak. Asagiri always has at least one of those
too. In Second Love it was the mysterious Marquis Gil who turns out to have been
the original Bluebeard, Gilles de Rais, a nasty bit of goods who was executed in
the 15th century for murdering boys. In Knock Three Times, it's
the Reversible's father's secretary, also a nasty bit of goods who's not above doing it
with his own sister. Nasty or not, Reversible wants him; and when circumstances deprive
him of the original, he goes looking for an acceptable substitute. And finds him
ultimately, so that Reversible, Pet, and Substitute Nasty settle down at book's end to a
happy menage a trois and a sexual threesome where Reversible can screw and be screwed
simultaneously. And you get to watch them do it.