Koi no Okite ( A Law of Love)

Author: Tohjoh Asami
Imprint: Bamboo Comics Reijin
Publisher: Take Shoubo
ISBN: 4-8124-5206-6

Reviewed by Jeanne

Tohjoh's specialty seems to be sincerity. She has heroes whose feelings are so 'junsui' (pure) that they look demented. They even look demented to the other denizens of the story, which serves as a kind of reality check for the poor confused gaijin reader. A case in point is the hero of Koi no Okite, just yer average salaryman who finds himself in bed one night with an illiterate rentboy and next day has no memory of how he or the rentboy got there. But being an honest salaryman, he hands over the 30,000 yen ($300) the boy demands. Our salaryman has other things on his mind besides magically appearing rentboys (who sat himself down at the restaurant table where the salaryman was getting seriously drunk alone, on the mistaken assumption that the salaryman was the client who'd commanded his services.) Salaryman's wife died two years ago, and he's just at the point where he's starting to feel again: and what he feels is pain.

Salaryman is not alone in his idiotic honesty. When rentboy discovers he slept with the wrong guy, he shows up at the office to return the $300, though God knows he earned it. This series ran in Reijin, where glowing cones of light are routinely allowed to become phantom penises, and salaryman's phantom penis is pretty damn big. (And rentboy's asshole, as we're constantly told, is pretty damn small.) The boy makes the mistake of mentioning the woman in the picture at the salaryman's apartment, and our salaryman sends him packing with the $300. But then he finds he can't forget him, any more than rentboy can forget this oddly straightforward ex-client of his. The rentboy has a rough life of it with his pimp, who has the boy convinced that an illiterate like him can never get an honest job. Our salaryman has to deal with the interference of his best friend who turns out to be in love with him. (Yaoi series reverse Kinsey's statistics. You can safely assume that 90% of the population is gay.) The course of true love doesn't run smooth, but our honest salaryman walks straight in where angels fear to tread- into boy bars and through crowds of chinpira (low-level yakuza)- in search of the thing that will give meaning to his life. It's an oddly affecting story, and no more unreal than the average Hollywood film where beautiful people Find Each Other as a matter of course.

The stand-alone story in this collection, Garasu no Kajitsu (Glass Fruit) is much nastier and Reijin-ish. A couple has been together for eight years, ever since high school. But now the seme is thinking of his career and starting to date women. (This is Japan, where unmarried salarymen don't get promoted.) His lover is hurt by all this and becomes, in the seme's opinion, a major nuisance- always hanging around outside his apartment moping. So of course seme hires a couple of old friends to rape his uke. Uke for once turns the tables on his seme by using a tactic much recommended by girltalk confidantes. (I'm not telling you what that is. Read it and find out.) Uke *then* allows himself to cry his wounded little heart out. Whether you believe the happy ending of this story depends on just how much you buy the unreal givens of yaoi. Note that no-one in yaoi ever follows that other common piece of girltalk advice: 'Dump him, dear, he ain't worth it.'