Hanaoto Comic

Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson

Not all yaoi is created equal in my world. Ordinary guys, highschool pals, buddies at the office- nnnehh, boring. Yawn. For all that steamy sex and (un)requited love to tickle my jaded palate, I need fantasy: long ago and far away, hair to the bums, kings, magicians, demons, the occasional one-eyed man. JUNE (the mag) doesn't give you this. Hanaoto does.

From Hanaoto we have the series Second Love, that at first looks like it's about yer average highschool wimpy uke-in-training. Wimp loses the girl he loves on p.2, is hit on by his tutor, and has a pass made at him by the school bad boy with a heart of gold. Inconsternation Wimp runs into 2nd hand bookstore where, in an hommage to Fushigi Yuugi, he falls into the book he was reading and finds himself Elsewhere, witnessing a sex scene between the long-haired king of the place, Saladin, and his one-eyed lover Ashra. (My kind of series.) As a further fillip, Saladin is the uke.

Not that a westerner would pick this detail up at once, since what wimp sees is Ashra giving the King head. Just a Japanese oddity: while tops in the west are, as the personals put it, 'Greek active, French passive' (the doer in anal and the done in oral), in Japan oral sex is the top's responsibility. Saladin's preferences still remain obscure, since after he captures the kidwho's interrupted their scene, he at once turns him on his back and plows him lustily. Freewheeling and uninhibited, Saladin is the perfect 'reversible': happy doing it in either role. Top with his sex slave, bottom to the arms trader whose help he needs. In actual fact Saladin's switch-hitting preferences are at the mercy of his artist's whims. 'I like this character uke with his dark friend, but I got the urge to do a scene where Ashra is the bottom, so I did.' To her credit, she devised a perfectly reasonable- in the context of the story- reason for Ashra to want the bottom role all of a sudden.

The yaoi quotient, in Kitty's terms, is 10+ and still climbing. I'm reminded of a work by Voltaire, the French philosopher, which was described as follows: 'Whenever the action shows any signs of actually coming to a point, everyone drops what they're doing and makes love.' Yes. But this isn't just a porn scenario. There's a plot happening around the sex: wimp is the incarnation of Ashra sent back to his original time to prevent the curse that has doomed all of Ashra's future incarnations to lives of misery. By a happy coincidence, highschool bad guy who becomes wimp's boyfriend is the incarnation of the king. The two are sent about in time and manipulated, sort of, by a future incarnation of Ashra: an 11-year-old Shotacon who lives between times, since he's dead in his own world due to that curse. Naturally he has an interest in seeing that it never gets a chance to happen. Manga subtext suggests that what really pisses Shotacon off is not having lived to be old enough to have real guy-guy sex himself. He does what he can, in his Shotacon fashion, with the unnamed 'Master' he works for, some kind of heavenly housekeeper disguised as a book-store owner. 'Master's' a pleasant well-spoken bookish type in glasses and a knitted vest who's not averse to sticking the occasional finger up the occasional boy's bum to give him relief. Oh, you didn't think pedophile humour belongs in a steamy m/m fantasy romance? Well, evidently it does. With this series you can safely expect anything.

This is a cheerful, hot fantasy, with a bunch of gorgeous guys; the angst is all for the future, which we confidently hope won't happen. Even the highschool drip is wet in a convincing and not unsympathetic way: yeah, people like that exist, they have their good points, and this one actually enjoys sex: no "Iya da, yamete"s from him. (A little confused wondering about 'Could I have a naturally sexual nature?' from someone who'd never thought of himself as a hot item- natural under the circs.) Last seen, he was having a good crack at preventing that fate from happening. More power to him.