West End I

Author: Aoi Futaba and Kurenai Mitsuba
Imprint: Super BBC
Publisher: Biblos
ISBN: 4-88271-376-4

Summary by Jeanne

Note: this is a summary, not a review. Spoilers abounding. Beware.

Post nuclear holocaust, the human race somehow hangs on and survives- rather well, it would seem- in a world that apparently lacks any central authority. Somehow the humans have manufactured a race of android slavies, the demis. With collars and owners, yes. Demi physical structure is unstable. They have to take stabilizing drugs daily, and when they die their bodies dissolve into fluid. Of course, this being yaoi to the nth, *before* they die their bodies dissolve into fluids too. But that's for later.

Most demis are mass-produced unindividualized factory demis. But there's a mysterious place called the Castle that manufactures superior demis to order. One of these, Tonami, was hijacked while being delivered to his intended owner and winds up in a demi brothel. One day while serving as 'signpost demi' ie while getting screwed out in the front room to attract and encourage customers, a 'worker' (read: knife for hire) called Kiri comes in, flashes his cash and demands a demi. One of the patrons, taken by Kiri's manly good looks, suggests Kiri do it with him instead. Kiri draws his knife and slashes the other man's face. The ensuing fight distracts people from the floor show. Since no-one's watching them any more, Tonami's partner dumps him and takes off. Tonami finishes jerking himself off as the fight continues. At the end, Kiri turns around and sees him at it. 'Had to do it yourself, huh?' he asks with unexpected sympathy. 'It's pretty tough, I know.' (Japanese mangaka have this odd idea that sex alone is a fate so cruel that no-one should have to bear it. Of course this is the country where people also think you shouldn't have to pee or die alone, and are always inviting other people to come along and do it with them.) Embarrassed, Tonami runs off to the 'case' where the demis await their customers. Someone calls for him thereafter, and is in the process of screwing him dry (yes, demis need lube. It's official) when Kiri appears, kills the guy out of hand, and runs off taking Tonami with him.

Tonami has fallen in love at first sight with Kiri and his beautiful eyes. He's in raptures when Kiri takes him home, sucks him off and screws him. Kiri also stops him from drinking the poisonous tap-water of the town and pulls him into the bath with him. But Kiri has no sentimental feelings, naturally. He's simply stolen Tonami to demonstrate his prowess to the rival brothel in town. He wants a job and money to finance his trip to the west-- 'There's someone there I want to see.' When he shows up to hand Tonami over and demand work, the owners shoot him and proceed to screw Tonami in front of Kiri's dead body. Which doesn't stay dead for long. Kiri revives, kills the brothel owner, and takes off with Tonami. He explains that whatever happens, he doesn't die, and in the west there's someone who perhaps can tell him why. And in some mysterious place, some mysterious person receives his orders from top officialdom to go and find 'the demis who come under our jurisdiction'- one of whom is Tonami.

In a new town Kiri pimps Tonami out while he himself tries to find work. Tonami of course spends a lot of time mooning around, thinking how he can't live without Kiri and wondering what is it he feels about Kiri and will he be able to go away with Kiri and ohh dear Kiri doesn't really need him and so on and so forth. Tonami does this kind of maundering about as often as he self-lubricates, so just assume that whatever else happens in the story, it's accompanied by Tonami doing 'poor little me' pull them heartstrings stuff. Over dinner in a restaurant one day Tonami tells Kiri about being trained at the Castle by their 'sensei' to be a servant. Discovering that Tonami can cook, Kiri puts him in charge of getting their meals. Tonami is terribly happy planning menus for Kiri (all the boy ever wanted was to be a housewife, really) but shortly thereafter a customer kicks him onto the floor for daring to sleep in a human's bed. Poor little Tonami thinks he's been imposing on Kiri because the two share a bed and bath together, and of course us poor demis shouldn't do things like that, so of course he starts to sleep on the floor the poor little thing. (Swallow lump in throat. Aoi and Kurenai are shameless in the depths of their pathos.) Kiri gets an interview for a contract, leaving Tonami to await the day's customer. Customer turns out to be plural, and when Kiri comes home Tonami is bundled up in his blankets shivering on the floor. 'Is this to get back at me for making you whore?' Kiri demands. 'If you're so cold, get yourself into bed' and he pulls him up, to discover that Tonami is bleeding from the treatment he got that afternoon. 'There were so many of them...' he explains. 'First I'd heard of it,' Kiri mutters, and proceeds to apply ointment to (a yelling) Tonami's cuts. Tonami tells him what's been eating his soul, and Kiri says to forget what other people say. 'Just do what *I* say.' Next day Kiri goes to meet his boss about a new contract. He recognizes the boss' son as Tonami's client, and shortly thereafter he and Tonami leave town, while in the background the townspeople are all excited about this whole gang of hoodlums getting wiped out.

Kiri takes employment in a new town as bodyguard to an aging guy (Ills Papa) involved in a trade war for control of the wholesale market that comes around every so often. His rivals, the Zan Family, try to take Kiri out. Story begins with Kiri hallucinating the first time he died, with an unknown voice saying 'I love you. I really loved you, Kiri. Don't be angry, ok? Just die for us- for me...' He comes to to see Tonami crying over him and his own right arm a shattered wreck. 'It'll take too long to heal itself,' he tells Tonami. 'Cut it off.' Tonami does, and the next thing we see is one-armed Kiri and Tonami shopping together. Tonami's arm regenerates in the middle of the store as he questions Tonami about why he was crying. 'But it hurt..' 'Yeah, but why were *you* crying?' 'And all that blood...' 'Blood's only scary if it doesn't stop. Mine stops before I die.' Kiri isn't being obtuse. He's just had a life where, as Auden said, he'd never heard 'of any world where promises are kept/ or one could weep because another wept.' Follows an interlude with Kiri and Tonami and a jar of candied cherries (kids, do not try this at home.) When Kiri returns to his bodyguard job, Ills Papa demands where the hell he's been. 'Sorry, I was just being dead for a bit,' Kiri says, neglecting to add 'and stuffing candied cherries up my demi's ass.' The Zan bodyguards are in fits because the guy they killed so thoroughly the other day is still walking around. 'We could double what Papa's paying him.' 'And Papa will just double it right back.' 'He's got this demi with him...' 'You can't use demis as hostages- though maybe as toys...'

Shortly thereafter a Zan bodyguard breaks into apartment and pinions Kiri to the wall with a crossbow. One arrow into the heart, two into each hand. Every time Kiri regenerates the arrow stuck through his heart into the wall kills him again. Guys then proceed to rape Tonami thoroughly while Kiri, dying and reviving over and over, remembers his first death. He was a member of a hoodlum gang that went in for arson and theft and manslaughter, and in the end the citizens of the town locked them all away in a room and threw away the key. Kiri was wounded, and his starving fellow gang members, led by Kiri's presumed lover- at any rate, the one saying 'Die for me'- decided to kill him first. 'I didn't get a chance to yell. He bit through my throat and drank my blood to the last drop.' Kiri experiences the pain of coming back to life. 'Every time I revive-- the same pain comes back. The same death comes back. Over and over again- and again and again-- Am I alive now? Am I dead? This pain and this blood, are they real?' His rapists asleep, Tonami tries to pull the arrow from Kiri's chest, but they wake at his tears and shove it back in. Kiri remembers when he came back to life to find the other gang members dying, including his former lover. When the guy begs him for help, Kiri kills him. 'In order to live, forget the pain, forget the fear of dying. Nobody else knows how it feels. Nobody else understands. Nobody knows how much it hurts.' When the citizens came six months later to take away the bodies, Kiri killed them and escaped. 'In that time I'd died twice of starvation.' But why, he wonders, is Tonami crying? The bodyguards are tired of it too. They decide to kill Tonami. At which Kiri tears his hands and his body from the wall and shoves an arrow into the guy holding Tonami down. Tonami succeeds in getting the arrow from Kiri's chest. The second tough lets loose an arrow at Kiri, who murmurs 'Cry only for me, Tonami' before killing the tough. Kiri arrives in time to prevent Ills Papa from being killed by the Zan family, but not from going mad with fear. Shrugging at the shifting balance of power in the town, he heads off with Tonami for the farthest west where lives the man who sees people's deaths. 'He'll tell me how I can die- or if I'll die.'

The authors include a postscript where they state that the themes of the series are 'ijime' (brutality, as if we couldn't tell) and 'machiku' (a brute of a man.) 'We'll include lots more ways to torture Tonami, and to do that we'll get Kiri to be a much much *much* more horrible person.' You better, girls, 'cause as of Vol 1's end he's looking like a seme on a white steed and a redeemed dirty rotten seme (poor sweet bay-bee division) and an all-round rough diamond shoujo hero.