Another BL novel, and as I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of these, so this is in no way impartial. The title of this one makes it sound much scarier than it is, and is unfortunately one of a litany of June titles that have words like “caged” and “slave” in the title. I read this on eManga.com (so cheap there!), and liked it so much I decided to get a paperback copy. But I accidentally bought Gentle Cage instead. I read that and loved it anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.

I won’t lie, this one was one of my favorites of the June novels I’ve read. The premise is fairly simple, too. A man named Tsukasa finds himself on the down-and-out after his boss and lover dumps him in order to immediately snap up an offer to marry the daughter of the company’s owner. Boozing it up in a bar and feeling down on himself, Tsukasa is soon picked up by one of the most beautiful men he’s ever seen, and predictably, the two spend a passion-filled night together. Not willing to give his name, the lover parts ways with Tsukasa with a promise that they can meet in the hotel room the next week if Tsukasa would like to continue the tryst. And so the pair continue to meet and have wild sex on Fridays for months, neither knowing the other’s name, until one day Tsukasa goes into work and meets his new boss, Takeshima, his mystery lover. And you know where it goes from there. Scared to know whether Takeshima will continue the game now that their identities are known to one another, Tsukasa can’t go back to their mystery hotel room. Takeshima settles for wild sex at random moments in the office.

There really are no surprises in this book, with a slight twinge of drama between the two serving as the final climax. The relationship between Takeshima and Tsukasa is incredibly passionate, though, which is what makes this such a great read. The sense of the forbidden, with the secret identities at the beginning of the book and the office trysts later on, are what makes it fun, and it gets its sense of the forbidden without crossing the non-con line, which is always, always a plus. Also, both the characters are likable and sympathetic, even Takeshima. That Takeshima is easy to like is a bit of a shock, because his role should, by all accounts, make him the type of remote asshole that only super-dominant semes can be. He’s stoic, and we don’t get the insight into his character that we get in Tsukasa’s (the story is told from Tsukasa’s point of view), but Takeshima never does anything against Tsukasa, which is a pretty big deal in an otherwise run-of-the-mill story like this. Another plus is that I like workplace romances, and relationships between two older, steady men like this. Not that there aren’t plenty of both of those out there already, but it makes me happy that there’s so much available now. I remember when these types of titles used to be hard to find.

Basically, if the premise appeals to you, you will love this. It’s another quick and easy read, and even digitally, I read it in one sitting. It’s not the most thrilling read on the planet, and it doesn’t break any new ground. But it scratches the itch, so to speak, which is really all you need in a book like this.

Every volume of this series is more demented than the last in ways that I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around. In this volume, we continue to find out just how crazy Yuno really is, and that her crazy is spreading to Yukiteru, who resolves to win the game in order to gain the power to bring his dead mother back to life.

Because I’ve only been reading this series sporadically, I didn’t realize that there was still one diary user that had yet to be revealed. As of this volume, all the members of the game are rounded up and get some face time, presumably as run-up to the final round, where Yukiteru gets serious. There are still… three diary users up against Yukuteru and Yuno. One is an element of chaos, one is an enormous caricature (which is hilarious, because… WHY), and the other is a very powerful man. The latter half of the volume is an extended fight where Yukiteru attempts to take as many of them out as possible.

There’s some more story about Yukiteru’s father, as well. Yukiteru knows all about what’s going on with his father now, but seems to care about his mother more. I can’t figure out why all this family drama is necessary, given the plot of the series is that Yukiteru is being forced to murder complete strangers and has a psycho devoted girlfriend to help him with the task. But it does serve as good motivation for the end here, and it makes me wonder if the point that came up between him and Yuno will really be a problem, since he could, in theory… uh, negate that.

There’s another nonsensical plot point with Yuno towards the end of the book, as well. I’m not entirely sure why that should matter, or why anyone would care. But it serves as the cliffhanger to the next volume. Ohhh… kay. The first chapter deals with what really happened between Yuno and her parents. It’s… about what you’d expect. Does it explain or excuse her behavior? Not really, but it tries, and it’s better than nothing.

I’m hoping I can finish this series up fast. I’ll have to order the last volume in Japanese. I was half-hoping for a license rescue from Yen Press… they reached out and got Alice in the Country of Hearts, which was similarly only one volume from completion, and Future Diary seems like it’d be right up their alley, a dark series that would definitely appeal to teens. But alas. I’m going to assume the worst since it’s been almost a whole year with no word.

Another June BL novel. I have… maybe one more I haven’t talked about yet, aside from the second half of Ai no Kusabi. I’m just trying to clear off my plate. Actually, I have a mountain of BL books I need to talk about, but I’ll start by clearing the novels off my to-be-reviewed stack.

The premise here is that Itsuki is sent by his employer to convince Tokiwa, a reclusive sculptor, to come speak to his boss, who is himself an aging sculptor with an opposite aesthetic. Tokiwa scoffs at Itsuki initially and sends him away. While trying to figure out the best way to convince him, however, Itsuki slips and falls into a creek, breaking both of his ankles, and is saved by Tokiwa. Worse still, there’s a blizzard, and Tokiwa lives on the top of a mountain, so Itsuki is stuck with two broken legs at the top of a mountain in the middle of a blizzard with Tokiwa. I’ll give you one guess as to what happens. Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how that would work with broken legs, either.

To be fair, the sexual relationship actually progresses rather slowly. Tokiwa and Itsuki seem to know each other from the past, and initially it sounds like they were artists in the same studio where Itsuki is employed. But that’s not the case, and part of the fun is the way the book goes about slowly revealing the connection between the two, and precisely what is up between Itsuki and his employer. At first, Tokiwa seems to hate having Itsuki in the same house, though he dotes and takes care of him, but he slowly softens up and Itsuki begins feeling more like himself the more time they spend together. Tokiwa occasionally slides into asshole seme patterns (the two broken legs makes Itsuki a textbook helpless uke, too), and there are some parts that don’t quite make sense, even after their past is explained, but for the most part, the mystery behind their relationship makes this an interesting read. There’s also a transformation element to Itsuki’s character that makes the story more interesting, too.

There are some logical fallacies, too. The sculptor that Itsuki works for… his restrictions are plot devices that explain why Itsuki and Tokiwa can’t be together, but his employment rules and relationship with Itsuki just… do not make sense in any context. It also doesn’t really make sense that Tokiwa would take Itsuki back after what he does to him. Twice. There were a few other head-scratching plot points, too (Itsuki’s sister leaves him is another good one), but… I mean, I didn’t go into this thinking it was a great work of literature.

I got what I came for, a good romance about artists. It’s not the most romantic, nor the best of the novels I’ve read from June, but it was a satisfying and unlooked-for read (I accidentally ordered this instead of Caged Slave). As per usual, if you read the plot summary and it sounds like it will appeal to you, odds are it will, provided you’re familiar with the genre quirks of BL.

I… completely skipped this volume. I don’t think I bought a copy, and I definitely didn’t read it. The big Shun reveal in 24 is slightly less random after reading a little bit of the foreshadowing in this volume, but I love that it is completely in-character for this series to throw a random curveball like that, so much so that I did not suspect I had skipped a volume.

I think volume 24 starts with Seiya in… some sort of lake of forgetting, or something, so I just assumed he’d been blown there when he took the leap from reality. This volume shows that he and Shun entered Hades through the Dante-like gate and got a ride from the Celestial Interval Star Acheron Charon, who is a huge jerk and more-or-less antagonized Seiya and Shun all the way across the river Acheron, rather than simply fight him. It was a nice break from all the serious fighting, especially with the childlike exchange between Seiya and Shun about whether they should save Charon after he falls into the river, and when they do, he predictably beats them up. There’s also a lot of super-awesome discussion about Mach 18 punches here.

In case the juvenile break wasn’t quite long enough, we get more when Seiya and Shun confront Celestial Imminent Star Balron Rene, the one who Judges the dead. Balron Rene prefers quiet, so of course Seiya does a lot of yelling, sneezing, and farting while wandering the halls of Judgement.

And because nothing awesome had happened in a long time, Balron Rene wraps his whip around Shun and shreds him into tiny pieces, then picks up Shun’s disembodied head, that then begins to bellow at him.

That’s why Saint Seiya is awesome. I’m so happy I found this volume tucked away, because now I’m remembering how badass absolutely every page of this series is.

There are other fights, with Cerberus and a Sphinx and the generals, and even Gemini Canon. But really, all this leads up to a scene where Seiya’s still-beating heart explodes out of his chest, much to Seiya’s amazement.

It’s magic.

It would be hard to top the excellent Valentine’s Day story we’ve had in the volumes before this. Skip Beat has its work cut out for it. Luckily, after 26 volumes of some of the most awesome shoujo manga I’ve ever read, I know it’s up to the task.

This volume is a little underwhelming, though, since it’s mostly exposition for the next storyline. But it’s exposition that will pay off in a big way later. As part of a Love Me assignment, Kyoko is paired up with Ren, who has to remain in character for a difficult role in an upcoming movie. Ren and Kyoko are, in real life, walking around as a pair of super-goth and very intimidating siblings. Better still, in character, the two are supposed to dote on one another.

This is about as great as it sounds. Lory is the instigator, of course, and even with only a couple chapters of in-character story at the end of the volume, we’ve already been treated to a hotel room with one bed and a round of clothes shopping, not to mention Ren’s inner commentary about how astoundingly difficult this all is.

As much as it sounds like a regular shoujo manga set-up (and it is), it’s Skip Beat’s sense of humor that makes all this far better than it should be. There is a little romance, of course, but most of the pleasure here comes from the fact that Kyoko is absolutely flabbergasted by all this. She’s dressed in a short leather skirt and plunging neckline, has to be mean, and has to fawn all over “big brother” Ren. She’s… a bit unsure of her acting ability in all this.

In a strange scene towards the end of the book, she is interpreting what appears to be Ren’s frustrations as exasperation with the fact she is not acting little sister Setsuka properly. The story is told from Kyoko’s point of view at this point, and it appears to be correct in context. But just before this, Ren is having trouble keeping his inner “kind of the night” in check, and I was reading his frustrations as more… anger at the fact that Kyoko has to dress and act this way at all. It’s a little strange. But from either point of view, it’s very funny stuff.

Oh, Skip Beat. I can’t even imagine all the great places this story is going to go. I can’t wait until the next volume.

For some reason, when I saw this on the recent updates at JManga, Phil Hartman’s voice came to me unbidden: “Hi, I’m Keiko Nishi. You might remember me from such one-shots and short stories as ‘Love Song’ and ‘Promise.’” Her stories have a very human element to them, one that she shares with artists like Mitsuru Adachi. I like her short stories quite a bit, so I was very happy to see her work surface on JManga.com. I’ve been disappointed with the updates there for the last couple months, so this was an unlooked-for bonus.

It’s a volume of shoujo short stories themed around the members of an archery team. The summary makes the book sound vaguely BL-themed, which was probably the point (it ran in Dear+ magazine, which specializes in vaguely BL-themed stories), but most of the content was simply shoujo romance. I liked it a little more for that, since there are very few volumes of good shoujo short stories available in English.

The one ambiguous story was the second chapter, where one of the members of the archery team has a crush on a pair of twins. The female twin, Ayano, is on the archery team, but the male twin, Shu, keeps showing up at inopportune times, such as when the subject of the story is admiring Ayano from afar and finds out it’s Shu. You can imagine how this goes. But the story is balanced between both twins, and by the end, the main character isn’t sure who he has a crush on. It’s a fairly quiet, but very well-written story, with good character development. That can be said for all these, really.

A short, dark-haired, bespectacled character named Tomokazu shows up in almost all the stories. He’s usually a naysayer and comic relief, and others make fun of him for apparently enjoying savory snacks (I think this detail was lost on me). He gets his own chapter too, where he develops a crush on a team girl, but for the most part, he’s just everybody’s friend and one of the elements that linked the stories outside of archery. He was more distinctive than the other characters, and while I liked the others in their own stories, he was easier to pick out of a crowd, so to speak.

Not all the stories are romances, something else I enjoyed about it. The last story in the volume was about a boy who was good at every sport he attempted joining the archery club with a big head. He barges in, expecting to be better than the team captain, only to have his ego crushed and his manners picked apart by the team members. Turns out he’s not good at archery at all, and the smallest member of the team is the one that teaches him how to do it correctly.

There is a nice, light sense of humor worked into most of the stories, too. Not overly joke-y, but more of an observation of human nature than anything. The funniest story was one of the first in the volume, where a boy named Houdai keeps a journal of what he imagines the girl he has a crush on is thinking. While this would shove him far into creepy stalker territory in any other series, here it’s a sweet look at a boy that can only observe his crush from afar. Plus, he comes through for her in the end, since it turns out she’s nearly as shy as he is.

To be fair, there’s not a lot to this book. It’s a fairly light read, which I think makes it perfect for a digital book like this. I think the light stories that are more slice-of-life than anything might not appeal to a lot of people, and even as romances, the stories never get much farther than two people admitting they like each other. But even so, they make you feel a little bit better for having read them. Even in a short number of pages, Nishi manages to convey enough about the characters to make the snippet romances work, and the archery element is also heavily featured and sort of a novelty to read. The book is marred a bit by a translation that reads a little clunky, and a reader that seems to hang up on loading screens a lot, but even so, I’m happy to read this in English at all. Give it a try, for a quick breath of fresh air and an enjoyable volume of shoujo short stories.

Oh, dwarf in the flask. You do get up to such mischief.

This is mostly a long, drawn-out, emotional fight. To say anything more about it would be a spoiler. But there are many parts that are well-planned. What the dwarf in the flask does with his master plan, the whole sequence where he is getting what he wants, was absolutely fantastic. I think I can say that. The scope of it, the visuals, the methods he used, all of it was great. I also liked the psychological warfare he used against Hohenheim at the end of the volume, too. I liked it as a rebuttal to a somewhat self-righteous observation, and I also liked that that dwarf in the flask wasn’t necessarily all about the painful physical attack at that point.

One thing that disappointed me a little bit was the cost reversal of this, and the fact that… uh, the sacrifices… I don’t know what was going on with the “sacrifice” part of that. I couldn’t figure that out.

The counter measures were spectacular too, especially the one involving Scar. The series had been sitting on that one for quite some time, and I was happy to see it come out at the very end. But, of course, the counter measures aren’t quite as impressive as what the dwarf in the flask does, because you know they’re coming.

There’s a little bit of a fight with Wrath at the beginning of this volume, and another with Pride at the end. The Wrath fighting had worn out its welcome at this point, and I was relieved to see that it was over. Actually, that’s true of all the homunculus fights, and I was a little disappointed when the action switched from the main villain to a fight between Pride and Al. I was won back over when Kimblee played a role. Excellent.

Basically, I’m still all kinds of happy with this fight, and I’m finding it hard to believe there’s three solid volumes of a finale in this series, all of them good. I have no doubt the last volume will be an awesome end to the series. Here’s hoping the epilogue is fun and not overly sentimental. Or, better yet, that the gag strips are still present and accounted for. I almost like those as much as the main story in every volume. They’re surprisingly funny.

I have a special place in my heart for manga about sentai and tokusatsu. Sentai manga aren’t released in English nearly enough, so I don’t get to talk about it much. I can count the ones I’ve read on one hand – Duklyon: CLAMP School Defenders, Heroes are Extinct, Ratman, Dokkoida, and Imperfect Hero. It’s a tragedy that these series are never more popular (Ratman and Heroes Are Extinct, in particular, are fantastic), because they are among the few series that actually make me laugh out loud. Most sentai manga I run across are comedies that poke fun at the inherent strangeness that is a team of color-coordinated superheroes beating up giant monsters. It’s really hard to make jokes about sentai fall flat, and easy to come up with increasingly ridiculous situations for them to be in. Serious tokusatsu-type/superhero series exist (Kikaider Code 02, MD Geist, maybe Apocalypse Zero), but they are way less fun than the sentai humor variety.

Kaim Tachibana, the mangaka, is a shoujo artist with a long career, though we have seen very little of her work in English (only Boy’s Love and Pieces of a Spiral). It appears she was most prolific during the 90s, and specializes in shoujo comedies and light shounen ai. I honestly don’t know that much about her, but there is a fun fan site dedicated to her if you are so inclined.

Shinesman was serialized in Comic NORA, a magazine that seems to… uh, share an audience with Champion Red, in that it publishes a lot of borderline skeevy sci-fi and romance manga. I’m not sure if this is a shounen or seinen publication, but I would probably classify Shinesman as a shounen manga, as it seems to lack the H factor

Matsumoto’s dream is to become a successful salaryman that can support his mother and little brother. That’s why, immediately after high school graduation, he finds himself a job at a large corporation named Right Company. Though it sounds like a good career move, this is not a regular corporation, and Matsumoto soon finds out the results of his physical and exams land him in a special department. With no fanfare, Matsumoto is dumped into a red power suit and becomes the leader of a team of businessman/heroes (the name “Shinesman” is a Japanese pun, and still means “businessman”). He and his team members Shinesman Grey, Shinesman Moss Green, Shinesman Sepia, and Shinesman Salmon Pink fight aliens that are bent on world domination, as usual. Except these aliens don’t like to fight battles that destroy the Earth, so they decide to use corporate espionage as the tool for their domination. Of course, the Shinesman fight them in their sentai suits as well, but they all have secret identities as business rivals, which is part of the fun of the series.

I’ve only read a tiny bit of the manga, but the anime adaptation of this series was my first taste of sentai comedy, and I’ve never looked back. The dub is hilarious, and I still get a big kick out of watching it twelve years after I first saw it. It’s only two episodes long, and probably only covers content from the first volume of the manga, but it’s still awesome. It was actually Tiger & Bunny that made me remember the anime, which then reminded me I should write up the Shinesman manga for one of these license requests. Tiger & Bunny is worth your time as well, but the Shinesman OAV is a real classic.

That reminds me, the manga differs from the anime slightly. In the anime, Matsumoto catches a glimpse of an alien named Shiima in the buff, who decides that she must either kill or marry Matsumoto in order to make up this offense. In the manga, it is the alien prince Sasaki that Matsumoto accidentally sees naked, and he’s got the same rule as Shiima. As I said, Tachibana dabbles in BL, and this is apparently a reoccurring joke between Shinesman Red and the alien prince throughout the series. I don’t think it actually goes in a romantic direction, though.

I’m sure the art and humor in this are extremely dated, and I’m also sure that it’s not nearly as funny as I’ve been imagining all these years (it’ll be hard to live up to the OAV dub). But then again, I believe it’s one of the cornerstones of the sentai parody/humor genre, and at nine volumes, I bet it’s a lot of painfully campy fun. From what I’ve seen, the art looks more utilitarian than dated, which may be a point in its favor, but it also lacks some of the polish that Tachibana gained later in her career. The parts I’ve read have some pacing and composition issues. But I’ve only seen the first volume, and this was one of Tachibana’s very first series, so I’m sure the art gets better as the series goes on, as her later art is quite lovely.

But, more or less, you can pretty much guarantee I’ll read any sentai humor manga in English. I’d write up a license request for pretty much any sentai manga. From what I can tell, though, Shinesman is one of the very best, and I would love to read it.

This series is full of good ideas. I loved that this volume used the ten-year bazooka to really change things up, sending the characters ten years into the future with various future versions of everybody running around. I love that there’s consequences for this, and I also liked that the ten-year bazooka occasionally made appearances throughout the volume. The way the story unfolds here is really interesting, and the fact that Tsuna is told what he’s done that’s led to this, and ways to prevent it, was a nice touch as well. I’m a sucker for time travel stories, so maybe I’m just easy to please, but I thought this was exactly what the story needed after the last lengthy fight scene.

Plus, I still really like the premise. Tsuna is some sort of next generation mafia boss, and he’s being trained by a baby that was, apparently, a full-grown man that was stunted because he was such a great assassin. I’m not entirely clear on the whole baby/Arcobaleno thing, but I know that’s fairly close. Also, “deathperate” is still, and always will be, the best pun in shounen manga.

But… I’ve read five volumes of this series now, and I still have no idea who most of the characters are. There are a thousand of them. That’s normally a problem in shounen manga, but it feels worse in Reborn since the volumes I read were all from the latter part of a fighting tournament. Literally, it was a fighting tournament, with teenage mafia candidates fighting other teenage mafia candidates to see whose leader would be the head of the family. It was an awful lot of fighting. With the restart, I thought there would be a bit more story, and there was (I’ve already talked about how much I liked it), but somehow they squeeze two fights into all this, while explaining about the future and past versions of characters I have no recollection of. It’s one thing for Tsuna to have seven bodyguards (or is it six?), it’s another thing to have about a dozen passing acquaintances that may or may not appear at any time, in present or future form.

As much as I like all the ideas in the new story in this volume, it was nearly impossible for me to follow it because I had no idea who any of the characters except Tsuna, Reborn, Gokudera, Yamamoto, and Lambo were. Part of that’s my fault, again, because I haven’t been reading from the beginning, but if your story is dependent on fights between a thousand characters… well, you have a Shounen Jump series. I’m finding I have less patience for them these days, unfortunately.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

Apparently I skipped this volume. I’m not sure how I forgot about it. It’s got a Kazuo Umezu book on the cover. One I’ve talked about here before.

I tend to enjoy this series for the historical information it offers as supplements to its stories, rather than the stories themselves. But it’s hard to complain when the volume opens with a double-page spread of a girl asking for Kazuo Umezu manga. He’s one of my absolute favorites. The first story revolves around a club that meets to talk about just how scary Kazz manga is, and a man who can’t handle scary stories trying to get close to the leader of the Umezu group. A lot of his manga comes up, but Mori no Kyodai is the book on the cover and the subject of a trivia question in the chapter itself.

The second chapter is a story about a young woman struggling with her design career that visits Kingyo and has her spirits lifted when she finds Sailor Moon, a series she enjoyed immensely when she was young. I hate that series, so… a biased failing grade on that chapter. I liked the next chapter about Sanpei Shirato manga better, though. Again, it was fun because it made me want to read Sanpei Shirato, not because I liked the story about men getting together at the zoo. Though it wasn’t a bad story per se, just not that memorable.

The last half of the book mostly covers topics related to manga distribution and collecting. One chapter talks about the sedori profession, people that go from bookstore to bookstore, buying items that are marked down at one and selling them to a store that can mark them up. This is more about the sedori characters than it is their job, and again, I’m not very attached to the characters, so I was more interested in what they were doing and how they were evaluating the collections. As someone that works at a used bookstore in the US, I can tell you the American equivalent of sedori are some of the most infuriating barterers that I’ve ever met in my life. I’m sorry, you are not entitled to a discount because you are going to resell this. No, I will not mark that down for you. No, no sales today. No, I don’t have any coupons to give you. Don’t do this at the register when we have a line, please. Or ever.

Other chapters cover lending libraries, rental manga, and book restoration, all of which are topics I’m interested in, but again… if you’re not a huge book nerd, the stories don’t really make up for the fact the topics aren’t gripping stuff.

But if you are a huge book nerd, as well as a manga geek, there’s a lot to like here.