Yes! It’s our first double feature! Quite by mistake because I started reading Apartments of Calle Feliz by est em on Jmanga because of the sudden announcement that Jmanga is closing up shop soon. I have a small pile of unread manga on the site, so I didn’t want to miss the chance to read what I paid for. And thankfully…
Apartments of Calle Feliz (alt title: Happy End Apartments) by est em
…THIS ONE DOESN’T HAVE ANY RAPE! *happy shoujo sparkle twirl*
I love est em. She writes the kind of BL and yaoi that I wish was saturating the market. Not only is it intelligent and well-written, but her manga often avoids the over-used BL/yaoi tropes.
Calle Feliz is about a young writer named Luca who moves into an apartment on the end of the aforementioned street after getting kicked out by an old flame. He’s facing quite a bit of writer’s block because his publisher wants him to write happy endings, but Luca has never experienced one himself. His roommate, Javi, who is also the landlord, inspires him to write about the building’s residents.
This launches into vignettes about the love lives of these people (men, who all happen to be gay, of course) and how their unhappy relationships wind up getting resolved. The first couple is a fashion designer and his shut-in, artist boyfriend who has chosen not to wear clothes or leave the apartment for the last three years. Second is about a (usually) decisive man who can’t chose between two identical twins for his lover, so he chooses both, much to their chagrin. The third story is about a puppet maker who wants to help a young boy who refuses to speak, but the puppet maker is constantly reminded of another young boy he loved. The fourth is about a deaf man and a former circus performer (he might be transgender or a drag queen or just a cross dresser, I’m not sure) who lets his old coworkers stay illegally in his apartment, and winds up becoming very tired of them. The last story is about Luca trying to give the mysterious Javi a happy ending in his book. Luca has difficult unraveling Javi’s past, it seems like Javi had a bad breakup, but that doesn’t seem to be all of it.
Calle Feliz was a really pleasant manga to read. Of course, I’m already a fan of est em, but it felt like a relief after all the rape-y manga of the past week. The only thing I could wrinkle my nose at was an implied, but consensual sex scene between the puppet maker and an underage lover. (That particular story focuses on going through puberty.) Though I didn’t like it and I can’t get too into it without revealing major spoilers, the sexual component did come from a situation that seemed more like actual love between the pair than abuse.
I’m already used to est em’s art style. It’s definitely not your typical polished, pretty, bishounen-everywhere art style, so some fujoshi might not like it. But I can’t recommend est em with anything but the highest of praise. It’s a shame that Calle Feliz and another one of her titles, Working Kentauros, will soon be unavailable to read (They’re unavailable for purchase since yesterday’s announcement.) Hopefully SuBLime or Digital Manga Publishing will think about picking them up again.
Yakuza Café by Shinano Oumi
I picked up Yakuza Café because I’ve actually read a few yakuza-related BL/yaoi titles that I really liked. I was hoping that this would be one of them, but no.
The premise starts out alright. A young man named Shinri without any other family to turn to is invited to stay with his estranged father. He goes and finds that his father is a former mafia boss, who has quit the yakuza business along with a number men from his clan. Together they’ve started a cafe, but it isn’t doing so well. Shinri deduces that it’s because the tea is terrible and the atmosphere isn’t much better. Thus he begins working in the cafe to turn it around and make it successful.
In the middle of all this, Shinri tries to get closer to a certain member of his father’s clan, Mikado, and winds up touching his elaborate dragon tattoo. Well, this sends Mikado into an uncontrollable rage and he rapes Shinri as a result.
Yup. Touch the guy (in a certain spot) and he’ll fly off the hook and rape you. That’s the premise of their budding romance.
Rape and the inevitable relationship that follows aside, because how much more can I go on about rape, this manga sucked because there wasn’t any buildup or tension before the romance started. There was a little bit of a reveal that Mikado had influence on Shinri in the past, and that Shinri greatly admires him. This would have been a perfect way to segue into a normal, healthy romance, but then the rape happens. Afterward, Mikado is Very, Very Sorry, But He Can’t Control Himself When People Touch His Tattoo. (*major eye-rolling over here*) It stalls the realization of their feelings for each other, but they eventually get together.
Then we get to a perfectly good story about another one of the former yakuza in Shinri’s clan: Zaouji. As a young man, he decided to make his way by stealing from men he sleeps with as a prostitute, but winds up falling in love with one of them. The man turns out to be yakuza and wants Zaouji to join up too, but it takes his death to get to Zaouji do it. The final story is about Mikado misunderstanding something Shinri says, and Zaouji torturing Mikado for that and for raping Shinri. Which, I have to say, was nice to experience as a reader who doesn’t like how these fictional rapists get absolved, but not so nice when you consider that the creator has such a blasé attitude about rape that they’ll make an extra story about it where the attacker only gets teased for such a heinous act.
The art is pretty good, it reminds me a lot of You Higuri’s style, but I found everything else except Zaouji’s short story to be lacking. No buildup, no tension, a ridiculous premise for the relationship AND rape? Nothing about Shinri and Mikado’s story excites me. I’m disappointed on so many levels.
Aaaand I’m betting that Calle Felize was only avaliable on JManga? Dammit, that does sound like a good one.
Also, you might want to change your bio since it still says you really want a puppy and I feel like i’ve seen a lot of puppy pictures from your twitter account lately. 🙂
Yeah, it’s only available on Jmanga. If you aren’t on Jmanga and you don’t already have points, you can’t buy any to read it before they shut down. D:
Working Kentauros was damn awesome as well. It’s not BL, but it’s about centaurs becoming a part of mainstream Japanese society and the issues they face.
Thanks for the heads up about my bio! ^_^
Have you read “My Darling Kitten Hair,” another JManga BL manga that unfortunately seems doomed to disappear once they shut the site down at the end of March? It’s a quirky slice-of-life-ish series whose premise could be fairly accurately summed up as “What if Maison Ikkoku’s residents included employees of okama bars and hostess clubs, the manager was a young gay porn novelist with a bullying editor, and the naive young guy who arrives as the story begins were the porn novelist’s formerly long-distance boyfriend (and childhood friend) from Hokkaido, who’s taken a job in Tokyo so they can finally move in together and consummate their relationship?” (Plus there’s no rape.)
The first volume was one of the best BL manga I’ve read in the last two or three years. The second volume is also pretty good so far (I’m about halfway through reading it), but doesn’t seem quite up to the standard of the first. So if you got volume one but not volume two and don’t have the requisite 895(!) points left to get volume two now, what you’re missing isn’t as big a loss as you might have expected based on volume one.
Ironically, DMP also issued another yakuza cafe-themed manga last year, “I Give to You,” which is about a million times better than the more generically-titled “Yakuza Cafe.” It’s about a cafe out in the country run by the son of a dead yakuza boss (with assistance from his intimidating former bodyguard/right hand man) and the rather hapless young man who winds up working there with them to hide out from his own problems–despite the fact that when the innocent young non-yakuza-associated employee first arrives, there’s exactly one person in the village who’s even willing to set foot in the place, much less order any food.
As this detail suggests, this manga is a lot more realistic than “Yakuza Cafe” is about how average Japanese people–especially those outside of self-consciously sophisticated big cities–would be likely to react to having known ex-yakuza start up an allegedly legitimate business in their midst, even though the yakuza heir doesn’t seem to have ever committed any crimes himself or been directly involved in his late father’s business. Admittedly, I seem to recall that the title restaurant in “Yakuza Cafe” came across as such a cheesily Disney-esque theme tourist trap for people who are into movie-style yakuza stereotypes that the customers there may or may not have realized that the very stage-yakuza waiters and maitre d’s were genuine ex-gangsters instead of rather hammy wannabe actors. So the contrast between the two mangas’ handling of more or less the same premise is kind of like comparing real apples and cartoon oranges.
Unfortunately, “I Give to You” isn’t entirely free of rapelike elements. However, the rather dubcon (at best) relationship in one character’s backstory does serve a constructive plot purpose, and does not result in Stockholm Syndrome-like reciprocation on the part of the party being targeted, despite the fact that he does have feelings of a sort for the other guy and the other guy genuinely does love him, in his own psychologically disturbed way. So if “I Give to You” is one of the yaoi manga you bought at the warehouse sale, at least its more unsavory elements have more redeeming social value than the shortcut-to-a-sex-scene rape in “Yakuza Cafe” does.
Hehehe, I bought “I Give to You” before the sale, but you’re spot on about it’s comparison to “Yakuza Cafe.”
Sorry if I give the impression that I don’t own or read ANY yaoi manga, but my collection is quite small for someone who collects as much manga as I do.