Sleepless Nights by Sachi Murakami
Sleepless Nights is about a high school boy named Miyabi who works in a convenience store in a heavily gay area of town. He’s very used to gay men cruising in the store, even harassing him and his coworkers. But one night he notices a cute boy in the store and winds up going to a love hotel with him.
Miyabi thinks that the boy will be just a one-night stand, he’s straight after all, but then the kid, named Shuuhei Nakatani, winds up transferring to his all-boys high school and becoming his roommate! Talk about awkward.
Things immediately become uncomfortable for Miyabi. Not only is he trying to deal with leftover feelings from his little fling, but he and Nakatani don’t see eye to eye about love and sex, complicating all the attempts they make to patch things up between them.
All the arguing makes Nakatani start spending most of his nights outside their room, which Miyabi hates because he assumes that Nakatani spends them cruising for gay sex. He finally confronts Nakatani about it, and they reveal their true feelings to each other.
The final story in the book is about Miyabi and Nakatani’s neighbors: the flamboyant Shinoi and the reserved dorm coordinator Kouno. Shinoi winds up rooming with Kouno to protect him from overly-zealous attackers, but also falls for the shy student.
Kouno also has a problem sleeping with others in the room, so he is constantly forcing Shinoi out of their room, causing a bit of tension. After accidentally revealing his feelings for Kouno in a very public manner, Shinoi figures out that they both like each other.
Oh man, this manga’s cover totally deceived me. There were ties and what looked like business suits, but they were high school uniforms! Agggghhhhhhh!
I don’t have any inherent problems with romances between high school boys as long as things are consensual and there are no may-december relationships involving teachers, but often times they’re full of the kind of melodrama that puts me off of BL/yaoi. Either that or I feel like all the tropes that I usually find to be acceptable in shoujo manga are just too forced when applied to young gay boys. I also get a bit bothered by the general idea that these are underaged kids being depicted in an erotic manga. Sure, they’re teenagers, but does that make it okay?
Luckily, Sleepless Nights is all consensual, there are no student-teacher romances and the sex scenes are kind of drawn “from the waist up.” (Meaning that the mangaka purposefully avoids showing the graphic parts. You see hands, limbs and torsos, but you don’t see any genitalia, fluids, etc.)
Happily, this continues a small streak of consensual BL/yaoi that I’m enjoying. It’ll probably all end when I pick up the next volume of Kizuna in a few days, but what can you do?
One thing that I did like about this manga was how Miyabi was shown to be exploring his sexuality in spite of what he thought it was. This makes his switch from “straight” to gay a little bit more believable. (Although I do wish his character was fleshed out enough to tell us why he’s so intent on being straight at first.) Likewise, I liked how Shinoi and Kouno didn’t play the “am I straight or gay” game at all. It was more of a “by the way, I’m also gay” reveal.
The art style isn’t really special in my opinion, but still serviceable. I enjoyed this one, but I can’t say I’m super-fond of it in general. It was still kind of moody and melodramatic in that same way that I don’t like. There’s hardly any story outside of the two main protagonists and the supporting characters who get a side story. But even with all that attention, everything’s almost always about the romance.
