Volume two?
Yeah, I’ve read the first volume already.
Oh, did you like it? Doesn’t seem like your type of thing.
I hated it.
Huh? Why’d you buy volume two then?
It was cheap? I don’t know!
Finder: Cage in the Viewfinder by Ayano Yamane
As much as I hated volume one ofFinder
The first chapter of this manga is about Akihito running into Asami again, quite on purpose. A detective gets in contact with Akihito and uses him to get in touch with Asami by taking Akihito to one of Asami’s exclusive clubs. There, Asami corners him and rapes him before freeing him.
The story then turns to Fei Long, and how he first meets Asami. Fei Long comes from a prestigious Hong Kong mafia family, but plays second fiddle to his older brother. They hit a major snag trying to secure smuggling routes to Japan, which is where Asami comes in. The two become a bit entangled as Asami tries to show Fei Long his worth as a person. Fei Long winds up running away from home and trying to prove himself on his own. In the process Asami jacks him off, sort of against Fei Long’s will, to try and keep Fei Long out of trouble for a bit. It doesn’t really work, and Fei Long’s father ends up dying in the ensuing. But before he does, he acknowledges and praises Fei Long, something he had been longing to hear from his father for a long time. Asami and Fei Long then find themselves at odds and don’t meet again until the events of volume one.
The last chapter is another reoccurring story about two classmates who find out that their fathers are having an affair with each other. As a result, they kind of get sexually involved. One of the boys gets sick, and his father uses it as an excuse to see his lover while the wife is out of town. Unsurprisingly, the two boys wind up jacking each other off again.
I don’t know if I liked Finder volume 2 any better. There was some better storytelling going on in Fei Long’s arc, but it doesn’t really set up much except Fei Long’s character and his past with Asami. Akihito and Asami get zero character development. This volume just really drives home that Asami’s a scruple-less rapist.
The short story is just as bad. One boy pressures the other into doing something sexual. Sure, it might actually happen to some folks because there are some seriously sex-crazy high school boys out there, but to see it as erotic art is kind of weird.
One thing I will note about Finder volume one is that Asami used some bondage paraphernalia and sex toys on Akihito, and I sort of wish we saw that more often in yaoi. A lot of yaoi is so vanilla, it gets boring. Sex can be so much more interesting than just the usual vanilla stuff, surely there must be more interesting (and hopefully consensual) yaoi out there that take advantage of the full spectrum of sex toys/accessories/what have you.
I mean, there’s always some character out there going on about how his partner’s a perv… I just refuse to believe it when all that’s happening is no-frills, plain ol’ sex. That’s not pervy-ness, that’s just his sex drive being higher than the complainer’s.
