Jun'ai Honnou by Kuibira Harumo (illustrated by Takanaga Hinako)

Jun’ai Honnou (Love of Instinct) by Kuibira Harumo is one of those (many) random books that catch my eye with a pretty cover, in this case with art by Takanaga Hinako. I read the blurb, decided it sounded amusing, and bought it. Luckily it turned out to be one of the decent ones. It has two qualities that a lot of the audience for BL seems to adore (judging from the sheer quantity of works published with those particular qualities), but can personally irritate me. First, complete and total misunderstanding coupled with a main character with a penchant for coming to completely off the base conclusions and just wallowing in all the emotions that conclusion wrings out. That alone can be very tiring and annoying, because it’s easy to just want to shake the character and yell at him to just talk with someone, ANYONE, who can straighten him out…preferably the other guy who is the cause of his angst. How to make the situation even "better?" Make him tsundere, with emphasis on the "tsun" (Actually,the "dere" only really manifests in…more tsun…^^;)! But amazingly the book didn’t drive me batty and managed to entertain me for the most part. The ending cinched it for me, making me laugh out loud. I can’t say it’s a good book, but…I’d read it again. (Okay, I confess, the art helps. A lot. But I know from experience that even fabulous art can’t save total crap. It can just make things a bit more palatable…)

Nose Tatsuya is a graduate student in psychology at a university near Nagoya. He finds out, to his dismay, that the eminent visiting Harvard researcher his (also eminent if eccentric) advisor is excited about is none other than his former high school classmate, Kouketsu Natsuki. Not only does he suffer a continual inferiority complex towards the brilliant Natsuki which manifests as eternal contrariness and prickliness, but he can't quite figure out his relationship to Natsuki. They had slept together in high school the night before Natsuki had transferred to America, and since then have had a on again off again relationship he can only characterize as a "sex friendship" for the last eight years. We basically get to follow Tatsuya around as he dwells on everything and comes up with theories and hypothesis, all very wrong. Of course he finds out just how wrong he is at the end. XD


( sort of summary and lots of pretty. )