mahiru no tsuki by kusama sakae

[insaneneko]

I tried listening to the drama CD of Kusama Sakae's manga Hiruma no koi today and had to stop. I liked the manga but had some problems with it, and the drama CD magnified the deficiencies quite a bit. I can't find my manga (I swear I just saw it the other day, too!) and don't want to bother go back to the drama CD so I'll have to go by memory, but the basic idea is that a salaryman is assigned to deal with a one-man machinist shop. They get together pretty quickly and the rest of the manga is about their relationship. Overall, I like it. I like the feel of Kusama-sensei's mangas and I like these two. The machinist is a younger puppy seme (voiced very well in the drama CD, btw) and the salaryman is more uptight (and was always into older guys so is at a loss at times dealing with younger puppy dude) but--and this is the important bit--NOT TSUNDERE. I love younger puppy semes, but most of the time they seem to be paired with annoying tsundere ukes who can never be honest with their feelings. While there are misunderstandings and the such, they aren't made into huge deals. It's sweet. My problem with the manga is that it felt like she jammed more than one volumes worth of material into one volume. It felt disjointed. How they get together baffles me. I actually stopped reading the manga and put it aside once because it was so nonsensical to me. Once I just swallowed the fact that they got together somehow and didn't think too hard about it I could go on and read the rest of the manga. So the drama CD is really cute when it comes to the two of them interacting, but it just throws me when the story just shifts. It doesn't flow.

Oh man, I'm tempted to see if they dramatized the bit with the salaryman's boss meeting up with his daughter and wailing about having just given the subordinate-who-is-like-a-son away. That was so cute.

Also cute is when the machinist asks salaryman about boss's birthday and when the salaryman immediately answers machinist is a bit devastated. His jealousy is so funny!