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Hito wa naze hataraka nakerebanaranai no ka by Yamada Yugi is a collection of short stories that I'd bought a while back but hadn't bothered to read it for a while. I recently came upon it, so I read it. Well, more like I attempted to. I read the first story about a rumpled middle-aged divorced manager and his severe but capable subordinate after a couple of false starts. The manager is very sad and the subordinate is very aggressive, and the unbalanced relationship threw me off for some reason. Usually I love this dynamic, but this one...not so much. I eventually grew to like it, more or less. One of the Amazon Japan reviews mentions that there are new chapters featured in magazines now. I think I'd like to see how they develop because I'm not enamored of them at this moment.
The next two stories...I couldn't even read. I really don't know why, but I'd start reading and lose interest. I can't even judge if they suck or not because I can't keep my focus long enough to find out. :P I'll try again some other day.
The best of the lot was the last story. It's about two ordinary salarymen and their long distance relationship. Most of it features their telephone conversations. They are adorable. You get a bit of the loneliness, insecurity, and angst of being apart, but not so much that it weighs down this fundamentally sweet story. The uke looks really young, which is not my thing, but the seme has glasses and flippy hair, which I found very cute. I think the manga is totally worth buying just for this story.
The next two stories...I couldn't even read. I really don't know why, but I'd start reading and lose interest. I can't even judge if they suck or not because I can't keep my focus long enough to find out. :P I'll try again some other day.
The best of the lot was the last story. It's about two ordinary salarymen and their long distance relationship. Most of it features their telephone conversations. They are adorable. You get a bit of the loneliness, insecurity, and angst of being apart, but not so much that it weighs down this fundamentally sweet story. The uke looks really young, which is not my thing, but the seme has glasses and flippy hair, which I found very cute. I think the manga is totally worth buying just for this story.
I had a pretty bad day yesterday, but was comforted by a completely cliched book called 
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"Aiteru Door Kara Shitsurei Shimasuyo" (Into Your Heart Through the Door) by Yamada Yugi is the second in the series that began with "Saigo no Door wo Shimero!" (Close the Last Door!), about the older brothers of one of the characters in that first volume. I haven't read the first volume (or the one that comes after this one), which is possibly why I enjoyed this one so much--I typically hate it when a series focuses on characters other than the ones they started out with. This was one of those "forbidden love" stories in which the brothers struggle to sort out what they are in relation to each other (because "brother" and "lover" are usually mutually exclusive), nothing really new. But the manga gives enough background on the uke and how he thinks that, despite my personal annoyance at him at times, I on the whole felt very sympathetic. Maybe I was synchronizing with the seme, who is, in a word, hot. I like the way he is drawn (scruffy sexy is good), and I like the way he isn't really forceful in any way and yet doesn't come off as weak (too many times semes are either total pushovers or waaay too aggressive). The first volume is out in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
