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Manga Review | Kiss Him, Not Me by Junko

Title: Kiss Him, Not Me

Kae Serinuma is a BL fanatic (can relate). She spends all day and all night consuming all manner of BL content, and when she isn’t enjoying BL, she thinks about it, buys it, fantasizes about it, and even spends her time shipping the boys around her together. As a result, she isn’t the most popular girl around. She’s also a bit chubby, which doesn’t earn her any points with the pretty boys in school, but that doesn’t matter. She isn’t interested in boys unless they want to be with boys themselves!

However, one fateful day, Serinuma’s world is rocked when her favorite character, Shion, from her favorite anime, Mirage Saga, is unexpectedly killed. Unable to handle the loss, Serinuma holes herself up in her room for a week. She doesn’t go to school, she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep, and even her mother and brother don’t see her for the entire week. Finally, her brother breaks her out of her stupor, but what emerges is not the lovable, chubby Serinuma. No, what comes out is a gorgeous lady that even Serinuma herself fails to recognize.

When she returns to school, everyone except history club president Asuma Mutsumi fails to recognize her, and once people realize who she is, they don’t believe it! But there is no denying that Kae Serinuma is this gorgeous creature. As a result, she draws the attention of some of the hottest boys in her school, including history club president and third-year Asuma Mutsumi, classmate and soccer club member Yusuke Igarashi, bad boy Shion-lookalike Nozomu Nanashima, and first-year student Hayato Shinomiya. They are immediately attracted to her new look and make it clear that they all plan on winning her heart. Things get even more complicated, though, when she also draws the attention of Shima Nishina, an androgynous girl who is also a BL fanatic and as equally drawn to Serinuma as all the boys.

While Serinuma enjoys her time with all her new friends, the pressure of their love causes plenty of trouble for all involved. What is worse is that she would rather the boys fall in love with each other rather than her! She promises to consider all of them as possible love interests and promises to give them all an answer in time, but how could she possibly choose? Why can’t they just love each other? Can a BL-fanatic actually fall in love with a boy (or girl)?

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Manga Review | No. 6 by Atsuko Asano

Title: No. 6

Atsuko Asano

Hinoki Kino

Shion is an elite student in the perfect city of No. 6. Because he excels, his family is afforded luxury and benefits provided by the city through a caste-based system. However, one evening, when Shion feels the urge to throw open his bedroom balcony doors and scream out into the typhoon outside, he inadvertently calls over a mysterious and disheveled young boy named Rat. It turns out Rat is a fugitive and has just escaped from prison.

Despite Rat admitting to being a criminal, Shion takes the time to take care of Rat’s wounds and encourages him to stay. Though Rat warns Shion that this could hurt Shion and his family, Rat acquiesces and stays the night with Shion. The following day, Rat is gone. The police of No. 6 drop in to question Shion and his family over the missing fugitive, and when Shion admits to aiding Rat, his family is punished by dropping in the caste system. As a result, Shion and his mother are forced to move out to the poor parts of No. 6, and Shion is unable to move up in academics and is forced to take a more labor-based position.

Even though years have passed since their first encounter and Shion has suffered greatly. As a result, Rat isn’t far from Shion’s mind. It isn’t long before they are reunited, though, as Shion is faced with what could only be described as the impending destruction of No. 6 as society knows it. While at work, Shion and his coworker discover the body of a seemingly elderly man. However, while in their office, Shion’s coworker suddenly begins to age rapidly and dies in front of him, leaving behind a corpse and what appears to be a bee or wasp. Police immediately swoop in to arrest Shion for murder, only for Rat to rush in and whisk Shion away outside of No. 6, where people suffer to survive, all hoping to one day be granted entrance to No. 6.

There, Shion must face the fact that No. 6 is nothing more than a beautiful facade hiding conspiracy and corruption. Shion also must face the fact that while Rat is his savior, Rat has his own painful past – a past that pushes him to seek revenge against No. 6, even if that means mowing down everyone living behind its safe walls. Shion wants to uncover the corruption of No. 6, protect Rat, and protect the innocent citizens of No. 6, but can he when Rat plans to crush it all, no matter the cost?

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Manhwa Review | Bloody Sweet by Lee Narae

Title: Bloody Sweet

Lee Narae

Shin Naerim’s life isn’t going so great. She’s being bullied at school because her mother is a moodang (Korean shaman), and her only solace is online, where she writes web novels and keeps up with a blog. Though she is bright and cheery online, she cannot even speak in real life because it would only entice the bullies further. So instead, she spends her days silently taking every comment and nickname (“wig,” being the main one, short for “witch girl”), waiting for her high school life to finally be over so she can move on with her life.

Unfortunately, there is still more high school life to contend with, and next on the docket for Naerim is an overnight school field trip. As if it isn’t enough for her to deal with the name-calling and abuse during the school day, now she has to do it overnight. Even more unfortunate is that there is an abandoned church nearby where they are staying. It is the perfect backdrop for more bullying of the “witch girl.”

However, these school girls don’t know that just because a place is abandoned doesn’t mean it is empty. While forcing Naerim through the abandoned church, they encounter a closed wardrobe with talismans on the outside of it. They make Naerim open it to reveal a man hidden inside – presumably a dead man as he falls out of the wardrobe on top of Naerim without a word. Of course, everyone is shocked and runs off, leaving Naerim alone in the church with the dead body. As luck would have it, though, it isn’t a dead body but a vampire, and he finds Naerim delicious.

After taking a few licks of Naerim’s wounds, she kicks him off of her and takes off back to where the class is staying, but even as she escapes the church, she finds that a red thread now trails out from her wound, seemingly to nowhere and she is the only one who can see it. However, it’s not clear what the thread is until the man appears on the balcony of the place Naerim is staying. She realizes that the man, named Vlad Fetechou, is a vampire and because he drank Naerim’s blood, a witch, he has now become her servant with a collar and red string that ties them together. If Fetechou drinks enough of Naerim’s blood, he will eventually become human, and their pact as servant and master will be broken, but will Naerim survive long enough to help Fetechou? Does she even want him to become human in the first place?

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Manga Review | Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura

Title: Princess Jellyfish

Akiko Higashimura

Tsukimi Kurashita is obsessed with jellyfish. Her obsession began when she was a child, and her mother took her to the aquarium. While there, her mother promised Tsukimi that she would make her a wedding dress that looked like a lace jellyfish. Not long after that promise, Tsukimi’s mother passes away, leaving her with the memories of the lace jellyfish and her mother’s unfulfilled promise.

Even as those childhood days grew further and further away, Tsukimi’s love and obsession with jellyfish never faded. Instead, it fuels and drives her entire life as she resigns herself to single life at the Amamizukan – a retro building dubbed the “nunnery” where many other like-minded, home-bodied women have congregated to live out their single lives together, obsessing over their own passions (some of which include elderly men, trains, and kimonos, just to name a few). As a result of their obsessions, the women of Amamizukan are all very anti-men and those they dub “stylish” and find themselves unable to interact with the general population as a result.

However, one evening, Tsukimi notices two jellyfish being kept in an aquarium together, and these two species can’t be housed together; otherwise, one of them will die. Tsukimi does her best to explain this to the store clerk, but because the clerk is a man and a stylish, Tsukimi struggles to communicate with him. A stylish woman comes by and helps Tsukimi rescue the jellyfish by chance. Though the woman is a stylish, she is allowed into the sacred nunnery because she isn’t a man. Throughout the evening, Tsukimi realizes even though her new friend Kuranosuke Koibuchi is a stylish, she is still a good person and even finds herself drawn to her beauty because she looks like a princess – something Tsukimi herself feels she could never be.

The next day, though, it is revealed that Kuranosuke is actually a man who cross-dresses as a way to escape his family’s political background. To protect her place in Amamizukan and maintain her new friendship, Tsukimi tells all of her fellow nuns that Kuranosuke is a woman. Even with her own position at Amamizukan protected, the entirety of the building and the neighborhood itself is under threat by large corporations seeking to buy out the land to build hotels and stores in its place. Having fallen in love with Amamizukan and the residents there, Kuranosuke enlists the help of all the women of Amamizukan to create a fashion line based on Tsukimi’s jellyfish illustrations so they can make up the funds needed to buy up the building before it is sold.

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