Lucky Tomonori Ozawa: he’s just landed a job as an assistant manga editor at his top-choice company, Shukokan. Unfortunately, he’s too ditzy to actually glance at his assignment: Rose Boy, a BL manga anthology. On top of that, he spends his first day with “Sakurako Kakyoin,” a gay man who draws manga and lets his readers assume he’s a woman. Oh, and Ozawa is just a liiiittle bit moe.

Now, on the off-chance that some of you yaoi readers aren’t familiar with the usually-female concept of “moe”: the word comes from the verb moeru, which means to sprout or to blossom, and refers to young characters who inspire a certain protectiveness in their audience; they’re usually hapless, sheltered, and innocent. Which is Ozawa to a T.

Which means that Sakurako, his three gothic Lolita assistants and the other editors at Rose Boy all have to teach him about the world of boy love, to what I suspect will be the great enjoyment of most readers. It’s over the top, light on plot, and not even all that romantic, but it’s really silly and in its own way gets into a lot of the concepts we talk about when it comes to yaoi – but from a creator perspective instead of a reader perspective.



However, most of that comes out in the first half of the volume. The second half focuses much more on the relationship between Sakurako and Ozawa, albeit still with the framework of them being an editor and a manga-ka as well as budding lovers. Honestly, their relationship is way less interesting to me than when they talk about how these things go into manga, even if does sometimes read as kind of artsy-fartsy “you must feel what you draw” kind of stuff sometimes.

If that makes any sense. Anyway, the manga is super cute and very silly, but this is a volume one and I have no idea where they would go with a volume two…except to focus on the relationship a bit more, which I didn’t find all that interesting. I’m going to steal Jordan’s line and say: the seme (Sakurako) is really interesting, but the uke (Ozawa) looks like “Uke #2543C in ‘brunette’ from the Ukes-R-Us catalog.”

…But the manga is still hilarious enough that I’m dying for the next volume, just not for the same reason as I would be excited for, say, Love is Like a Hurricane volume two.

Mangaka: Higashizato Kirico
Publisher: Juné (Upcoming Releases | YaoiWiki Entry)
MSRP: $12.95
Censorship: N/A
Warnings: Female characters. Oh noes! Sheer and utter wackiness; much discussion of manga industry and the making of manga.
Disclosure: This was a free copy, courtesy of Juné Manga.