Why is it when I read or watch a BL/yaoi story, it ALWAYS has to have some kind of sexual assault or rape scene in. Even Love Stage which comes off more as fluff has a scene in it where Ryouma has to prove to his brain that Izumi is a guy and "OH MAH GAWDS I AM A FERAL BEAST AND CANNOT CONTROL MYSELF!" after he tears off his clothes... and we are supposed to think men are rational beings capable of logic.

I have found a unicorn: a Juné yaoi novel that contains no rape. It doesn't even have anyone thinking about raping someone. Unfortunately, the book wasn't very good. There were some aspects I really liked, but the way they were written (or translated?) just didn't work for me.

This book was about Biwa, a Japanese screenwriter who has lived in America for most of his life, and Yamato, a famous Japanese actor. Biwa's production team is working on a detective show, and the director wants Yamato to play the lead. Biwa originally believed he made it onto the production team on the basis of his scriptwriting skills, so he's disappointed to learn that he might have been added to the team primarily because he knows Japanese and could act as Yamato's babysitter. Although the two of them don't exactly start off on the right foot, it's not long before they become friends.

When I first started reading this, I thought I was dealing with a complete clunker. Morimoto introduced 8-year-old Biwa and then sped through the next 18 years of his life in just a few pages before stopping at Biwa's first day as part of the production team. I was glad things slowed down after that. The book's earlier scenes are among its best. I enjoyed it when a frustrated and insulted Biwa ripped into Yamato for saying that getting on any TV series, whether American or Japanese, was easy. And I was happy when Yamato turned out to be friendlier, humbler, and more dedicated to his work than he at first appeared to be.

I was a little worried that Biwa's early demonstration that he possessed a spine meant that Yamato would be super-dominant and super-aggressive once they inevitably had sex. Thankfully, Biwa and Yamato's relationship remained light, playful, and a little sweet throughout the entire book. The closest Yamato came to being aggressive was unexpectedly kissing Biwa. Yamato turned the whole thing into a joke or cultural misunderstanding (“[Kissing] is like shaking hands over here, right?” (88)), and Biwa accepted that explanation even though Yamato continued to test the boundaries of their relationship as the story progressed.

Biwa and Yamato were an okay couple, and I really did like those early scenes, but the book suffered from two big problems. One, there wasn't much of a plot, and two, Morimoto's attempts at banter (or Quine's translation of that banter) tended to fall flat. One of these things alone might been okay, but both of them together resulted in a story that plodded along before it finally thunked to a halt.

Most of the book focused on the planning and creation of the detective show's pilot episode. There were long passages describing how American TV shows are created and how they differ from Japanese TV. Morimoto did a bit of authorial hand-waving with the scriptwriting and filming portions and made no attempt to sugarcoat the show's chances of success. I actually think the story might have been better if Morimoto had thrown realism completely out the window and turned the show into Biwa's big screenwriting break and Yamato big Hollywood acting break.

Strangely enough, Morimoto decided to abandon realism near the end of the book and have Yamato and Biwa agree to work together on a project that, as far as I could see, had less than zero chance of success. Since neither Yamato nor Biwa were supposed to be stupid or overly idealistic, I felt like I'd wandered into some sort of Like a Love Comedy alternate universe.

There were times when the banter between Yamato and Biwa was nice, but for some reason their dialogue didn't consistently work for me. Parts of it felt a little too formal, and the topics of their conversations tended to bore me to tears after a few pages. I can remember them talking about American sitcoms and the hugeness of American food portions, and that's about it. By the way, the food portions conversation was at a fancy restaurant, which bugged me, because I'd figure that the portions at a place like that would actually be quite small.

Hmm, what else? I suppose I should say something about the book's one sex scene. It was...pretty bad. Like I said, there was no rape, so it wasn't that. It read a bit like a heterosexual penis-in-vagina sex scene – no lube of any kind, an emphasis on “there will be pain the first time, but after that it'll be fine,” and occasional details that I was pretty sure wouldn't apply to male anatomy.

This wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, and it didn't leave me feeling angry, but there were a lot of aspects of it that could have used improvement. It's too bad, because Yamato and Biwa really were a nice couple, and I wanted to like their story more than I did.

Extras:

One color illustration, 10 black-and-white illustrations, and an afterword written by the author. Narumi's art style wasn't to my tastes, and the scenes chosen (mostly kissing, sex, or post-sex) were a bit odd, considering that the story wasn't actually all that steamy. Maybe an attempt to compensate for that?

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

I have tomorrow off, so I figured I'd dig into one of my "this is probably bad but I want to try it anyway" books.

This starts off with Biwa, a Japanese guy who's spent most of his life in America and hopes to one day be a screenwriter for an American TV show. He has learned that his production team will be working on a detective show starring a Japanese actor as the lead. A Japanese actor who can't even speak English, who seems to be completely full of himself, and who thinks getting a part on any TV show, whether Japanese or American, is easy. Finally, Biwa can't take it anymore:

“Let me fill you in on something, bud. I'm no fan of yours. Maybe you've forgotten already, but when you ran into me in the lobby, my only thought was: Who the hell is that? You may be hot stuff over there, but here, nobody's ever heard of you. The average American knows Masi Oka and Ken Watanabe. And probably George Takei and Pat Morita. He might recognize Sonny Chiba and Takeshi Kitano. And maybe he remembers Toshiro Mifune. That's it. And while we're at it, just because you're famous on your little fishbowl of an island, pumping out shitty little dramas, you think every Japanese in spitting distance is your fan? What a moron.” (37)

This was me: O_O

Biwa maybe isn't the smartest guy around (OMG, he can't get fired yet, there are still 100 pages to go), but at least he's not a doormat. Right?