Age Rating: Mature
Genre: BL
Price: $12.95

You & Harujion is possibly the most innocuous age-gap romance you're likely to find. The story concerns 17-year-old Haru, whose father has recently died, leaving behind large debts to unscrupulous creditors. Some of those creditors show up at the wake, but they are seen off by Senoh, a lawyer who claims to be a friend of Haru's. Haru doesn't remember Senoh at all, and at first is reluctant to accept his help, but soon the legal issues pile up and Haru finds himself out of his depth. He appeals to Senoh for help, and Senoh is only too glad to give it -- even asking Haru to move in with him when his family home is repossessed.

What Senoh remembers that Haru has forgotten is an incident years before, when Senoh had broken his leg and was in the hospital feeling sorry for himself. Haru, no more than a child at the time, was visiting his terminally ill mother, and managed to perk Senoh up and draw him out of himself by being bright and positive and by pointing out the harujion flowers growing on the hospital grounds. This incident has made Senoh want to repay Haru somehow, but there's more than gratitude in his feelings for Haru; and Haru, too, grows to care for Senoh as more than a helpful friend.
 
It's all very sweet and nice, and Kinoshita does a good job of building up Senoh and Haru's feelings for each other, and Senoh's worries about being too old for Haru, but it's terribly tame and lightweight. They don't have sex -- in case you might have suspected they were doing it in between pages, there's an extra story that confirms that Senoh is waiting for Haru to get into university. They barely even kiss. It could easily have been a simple story about a slightly intense friendship, and perhaps it would have worked better that way.
 
The feeling of lack of substance is helped along by Kinoshita's art: her line is so fine and narrow that it almost disappears. In places, the art looks like it was drawn with a technical pencil (and perhaps it was). It's actually pretty interesting to look at; even if I could wish she'd pay more attention to her backgrounds, it lends each page a light, airy feeling that more BL manga would benefit from.
 
Overall, although I did enjoy You & Harujion, I can't exactly recommend it, although I wouldn't warn against it either. It's sweet and fluffy and heartwarming and insubstantial, both in style and in content; not a bad way to pass an idle hour, but hardly essential reading.
 

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