Genre: BL/Yaoi

Age Rating: 18+

Price: US$12.95

Yugi Yamada is a BL mangaka who can be relied on to provide a story that's more than just a reiteration of the BL formula. Her great strengths are in her depiction of snarky, spiky characters and the naturalness of the way they come together. Unfortunately, Close the Last Door! demonstrates that she's not so good with characters who aren't prickly sarcastic wisecrackers.

Close the Last Door! is built around a love triangle: Nagai gets drunk at the wedding of his friend and colleague Saitou because he's been in love with him for ages and never said anything; at the bar he meets Honda, another guest, who takes care of him in his inebriated state. But the next morning, Saitou's bride runs away, which leaves Saitou in need of care, and Nagai with a dilemma on his hands: be a good friend and help Saitou find his bride, or take advantage of his emotionally vulnerable state for his own benefit? Meanwhile, Honda's still hanging around, both in Nagai's thoughts and in his life.

The big problem with love triangles is that all too often it's obvious which one of the corners of the triangle is the one that's going to be eliminated, and that's the case here. Honda and Nagai are both the snarky, proud, emotionally stupid types familiar from other Yugi Yamada manga, but Saitou is a weak, boring nonentity -- he doesn't look like a stereotypical uke, except in that he's the shortest of the three, but his tendency to burst into tears at the drop of a hat and his general passivity and spinelessness make Nagai's infatuation with him incomprehensible and hard to sympathise with. And that infatuation crowds out the much more interesting relationship between Nagai and Honda.

I would have enjoyed Close the Last Door! a lot more if Saitou had either been a more interesting, better-developed character, or if he had been dropped from the story altogether after the wedding. A lot of pages are spent on Nagai's attempts to comfort Saitou and on the issues with Saitou's runaway bride, which were reasonably amusing, but ultimately felt like a distraction. To put it bluntly, I didn't care. I didn't care about Saitou and I didn't care about Nagai's feelings for him. I found those parts of the manga boring when they weren't actively annoying me.

The part of the story that deals with Nagai's relationship with Honda is well-done and convincingly erotic (although the art throughout the manga is on the messy side), but having to wade through scene after scene of Saitou blubbering on Nagai's shoulder took some of the pleasure out of it.

I'd like to be able to recommend Close the Last Door!, since I've really enjoyed the other Yugi Yamada manga that I've read, but I just can't. It's not bad, but it's unbalanced and overlong; if Yamada had cut the "love triangle" aspect and focused solely on Nagai and Honda, I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

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