Genre: BL/Yaoi
Rating: 18+/Mature
Price: $12.95
I can perform well with anyone. Put on a smile and make some pleasant conversation. I can do him, too. So... would somebody please just give me a script?
When is a BL manga not a BL manga? Perhaps Seduce Me After the Show is the answer to that question: for all that the stories in this debut collection are about love between men, none of them stick to standard BL formulas, and yet the departures from those formulas don't come from "twists" or extravagant premises that ultimately pay homage to the genre they seem to be subverting, but from intelligent, clear-eyed storytelling that seems to suit the BL label almost by accident. These are stories about love, but not "love stories"; there is both more and less going on here than a reader expecting typical BL might expect. Less, in the sense that Est Em doesn't offer pat resolutions or intense bursts of emotion; more, in the sense that her writing is far subtler and more thoughtful than the norm.
From the opening pair of stories, about a dancer who takes up film acting and has an affair with his co-star, to the last, in which an old man returns to Kyoto after many years to look for his former lover, the dominant mood is one of melancholy and loss. There's a sense that every one of these stories has another story behind it that the characters could tell, if they could only find the words. Est Em suggests rather than spelling out, and this applies to the art as well as the writing; in places it seems sketchy or sparse, but that sparseness is exactly what's needed for these stories.
There are some minor technical issues with this book that were all the more annoying for the high quality of the content: the dialogue contains some irritating errors, one of which made the sentence in question incomprehensible; and it's not always clear which dialogue bubble applies to which character (a problem which in most cases could have been solved by adding a tail to each bubble). That said, the translator and adaptor are to be commended for the job they did with the final story. Most attempts to translate Kansai-ben into equivalently regional English are embarrassingly awful, but here the Kyoto natives speak in a phonetically-rendered North England accent that works just fine.
Seduce Me After the Show is exceptionally well-written. The stories may seem insubstantial at first glance, but they linger in the mind for days after reading. There's more here than meets the eye.
9