Genre: BL/Yaoi

Rating: M/Mature

Price: $12.99

"When I was little and wanted something, I would draw it in my sketch book and just keep staring at it... it made me feel like they were mine in some small way."

One of the interesting things about being a BL reader is that BL, unlike the more mainstream manga genres, tends to come in small doses; occasionally you get a multi-volume juggernaut like Love Mode or Junjo Romantica, but more often BL manga stories come in one volume, or even less, which gives mangaka a chance to show off their skills with different storytelling techniques. A BL anthology is like a box of mixed chocolates; you might not have thought that a caramel espresso truffle would be delicious, but if it appears next to your favourite strawberry cream, you might be tempted to try it even if you'd never have bought a box with nothing else.

Of course, not every unexpected chocolate treat is equally delicious, and it's rare to find a BL anthology where all the stories are equally good. All too often, as with Last Portrait, there's an excellent lead story and a less-good backup, or a mixture of stories of different quality levels. However, even when some stories aren't as good, it's still great to see the same mangaka try different kinds of story, and Last Portrait offers two very different kinds of story.

The title story is the better of the two. Yamato is the son of a company president and is expected to succeed his father, but dreams of becoming an artist. He falls in love with his office colleague Sakaguchi, who is engaged to his sister, but Yamato is used to not getting what he wants. This story is a real treat: sensitive and thoughtful, with two well-drawn characters as protagonists and a story that develops naturally from the situation they find themselves in. The use of Yamato's sketch book as a barometer of his desires is particularly good, and Honma follows through on some implications of it in a way that took me by surprise, in a good way.

The second story, "Stairway to Heaven", is not so good; it's a thriller-type story set in the USA concerning an FBI agent and the condemned prisoner he's set to guard. Here the relationship aspect of the story is well-handled, but the thriller aspect is not so good. The idea of a combo cop-thriller/BL-romance story piqued my interest -- sort of like Fake, I thought -- but it turned out that the factual errors that were only a mild problem in Fake were much more serious in a story that wasn't trying to be funny. It's very clear that Akira Honma has only a vague notion of what FBI agents do and how they do it, and the combination of vagueness and flat-out mistakes gives the whole story an air of unreality. This isn't helped by the clunky ungrammatical English put into Keith's mouth; I know that translating colloquial speech is hard, but I've seen colloquial Japanese that has been translated into believeably slangy English, and this isn't it. It's a shame, because the spine of a good story is here, and I got the feeling that with a bit more research and a better translation, "Stairway to Heaven" would be terrific; as it is, it's not much more than adequate.

Last Portrait is interesting as a whole, as a demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of Akira Honma's writing (her art is consistently good); "Last Portrait" is an excellent story on its own, and while "Stairway to Heaven" is a little disappointing, it's still worth reading.

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