Genre: BL/Yaoi

Age rating: M/Mature/18+

Price: $12.95

If you are going to run, then I want to run away. I'd want to go to a place where you don't exist. But even so, we're cousins. As long as we live in this small world, there's nowhere I can run from you.

I don't often read manga that require me to draw a kinship diagram just to keep the characters' relationships straight, and when I do, it usually takes the mangaka more than a single volume to make matters that complicated. Ka Shin Fu is an exception, concerned as it is with the inheritance of the Kourenji family, one of those fabulously rich and quasi-aristocratic families without which shoujo manga would cease to exist. There is no direct heir to the family fortunes, since the son of the eldest Kourenji disappeared long ago, and now the grandmother of the family clings stubbornly to life in the hopes of seeing a man of the Kourenji bloodline inherit. First she tries to marry off her granddaughter Mitsuko to one of Mitsuko's two male cousins; but the cousins are more interested in each other than in Mitsuko, and Mitsuko doesn't want to be a pawn in her grandmother's game, so she runs away with the chauffeur. Years later, her son Kaoru and Ryuugo, the son of the disappeared uncle, are summoned to the Kourenji home as the grandmother lies close to death. Which of them will be chosen as the heir? Do either of them really want that honour? Or perhaps they both have agendas of their own...

There is more to Ka Shin Fu than meets the eye. The opening chapter at first suggests a simple well-worn story of love temporarily thwarted by family obligations. But it soon becomes clear that something different is going on. The Kourenji family has secrets, and several characters are not what they seem; the backstory is complicated, and the family drama that occurs as it is revealed takes up most of the second chapter (which in turn takes up half of the book), while the romance between the second-generation pair is left hanging, to be resolved in a later chapter.

This structure is a bit less satisfying than it might have been if the family plot and the romance had been resolved together, but it works; the Kourenji family are convincingly messed-up and the relationships that develop in the shadow of the family's secrets are correspondingly strained and difficult. Breaking free is not easy, just as it is not easy in real life to cut ties with even the most dysfunctional of families.

Tateno's art is striking; a little heavier on the screentones than I generally like, but with a delicate wispiness to the figures. The overall effect is very easy on the eye; it falls within a range of styles common in shoujo manga, though less common than it used to be.

Overall, Ka Shin Fu is good enough to be worth a look, and unusual enough to be worth a second look.

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