Genre: BL/Yaoi
Price: $12.95
Age rating: M/Mature/18+
"I don't know where the line between "friendship" and "love" is."
"Do you want to, like, have sex with him and stuff?"
"W-with WHO?!"
I've been disappointed by Yugi Yamada titles in the past, but that's just a sign of how much she impressed me when I first read her work; if I hadn't had high expectations, I couldn't have been let down. So although I bought a copy of Don't Blame Me! volume 2 months ago, it's taken me this long to get round to reading it, partly because I wasn't sure whether this would be the really good Yugi Yamada of Laugh Under the Sun or the not-so-good Yugi Yamada of Close the Last Door, and partly because I would have preferred to read the first volume rather than plunging in at the half-way point. But now that I've read it, I'm kicking myself for having waited so long.
As volume 2 begins, the main character, college student Nakamura, is awkwardly confiding in his film-club buddy Kujirai that he thinks that maybe he might be kind of in love with fellow club member Kaji, but he's not sure -- he's never really had friends before, so maybe that's all? Kujirai is openly gay and very experienced, so he teases Nakamura in a way that shocks him and gives him food for thought. As Kaji and Nakamura work together on their club's project for the college cultural festival, Nakamura's feelings become harder and harder to deny, and Kaji has feelings of his own to wrestle with. There's a very well-observed conversation between him and Kujirai where he makes the standard but-he's-a-guy objection and then jokes that it would be okay if it was Kujirai; and Kujirai replies "There you go again -- just trying to take the easy way... You're not in love with me, so of course that'd make things much easier and less complicated."
The characters are well-drawn in a way that reminds me of why I loved Laugh Under the Sun so much: they have the kind of mixture of patchy self-awareness and emotional stupidity that's very common in real life but frustratingly rare in BL (where most characters are either 100% naive or so all-knowing they might as well be telepaths). Their mishaps and misunderstandings are funny and real, and there's not a trace of stereotyping anywhere. The high quality and the light-hearted tone are kept up consistently, even in the epilogue-like final chapter, which skips ahead a few years and examines Kaji and Nakamura's relationship after it's become well-established, and in the unrelated backup story, "Please Take Me In".
Don't Blame Me! is fun and funny and a pleasure to read. Highly recommended.
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