Genre: BL/Yaoi

Age Rating: M/Mature/18+

Price: $12.95

"When everything else in my life was a blur, the only clear thing to me was you."

It's very rare for me to read a manga anthology in any genre where all the stories are equally good, but Weekend Lovers holds that distinction, as well as subverting expectations for a BL collection several times over, and displaying Kiriko Fuwa's ability to shift between light, fluffy romance and sinister erotic drama without missing a beat.

The title story is a charming two-parter about an established couple, Koutarou the eager trainee chef and Asahi the hard-working salaryman. They both work long hours, so on the rare occasions when they can get together, Koutarou bursts with enthusiasm -- which Asahi, being seven years older and rather more reserved, finds a little embarrassing and hard to handle. What makes this pair of stories stand out from the norm is the unfussy warmth between the two lovers, a warmth which doesn't magically dissolve all their problems or make their differences disappear, but which gives both of them something to remember and fight for when difficulties arise.

Having let the reader bask in the warm glow of mutual love between consenting adults for a while, Fuwa then shifts gears into something darker and spicier with "Fragments of Glass and Dark Water", as a video store employee finds himself plagued by kinky erotic dreams about a younger co-worker. The dark spiciness continues with "Cage", in which a low-ranking salaryman blackmails his boss into an affair; "Cage" is longer than "Fragments", and thus has more room to develop the relationship, which plays out a little bit more conventionally than in "Fragments".

The gears shift again in "Right of Passage, Road to Love", which is a rather goofy high school story about a sophisticated city boy transferring to a rural high school, where he's waylaid by a curiously old-fashioned gang who look like something from a Shounen Jump manga. Then, in "Servant and Service", we have gratuitous drag and smouldering repressed passion in a tale of two domestic servants finding love despite many misunderstandings.

One factor that unites all the stories in the collection, varied as they are, is a lack of the more predictable BL clichés. One of the things you get used to if you read a lot of BL is that there will always be a seme (top) and an uke (bottom) in every relationship, and 95% of the time you can tell which character is which based on how they look in the cover illustration. Fuwa neatly sidesteps this, and also avoids assigning sexual roles based on personalities. It's a small thing, but it's so rare in this genre that it's a relief to encounter it.

All told, this is an impressive collection of highly erotic and emotionally satisfying stories with a range of styles and tones and an approach to storytelling that kept me hooked from the first page to the last.

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