Don't Worry Mama

Don't Worry Mama recounts the wildly improbable love story of co-workers Yuichi Higashiyama and his boss Imakura, who, upon finding themselves stranded on an deserted island together, not only survive, but overcome their disgust and hatred of one another to discover a mutual attraction. Why wildly improbable? Because Yuichi, who maintains a nice guy façade, is a neat, attractive homosexual with a thing for younger guys who look like boys. Straight, virginal Imakura, by contrast, is an overweight, overbearing mama's boy with no interest in men, let alone Yuichi. They have not a thing in common beyond working at the same company and their current situation.

The novel begins on the boat bearing the two men to the island, and quickly leads to their abandonment. Neither of these men is particularly likable, even before they're left behind, and their dire circumstances only exacerbates their personality flaws. Imakura is such the useless, selfish, mama's boy that he won't share what food he has with Yuichi. And Yuichi is pointlessly fixated on being stuck somewhere he can't go out and get laid. And so it's something akin to watching a train wreck as over the days Yuichi discovers the slowly slimming Imakura is actually very much his physical type beneath all that fat, especially when he discovers that he realizes Imakura suffers from a non-retractable foreskin (the author uses the technical term, which sent me scrambling to Google to look it up) and wants to "help" him with this problem. Hardly erotic, but difficult to turn away from, because you just have to know what happens next.

And so the two men engage in a brief fling (at first under the pretext of teaching Imakura how to seduce women) before they're rescued and go their separate ways. It's not until months later that they run into each other again. By then, Imakura has slimmed down considerably, making him even more Yuichi's physical type (even though he is actually five years older) and pursued his dream of becoming a sommelier. A few more romantic bumps occur, but the two do end up together -- leading to a sexy little bonus story at the end, "The Gift."

Don't Worry Mama does manage to be somewhat entertaining despite the odd plot and largely unlikable characters (although by "The Gift," they've become more appealing). And the illustrations by Yuki Shimzu of Love Mode fame are tasty indeed. It's unfortunately hampered by an awkward translation, and too many confusing "he, his and him" make reading certain passages -- especially the sex scenes -- difficult. By and large, the quality of the text is at the level of an average fanfic, with simple language, sentence structure and flow, and it's impossible to know if that's because the original reads that way, or if it's the translation that reads that way. If the former, then I may stick to reading manga. If the latter, here's hoping future novel translations improve.