Kimi Shiruya - Dost Thou Know?

It is very difficult for me to put into to words just how I feel about this volume, but I shall try nonetheless. To paraphrase the comedian Dylan Moran: I have to get up early in the morning just to hate this manga because there aren't enough hours in the day.

There are many reasons, many multitudinous excellent reasons, why I think this particular work of fiction simply isn't worth my time, but there is one flaw above them all which I simply cannot forgive, and which I think exemplifies the problem at its core. It regards the look of the manga's characters, and it is as follows:

Yes, you heard me correctly, this is not boy's love, this is lizard's love. Teenage, high-school, lizard angst. Which is much like normal angst, but with longer tongues, eating flies, and utterly emotionless faces. Simply put, Satoru Ishihara's characters do not look nice; they don't look individual, their faces are angular and childish, their mouths are mere slits, and the only way you seem able to distinguish between the two major characters is their hair colour and their height. I just can't stand it.

You'll have to forgive my over-the-top outpouring as I write this, but Kimi Shiruya - Dost Thou Know? came to me on fairly solid recommendations, and I can't quite remember ever being so disappointed with a manga as I was by this; it actually made me upset that I'd spent money on it.

Yaoi, in my opinion, does not require great things to be readable. It can get by with reasonable art and a good angsty plot, or a mediocre plot and beautiful artwork; to some tastes even no plot, no characterisation and a lot of steamily drawn sex scenes will suffice. None of these combinations may produce a "great" manga novel, but all of them will rate as "passable". It doesn't take much. But this... this simply fails.

Tsurgi and Katsuomi are our leading lizards, both are Kendo champions (cue endless innuendo about "desiring to cross swords"), both with Kendo playing younger brothers who look exactly like their elder brothers, except in miniature. When Tsurgi moves to Katsuomi's neighbourhood he deliberately goes to a different dojo, lest his kendo skills be blunted (Oh yeah, as a side note, the translation of all the kendo talk is incredibly clunky) by becoming "too close" to his tournament rival. Unfortunately their respective younger brothers both go to opposite dojos too, which means that each is training with the other's brother. I don't know if it is a traditional thing that brothers don't go to the same dojo, or if there's a very sensible reason if you know the sport, but it looked like a great big glaring plot device to me. Anyway, Katsuomi ends up being drawn into Tsurgi's life via his little brother, who gets into all the kinds of trouble that girly blonde uke younger brothers are supposed to. Tsurgi harbours inappropriate thoughts towards his kendo rival which increase into an infatuation (with little or no characterisation whatsoever), presumably spurred on by the supposed electricity and passion between the two when they fight in competition, although whenever they seem to meet in real life there's no spark whatsoever.

There's the odd kiss, and lots of kendo, and lots of veiled conversations about how they don't want to "dull their defences" and eventually they end up together on the very last page, after a wait which would have been angsty, if there was ever really any characterisation or plot to get angsty about. I tried so hard to care about any of these characters, but I just didn't. It's difficult to be bothered about a relationship when there's no ostensible emotional basis for it, or when a character turns around and goes "I have feelings for you, but I shall ignore them and walk away now... to create angst!" I just did not give a damn about these people.

Like the lizards the characters resemble, Kimi Shiruya - Dost Thou Know? left me feeling utterly cold-blooded. The artwork is expressionless, the characters flat, the plot non-existent. I don't think this manga should be bought by anyone, ever, except perhaps as an example of how not to do it.