Let Dai

When Jaehee rescues a girl from a nasty gang of teenagers, he catches the eye of the gang leader, Dai, a rough, hateful young man who's personality can flash from friendly and caring to cruel and heartless in an instant. Overwhelmed by Dai's compelling presence, Jaehee finds himself bordering on an obsession with one of the most dangerous teenagers in Seoul.

The story of Let Dai is one of the most developed and original shonen-ai/yaoi plots I have encountered. The setting is realistic and highly believable, addressing pertitent issues that might arise in a relationship like that between Jaehee and Dai. The characters have multi-layered personalities with deep histories and enough mystery that not even the first volume comes close to plumbing the well. Dai is a dynamic character, strikingly different from the typical shonen-ai characters in his cruelty, unhappiness, and fearsome presence. Jaehee, even as he falls in love with Dai, acts as Dai's foil, as he becomes both lured into Dai's world and fights against it.

The artwork in the manga is good, but not awe-inspiring. All the characters look distinctive, but are sometimes inconsistent in their quality. The lines of the drawings are clear and sharp, and the artist makes good use of the white space around the characters. The biggest fault I found with the manga was that the translation is surprisingly awful. There are typos, misspellings, and sentences that do not make gramatical or logical sense (I wrote to Net Comics about this issue). Sometimes some of the dialogue gets cut off in the binding of the book. Aside from these problems, which do not have to do with quality of the manga, but with the publishers, there is not much else to criticize.

But a warning to any squeamish readers: There is an intense amount of cursing and bad language as well as a fair amount of depicted and implied violence and torture.

Let Dai is an amazing manga with a deep, complicated story, orignal characters, and a believable setting. I highly recommend it.