Say Please

I was a "Boy" at the club, and he was a client… The tantalizing quote appears on the back cover of Kano Miyamoto's Say Please, published by Deux Press. A story of a prostitute and his client, brought together by money and bound together by something more, works well in stories of a similar theme such as Fumi Yoshinaga's Gerard and Jacques, but only when the relationship that develops between the two characters is believable and mutual. In Say Please, it is neither, and a promising prospect turns into a mostly flat, predictable tale of two people with nothing in common who seem to fall in love for no particular reason.

Sakura is a teacher at an all-girls' high school who purchases the services Ryoichi at a brothel, though the "club" itself is never shown. The manga opens on the two of them coming to Sakura's apartment for the night, engaging in awkward conversation, even more awkward sex, and a downright uncomfortable morning-after. Later, Sakura pays for Ryoichi to stay with him for a week, as his "sex slave" to borrow Ryoichi's words, but the two act more like bickering roommates, with the odd night of sex thrown in. Their interactions are stilted and choppy, largely due to Sakura's near absolute silence on any and every topic Ryoichi tries to bring up. Any attempt of Ryoichi's to get to know his client is met with either complete silence or curt, short answers. The reader never gets the sense that either of them cares especially for one another, making the revelations and plot twists in the last two chapters seem sudden and groundless. If this wasn't a yaoi manga, and the reader didn't already know that the main characters of yaoi manga almost always end up together, you might think that this relationship wouldn't survive through the end of the book.

The storytelling does get better over time, and by the end of the book, I was smiling with a sense of satisfaction at the ending. However, the reward of simple satisfaction hardly felt like enough of a payoff for slogging through the first three yawn-inducing chapters.

An extra short story of two chapters shows the relationship of a delinquent high school boy and a gay American man living in Japan, as a sort of surrogate parent/surrogate child relationship that eventually turns sexual. This story is less awkward and more poignant than Sakura and Ryoichi's story, but it isn't enough to save the book. Miyamoto-sensei's sketchy and unfinished art style only damages the book's overall quality further; between the plain, forgettable art and the bland, careless storytelling, Say Please seems more like an amateur's work in progress than a finished, professional manga volume.

In keeping with their other releases, Deux's presentation is simple and fairly good-quality, but their selection of this manga to publish is questionable. Say Please has very little to recommend it or help it stand out as a unique story in the ever-growing U.S. BL manga market. Compared to all of the other titles on the shelves out there, Say Please is the perfect volume of manga to skip over.