Solfege

Fumi Yoshinaga-sensei likes to explore different environments in her manga, and with the name like Solfege (the basics of musical studies, such as learning how to read music as well as take musical direction) you know it's going to be about classical music. This story is about Kugayama, a music teacher and his gifted but clueless student Azuma Tanaka who needs help studying for a prestigious music school's entrance exams. Tanaka has a difficult background - a single mother working as a hostess bringing home different men every night - and has a delinquent reputation, but he loves music above all and Kugayama takes him under his wing. Homosexual Kugayama doesn't really know what to think of the naive student of his who has a big adult body but a mind of a boy, but one drunken night when distressed Tanaka comes to him after yet another disappointment from his mom, the teacher takes advantage of the boy. From this follows a forbidden steamy relationship until it's inevitable discovery that forces Kugayama to send Tanaka off to Italy to study opera.

The book spans ten years in the lives of these two men together and apart, and tells an uncomfortable story about illicit love affair gone wrong. One has come to expect feel-good charming stories from Yoshinaga-sensei, but although Solfege has its Yoshinaga-trademarked funny moments, it's not a comedy in a way her other books are. Tanaka is the more usual of the characters - he's naive and happy-go-lucky, and always believes the best about people. But Kugayama is a jerk, pure and simple. You can understand some of his motivations, but many of the choices and decisions that he makes are just wrong - he doesn't act out of love or duty, but out of selfishness regardless of the mental damage it causes to the other person.

Solfege is one of Yoshinaga-sensei's older works (originally published in 1998) but her artwork was established early on and has always been very consistent. There are some priceless moments in this manga when Kugayama decides to sleep with Tanaka and puts on his seductive face - the gorgeous art just jumps at you from the page. In the same vein his face when he wakes up the next morning realizing what has happened has me in giggles every time I see it. Excitable Tanaka is super-cute with his adoration of his teacher, and Kugayama is at his best when confused and irritated but happy. Yoshinaga-sensei is also very clever in this book when it comes to seme and uke roles - although Kugayama is the instigating party, the two men don't really fall into any kind of traditional seme and uke setups, and even when having sex they keep swapping the roles which I find not only refreshing but incredibly hot. This book has been rated 16+ for young adults so the sex isn't explicit - but there is quite a lot of it and it just shows that when the writing is top notch the title doesn't need to show all to still be very sexy.

June has done good job with this release. Some honorifics have been kept, and especially keeping "sensei" is just mandatory - there is a lot of power-play in this manga between a student and sensei and keeping the original word instead of translating it adds to the authenticity. There are no extras but special effects have been translated (although not replaced).

In my opinion Solfege is not Yoshinaga-sensei's best work, mainly because Kugayama is so unlikable - but since I think this is intentional from her part, I think this title quite is unique in this aspect. Like all Yoshinaga-sensei's work, Solfege is head above shoulders from most BL manga available in it's originality, artwork and writing.