Reviews in Brief: Hyouta Fujiyama's Lover's Flat

Hyouta Fujiyama is another mangaka doing yaoi whom I've taken a liking to. She puts together solid story lines graced with clean, strong graphics for some of the best yaoi out there.

Lover's Flat is a series of interlinked stories about two young couples. Kouno transfers into Natsu's school, and the boys hit it off right away. Kouno has his own tiny apartment, where Natsu is a regular visitor, and one Christmas, the inevitable happens: virgin Natsu is a virgin no longer. Next door, Naomichi and Kei share an equally tiny flat. Childhood friends, they take a place together when Naomichi decides he has to get out of his parents' house. Kei soon confesses that he's had a crush on Naomichi for a long time, but poor Naomichi doesn't know what to do. He meets Kouno, a sympathetic ear, and pours out his heart in several all-night drinking sessions. Fortunately, he follows Kouno's sensible advice, and realizes that he loves Kei. Unfortunately for Kouno, he has trouble following his own advice: his relationship with Natsu is quite stormy, but in the end, their love weathers the storms.

I like this one because, even though it's terrifically romantic, there's a lot of emotional realism: the conflicts are not in the least contrived, being the result of jealousy, insecurity, and miscommunication, and come across as pretty damned serious, at least from these boys' standpoints. When Kouno and Natsu get into a fistfight in the middle of school over a letter from Kouno's old boyfriend, it's totally believable. It's another one I would recommend to a gay teenager with no reservations, particularly since in this one, Kouno's worried about being "found out," but when their classmate Sugo expresses his relief that they haven't broken up, and just says, in reaction to their dismay that he knows about them, "You're happy together, aren't you? There's nothing wrong with that," it reinforces their commitment. (In fact, the yaoi I've been reading in general offer strong validation to gay kids and put same-sex love -- and sex in general -- in a sensible perspective, absent the hysterical and highly unrealistic moralizing so often found in American public discourse.)

This is a reprint of an early series by Fujiyama, and it's interesting to see the development of her style, both in the contrast between the original stories and the coda she has added for this edition and in relation to Spell. Graphically, she started off good, and just got better: this is a group of handsome young men with strong features and marvelously expressive faces, rendered in a clean, definite style that catches the key elements of the action without distraction. Word and picture work together beautifully in her work, and this one's no exception.

This is another from Juné.