Reviews in Brief: Hyouta Fujiyama's Spell

Spell by Hyouta Fujiyama is one of those yaoi that I would certainly recommend to a teenager trying to come to grips with himself. That's actually one of the reasons I'm reviewing yaoi: while my own taste is for those that deal more with relationships between adult men, I'm on the lookout for those that give some resonance to boys taking their first stumbling steps toward loving. Sure, it's a romantic vision in these books, but that doesn't invalidate it: we need our dreams, and maybe gay kids need them more than most of us.

Takama Natori is a second-year college student when he meets Junpei Kisugi at a mixer. Both were invited by their friend Takeda and both are bored with the party, but they hit it off with each other instantly. Natori is somewhat of a bumpkin, although much more sophisticated than he was at the beginning of his first year, and finds it a little hard to deal with the fact that Kisugi is openly -- at least, openly to some -- bisexual. As it turns out, Kisugi is a perfect gentleman in that regard: he's already dating someone, an older man named Tooru, and he makes it a policy not to hit on Takeda's friends. So things are fine, and they become fast friends. And then Natori realizes that he's falling in love with Kisugi.

There's some good conflicts in here that keep the story moving: first Natori's recognition of his feelings for Kisugi, then his qualms about moving in on Natori's relationship with Tooru, and the fallout when his friend from home, Yasuha, who was starting to have her own feelings for Natori, sees him kissing Kisugi. Kisugi has his own conflicts, crystallized in a monologue after a painful interview with Tooru.

That interview is the one major flaw in the narrative: it is included as a separate chapter at the end of the story, when I think it would have been much more useful and made the story more coherent if it had been integrated into the main narrative. It would also have provided much more support for Kisugi's conflicts. As it is, the placement makes no sense.

Fujiyama's graphic style is bold and spare, figures and features rendered deftly and economically, and she has a great ability with facial expressions. Features are more human, less elfin than the general run of manga -- more realistic -- and although eyes are still emphasized, they're not the grotesquely oversized eyes that tend to dominate the genre. And the boys aren't always pretty, although they are handsome.

High marks for this one, although it's a slight story. It's from June, an imprint of Digital Manga Publishing.