Reviews in Brief: Tarako Kotobui's Love Pistols

This one came to me via a friend/colleague who was cleaning out her bookshelves. I'd run across it on Amazon and put it on my list to pursue someday, but at the price she asked, I jumped right on it.

Imagine, if you will, a universe in which humanity, the regular sort descended from an ape-like ancestor, shares the world with another sort of person, descended, it would seem, from everything but the apes. This is the universe in which Norio Tsuburaya finds himself -- after crashing his brand new motorbike into the garden wall on his sixteenth birthday, in what seems to have been a near-death experience but only resulted in a broken foot. Suddenly, not only is he seeing people as animals, but they are coming on to him like crazy. His senpai, Kumakashi, first clues him into the existence of Zoomanity, as it is called. Kumakashi is a large, hulking sort of guy, captain of the judo team and a member of the gardening club. He is the first to confess his love to Norio -- but what Norio sees is a bear. Things are getting decidedly out of hand when Norio, limping along on his crutches, suddenly smells something totally captivating -- just before he falls down the stairs and onto Kunimasa Madarame, a senior and the one man that Kumakashi told him especially to avoid. Kunimasa's reaction is somewhat strange -- he starts sniffing Norio, then picks him up and carries him off. And so begins the main story line.

There are other stories scattered through the five volumes of this series, involving Kunimasa's brother, Yonekuni, who professes to hate men; Kumakashi, who is contracted to mate with a North American bruin; a flashback to another of Kunimasa's brothers and his parents; and more. And as the series progresses, it gets weirder and more outrageous.

One of the saving graces of this one is that Norio and most of the other uke tend to fall into the category of "ornery uke." For example, it seems that Norio is a very rare type, known as a Missing Link, so not only is he in high demand, there's also the fact that, as one of Kunimasa's brothers tells him, "no one can beat a pissed off Missing Link" -- and Norio spends a lot of time being pissed off. The conflicts with Kunimasa, who is completely lacking in interpersonal skills, rely on Norio's stubbornness to counter Kunimasa's demanding nature. Characterizations as a whole are somewhat extreme, but perfectly believable and generate most of the momentum of the various stories.

There's also the fact that Zoomanity has discovered a way for men to bear children and for same-sex couples to generate their own offspring, which leads to some very interesting family relationships -- consider that "Mom" to one sibling may be "Pop" to another. Kotobuki has thought this out pretty carefully, so we are treated to excerpts from chidren's primers on Zooomanity, the main groups, the rankings, and so forth, as well as a family tree of the Madarame, which has to be seen to be believed.

And drawing is a pleasure to see. Kotobouki favors elongated, blocky body types, somewhat like Ellie Mamahara's style, with exaggerated hands and feet,although her renderings are more fluid. Narrative flow is fairly straightforward and very clear, which is fortunate: the stories themselves are hard enough to follow.

There are five volumes out; there was to have been at least one more, but apparently Kotobuki abandoned the series -- volume 5 was published in Japan in 2006 and there's been no sign of a sequel. Nevertheless, it's worth checking into -- it is without doubt among the most imaginative yaoi series I've run across. It's from BLU.

Note: If you're searching the Web for this one, you may run across references to "Sex Pistols," which was the original title. That was changed to avoid conflict with the band of the same name.