This is not a story I would expect myself to like. When it comes to gangster stories, I tend to prefer the comedies, and this certainly is not a comedy in any way. If there is any humor, it is a dark, twisted one. The main themes are of sexual violence and reactions to that trauma, something that I don't usually respond well to. Yet I find myself caught up in the characters and story and have reread this first volume several times over the last few years, and was very happy to finally be able to buy a legal copy in a language I can read.

There are a few BL comic tropes and clichés scattered about as expected, but for the most part I find that Yoneda's work is more subtle than most of the dark/edgy things out there. She puts a lot of work into pauses and words unsaid, not to mention the emotion conveyed through her drawings and the use of screentone shadows. Maybe some things are more obvious to those who have a more nuanced understanding of the cultural norms and assumptions, but I have found more depth to the story with each reread.

This volume has three parts. 1) prequel of sorts introducing the main character Yashiro through a story about his only friend Kageyama. 2) main story, where ex-cop Doumeki joins Yashiro's yakuza group and the two establish a strange relationship. 3) flashback to high school, when Yashiro became friends with Kageyama. There are fairly blunt, if not outright graphic, descriptions of sexual assault and a few suggestive illustrations in all three parts. The story is partly an examination of how Yashiro reacted to his trauma by becoming hypersexual, while Doumeki became impotent. It is mixed in with a plot about gang leadership schisms and successions, and a growing relationship between the two main characters.

As I try to describe the story for anyone curious enough to scroll down here, but who may not have heard anything about it before, I cringe a bit at the caveats I keep wanting to write, and hedging of how graphic/ugly it is. Because it's frankly not a happy story. It is about Doumeki being drawn to something in Yashiro that is fragile and beautiful, and Yashiro responding to Doumeki as the only person who has never seen him as a source of sex. Yashiro who exhibits so many signs of twisted self-worth from his years of trauma, yet is a fairly powerful and cruel leader of a gang's subgroup.

There is a connection between them, and it seems that by the end of the volume, they have reached a tentative understanding. But though they cling to each other, it isn't any kind of healthy relationship, and is nothing like the purple prose romance that the marketing copy on the books seems to suggest will develop. I find Yashiro, Doumeki, Kageyama, and the underling Nanahara (who provides much-needed comic relief) to be pitiable and compelling and want to see a happy ending for them all. But the violence in their yakuza world suggests that Yashiro's ending will as likely be from a bullet than anything.

A note on the translation: I have the 2nd edition of the DMP/Juné publication, which received a new translation and editing after the first one was so poorly received. From what I saw, it really was bad, and I held off buying a copy because of it. The 2nd edition has a pretty good translation, though I'm no native speaker so I wouldn't really know, but there are several fairly obvious spelling errors or typos that really shouldn't have got past the editor, especially since this is a 2nd edition. Also, few to none of the original color pages transferred well to the black and white printing, which is a shame. They're muddy or blurry or have too-obvious contrast between masked elements. Again, it's a shame. Maybe about what you can expect from DMP, though. ( )

That cover. That cover. That cover. Love it. Want it. Need it.

I really need to get my hands on the rest of this story. Yashiro is the best character from last year. ( )