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Oh, loaned volume one to my friend. And ignore the tacky pattern on my futon -_-”

Bokutachi Otoko no Ko (Bokutachi = Us, Otoko no Ko = Boy(s). I’m having trouble trying to translate the title without sounding awfully cheesy, so I hope you get the picture there) is the story of two best friends who well, end up as more than best friends – *yawns* Only they’re both guys it starts out and continues to be a one-sided slightly awkward thing for about 5 volumes which leads to an entertaining mix of humour and drama angst etc. – *yay*

Why you shouldn’t might have problems reading this manga:

1. The dialogue’s drenched in Kansai-ben (story set in some so-called inaka somewhereabouts Osaka) – not that I found to be a problem since I’ve lived in Osaka for a while now though my own Osaka-ben is shit limited. But when reading manga/anything in Japanese, it’s my habit to just weed out the general gist of a sentence rather than fuss what individual words actually mean, and the story’s straightforward to begin with so reading wasn’t too much of a hassle. Comparitively, a friend of mine whose level of Japaneses light years ahead of mine (bloody Koreans and theire seeming ease in adapting to the language – kidding XD) and is used to probing through a good mix of formal/informal Japanese texts, took a look at the first few page and declared she couldn’t read it -_-”

2. The art’s fugly. Well, it was first published in 1993 so slack can be cut. Not that let art become an issue if I enjoy reading the story, which in this case I clearly did (otherwise I wouldn’t be typing this post on it at this inconvenient time -_-”), though I know too many people who’ll refuse to touch any work should the art not appeal to the eyes… Yea well, their loss I can still say.

3. Oh yea, shounen ai. Big whoop. However I can testify that there’s nothing risque-r than a kiss. So yea, those of you who say “What, just a kiss?”, can put that as reason number 4.

Now on to the positives. This is where I’m going to bumble and contradict myself a lot so bear with me.

I think it’s bittersweet when someone falls in love with their best friend (*ack I can’t I just typed that*), and in Tamio and Takashi’s case, rather sweet in that they start out as the best of friends as young shoutas boys (watch as the people who came after they read this post’s title and assumed I’d be talking about gender again run for the hills -_-”).

Here it starts with Tamio (who is the most adorable character this side of Mihashi Ren XD) thinking how nice it’d be to be with his best friend Takashi (as best friends?) for, well, a long long time. It’s the most innocent of thoughts, and it’s rather interesing to see how the friends grow up (through some ludicrous lulzy circumstances as only manga would permit – think crazy out-in-the-wild grandma who takes her grandchild and abandons him in Hawaii -_-” Best friend who hasn’t seen him in years catches wind of this and coincidentally wins a free vacation to – guess where?) in the typical fashion as boys do – only of course one of them likes the other who’s oblivious to it the entire time. Of course in due course, what starts out as the simplest of human relationships grows into something more complicated (Oh, high school…), but you can always count on fiction and happy endings friends to patch things up in the end =P

I could ramble on about crossing that seemingly delicate border between best friends and beyond, but for now I just wanted to muse over the notion that if you wanted to be together with someone for the rest of your life, how it would really be for that someone to be someone you’ve known for most of your life as a best friend. Again, disregarding gender issues.

Going on holiday for a week starting tomorrow. Does not explained rushed irrelevant manga post on this blog, but yea just had to post something before I vanish from the face of the blogosphere. Again.