Manga Review: Meeting You

[Jason]

Title: Meeting You
Mangaka: Mio Tennohji
Originally serialized in: Drap (Core Magazine Co. Ltd.)
Genre: Yaoi
Licensed by: 801Media
Price: $15.95/US

In Meeting You, Mio Tennohji, manga-ka of Sky Over My Spectacles, offers up a collection of school-love and businessman-love stories in her latest collection to be released in the United States.

The first two stories, both titled Meeting You, are about Himeshiro, a jerk-of-a-high school playboy who finds his take on romance changing when the shy Touru confesses to him. The salary men stories, How to Find a Gentle Kiss and Mornings at the Bus Stop, feature men who work for the same office—Keigo Senken, who runs into an old friend after years apart and finds that their feelings for each other haven’t changed, and Shunpei Machida, whose daily meetings at the bus stop leads to deeper feelings for his fellow commuter.

Unfortunately, though all of the stories in this collection are mildly interesting, funny, and romantic, they don’t ever really move past ordinary. The Meeting You stories in particular, seem very ‘been-there-done-that’. Yes, Himeshiro is a jerk, but so are many other semes in yaoi-land. Tennohji gives us no reason to like him and no explanation, beyond the mysterious powers of the crying, blushing uke, to explain why his attitude changes when he begins going out with Touru. The last story in the collection, Meeting You Extra ~What If?~, is the exception to the mediocrity. It features Touru and a classmate wondering if Himeshiro and his friend were ever lovers and, if so, then which one was the uke. It’s a funny little take on the characters and ends the whole collection on an up note.


The salary men stories are stronger than the schoolboy ones, but they still aren’t terribly memorable. I liked the maturity of the two characters in How to Find a Gentle Kiss but wish that Tennohji had done more with them. The companion story, Mornings at the Bus Stop, is cute, though little more than that. Other manga-kas have done the bus stop meeting story better. I do like how Tennohji writes for grown men, though, as opposed to how she writes schoolboys. Her salary men act like men, even the ukes, whereas her uke schoolboys are girly and weepy in a way that quickly irritated me.

Unfortunately her art only furthers that irritation. The characters’ long faces, limbs and bodies are attractive enough, if nothing out of the ordinary for yaoi, but Touru looks so overly feminine that only his prodigious manhood gives away his gender. The salary men, by comparison, are much more adult looking and there’s less chance of mistaking them for women. Tennohji’s page layouts are cluttered, but still understandable. Characters seem very close to the reader, a feeling heightened by the smaller size of 801 Media’s books. This made me long for the opportunity to step away from them a little.

Overall this isn’t a poor choice for a yaoi reader looking to sample a story here and there, but it isn’t a title that’s strong or memorable either. Readers looking for a lasting story will probably be disappointed, but those in search of a quick yaoi fix will probably be moderately satisfied.

Reviewer: Snow
Proofed and Edited By Lissa Pattillo