Dark BL Manga Reviews: Cut, Kawai; Sakura-Gari, Watase; Color Recipe, Harada

Look, this one GoodReads list has done right by me.

Title: Cut
Author: Touko Kawai
Published: Digital Manga Publishing, 2003
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 378,195
Text Number: 1405
Read Because: from this list of dark BL
Review: Two teenage boys catch each other behaving badly, pulling them into one another's self-sabotage. The art is nothing special; the drama of the traumatic backstories and the timing of the climax & resolution are all standard for the BL genre, and as a result tend towards silly and predictable. But the experience itself, of living with trauma and self-loathing, of building relationships despite/within that, is more organic and satisfying. This is nothing amazing, but as dark-BL-lite it's totally adequate.


Title: Sakura-Gari
Author: Yuu Watase
Published: 2007-2010
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 715 (235+232+246)
Total Page Count: 378,940
Text Number: 1407
Read Because: from this list of dark BL
Review: Review of the series entire. I read a fair bit of Watase's shojo work as a teen and liked it fine, but don't remember much now & have no strong inclination to go back. I had no idea she's written dark BL with a historical setting: In 1920 Japan, a poor student studying for university takes on work at the home of a scandalous mixed-race aristocrat who blackmails him into a relationship. As per my usual grumpy old age of manga reading, I wish the dramatic reveals were toned down by like 10%. But I'm surprised how well this works. Its deeply rooted in its setting and feels fully lived, despite the contrivances of the drama: ambiguous, messy, cruel, but honest—the characters are informed by their histories and altered by their relationship and I buy the ending, which may be the truest sign of success in a narrative of this heightened tenor. A swift and compelling read.


Title: Color Recipe
Author: Harada
Published: Kadokawa Shoten, 2016 (Vol 1), Shinshokan, 2018 (Vol 2)
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 430 (182+250)
Total Page Count: 381,755+260
Text Number: 1436-7
Read Because: reading the author, who I assume I originally found through this list of dark BL
Review: Harada's oneshots are some of the best I've ever read, dense and intense and fully utilizing their length. So a longer work feels unfairly attenuated and unfocused, despite that two volumes is still pretty short. But this remains deep within Harada's wheelhouse of psychological dark BL, and I appreciate that a longer work allows for a) a slower reveal of the coercion and manipulation occurring in the relationship and b) more room for the victim to evolve, which becomes an exploration of how and why people remain in abusive relationships. Unfortunately, longform also makes for c) more substantial depictions of problematic tropes like the depraved homosexual; it feels more tropey, more exaggerated, more like the rest of the genre. This isn't as breathtaking as drowning in those phenomenal oneshots, but it's a treat to linger longer in Harada's mind.

True crime book reviews: Working Stiff, Melinek; American Fire, Hesse; A Rip in Heaven, Cummins

Because I'm caught up on Critical Role, the amount of "listen to true crime while play video games" that I am getting through right now is actually astounding—and when reading like this, because I often need a book like right now, I find things by browsing available now + audio and then looking up a few reviews. And so my TBR does languish, but to be fair a lot of the true crime on my TBR is harvested from truepenny reviews and not available on audio anyway.


Title: Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
Author Judy Melinek, T.J. Mitchell
Narrator: Tanya Eby
Published: Tantor Audio, 2014
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 265
Total Page Count: 380,695
Text Number: 1432
Read Because: more morbid nonfiction while gaming, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I'm glad that I went into this warned of the author's hateful, judgmental view of suicide, because I would have DNF'd otherwise; it casts a doubt over her other opinions & in particular her interactions with survivors of the dead. But on the whole I liked this. It's effectively comfort reading for me, answering morbid curiosity with honesty, humor, and compassion; this is a type of death work that I hadn't explored in depth before, and while the insights (particularly re: police, the medical system, and politicized bodies) aren't surprising, they are compelling. The memoir elements are ... fine—they contribute to the breezy readability but they're slight, almost to the point of being a distraction.


Title: American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Author: Monica Hesse
Narrator: Tanya Eby
Published: Dreamscape Media, 2017
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 260
Total Page Count: 382,015
Text Number: 1438
Read Because: more morbid nonfiction while gaming, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: I find whatever-would-be-the-crime-equivalent of folie à deux deeply compelling; this is an antidote to that. The unusual, criminal ways in which a relationship develops or evidences itself does not necessarily make that relationship interesting, lasting, or even unusual. This is small, petty, a little embarrassing, a little boring—pointedly so, but that doesn't alter the tone. Worth reading for me personally, but I wouldn't recommend it.

100% did not notice these shared a narrator until collating this post.


Title: A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder And Its Aftermath
Author and Narrator: Jeanine Cummins
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2020 (2004)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 384,170
Text Number: 1445
Read Because: as above; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This isn't especially successful at its purported goal of centering the murder victims, but I don't think that's a problem. It's difficult to write about average young women in a way that isn't boring or idealizing; they're just ... people, and that's okay. This is more successful at inciting blinding rage at the police—which isn't difficult, to be fair, but this particular instance of police coercion and psychological abuse is both more limited and more readily believable for the nature of the abuse and the identity of the victim, a young white* man.

So it's even more egregious that this falls apart in the final quarter, when other suspects are introduced and go to trial. This case is a fascinating, demoralizing hot mess all the way down, but most of what I know of that was gathered from book reviews and secondary reading; even the author has written better elsewhere on the issue of race as it impacts this trial. Here, despite the affected omniscient narration, she's too close to the case, unwilling to extend the same suspicion of the criminal justice system to black men; an understandable but inexcusable flaw that directly undermines the real strength of the book. The police are, absolutely, believably, harmful—and this is a valuable exploration of how and why they harm. But everyone should be protected from that harm; yes, even criminals; especially those in more vulnerable social positions; especially from the death penalty. A compelling but deeply unsatisfying read.

* Cummins's (and her family's) race has come under scrutiny, and is more accurately white and Latinx; but for the purposes of the investigation, the victim was perceived as white.