トーマの心臓

One of the foundational BL classics

I'm not quite sure what to think of トーマの心臓. On one hand, the artwork is gorgeous; you can really see the roots of shoujo manga here. The story deals with some fun symbolic themes and keeps the pace fairly quick for such a long story. Our characters are all generally well fleshed-out, and this being set in a boys' school in Germany is pretty neat.

On the other, the melodrama never really ends; you have a bunch of 13/14 year old boys running around, already traumatized in various ways, wrangling that great question and emotion of 好き constantly. I got a bit burnt out near the end; it felt like the author wanted all emotions dialed up at all times, which got tiring.

Nevertheless I enjoyed the work as a whole, and thought it was a great look at one of the foundational BL works. Be warned that this can be quite difficult when compared to modern manga; scene transitions have absolutely no warning, punctuation is non-existent, and the author has no problem running several sentences together in the same speech bubble. There were even cases where she had two separate speech bubble from two different characters jammed together, and the only indication of who was talking was the little bubble tail sticking out.

The actual content of the manga was not difficult, but all that above combined with the author's preference of using kana over kanji, and it can be quite a confusing experience for a new reader.

Masterpiece 1970s BL

The art, storytelling, drama, characters, etc - masterpiece is really the only way I know to describe it - and I'll leave it at that, since I won't do it justice.

The language in this one was deceptively hard compared to other school stories I've read. So I read it alongside a translation. Like other 1970s manga I've read - the pacing is quite fast, and the story never slows down - tho not to the extent of おにいさまへ (Ikeda Ryoko, same period).

Well worth the effort it took to read it!