Gold Star Review: Future Lovers

Author: Saika Kunieda
Pages: 200
Price: $12.95
Publisher: Deux
Summary from back cover: A romantic lover awaits you... in the future. Kento Kumagaya wishes for the simple things in life: to have a happy family with the ideal housewife, loving kids, and kind grandparents all living together, happily ever after. Fate, however, has other plans. Enter Akira Kazuki, a smart, beautiful and unrestrained gay man who shatters Kento's dream with a single night of wild and passionate homosexual sex. This is a romantic, sweet and funny story between two different people (in more ways than one) who unexpectedly find the same future together.

Review: Whenever I want to get someone whose life has been yaoiless to sample a little BL I always offer up this manga. The story is brilliant, the characters rememberable, and the art style unique. What more can one want from a manga?

Future Lovers starts by introducing us to Kento Kumagaya who has dreams of a wife, kids, and a house bursting with love. In order to achieve this picturesque life he first needs to acquire a wife. Too bad for him the story opens with his girlfriend throwing her drink at him and then storming out of the bar. An innocent bystander,Akira Kazuki, gets caught in the crossfire and ends up getting drenched. He casually clues in a clueless Kento as to why his date was so upset. When a girl asks you what you like about her replying "you're stable and you seem fertile, so we can have a lot of kids" isn't probably the best response. So, yeah, ouch, serious case of foot in the mouth. And we all know the best cure for that is a hearty heapin' helpin' of alcohol, which Akira readily provides.

Wait. Lets stop. Time to review our BL math. What does Alcohol + Two Guys equal? Sex! And Saika Kunieda must have peeked inside my brain because she knows exactly what I like in a BL sex scene. I've stated before how I love for my uke's to enjoy sex, and boy does this uke love it. Kento, shockingly, enjoys himself too, but by the next day he is determined to wipe his mind clean of his first homosexual experience and dedicate himself completely to patching things up with Yukie. Yukie will complete his dream of a perfect family. That gay guy from last night, psh, forget about it. But it would seem things like hot sex can't be forgotten so easily when the guy you slept with has been hired to teach at the same school you work at. Akira is just as surprised to learn he will have to work with a man who wants to keep their late night meeting a secret. But, hey, he's cool with that, probably not the first or the last time he'll have to pretend "nothing happened". But when that "nothing" happens a second time with Akira, Kento's dream slowly begins to morph into something he doesn't recognize.

If this plot sounds familiar, it's because it probably is. But the cast of characters in Future Lovers takes this tired old plot and revitalizes it. One of the ways Kunieda is able to do this so successfully is by using her secondary characters to reveal things about Kento and Akira. For example, Kento lives with his two grandparents. Their presence not only brings more life to the story, but it helps drive home how important family is to him. Also, in a lot of BL, side characters have a tendency to fade into the background, but in both chapters these characters have major roles in the story. I promise, you'll come to care for them almost as much as you do Kento and Akira.

Aside from the main story, Memory of the Future (love that title), there is a one-shot included in this volume entitled, Winter Rabbit. I started out excited about this story because unlike MotF, I've never read it. But after reading it, I was a little disappointed it didn't have same charm as MotF. Winter Rabbit has twice the angst and no humor. This is kind of a let down because I find comedy to be Kunieda's strong point. Needless to say I still enjoyed the little short about an older brother who falls in love with his younger adopted brother. This story could have focused on the sex, because, yeah, it is the issue. But instead, the focus is on the relationship between the two brothers and the abandonment issues the younger one never gets over and the patching up of both.

I have to comment on Kunieda's art. This is the first volume so as the characters develop emotionally so does the art go through changes. Kento and Akira won't really take shape artistically until the second volume. But what you get in the first volume is a sampling of what's to come (which is more awesomeness). Kunieda doesn't limit herself by just drawing one specific type of character. Our world is filled with many different people of many different shapes and sizes, this isn't always the world BL characters live in. But it is in MotF and it's really refreshing to see a BL that isn't filled with pretty faces. I think one of the reasons why I like Kento is because he isn't that pretty seme. He looks like a regular 9 to 5 guy, the average Joe anyone can relate to (plus he's kinda borderline bara and I loves me some bara). The paneling and layout flows really well. The transitions are so smooth it's almost as if I was looking at a storyboard. And really, comics should very much work like that. The pictures should be able to carry the story just as well as the words, and MotF succeeds at both.

Of course, because of my new very yellow banner I think it's quite obvious I really like Future Lovers. This review was hard to write because I really just wanted to fangirl the whole entire time. I hope you do pick up this manga and share it with everyone you know. And be sure to snatch up the second volume when it comes out in April. Deux will also be including the new story Kunieda did for the Libre re-release in the second volume. So get excited!

And if you haven't guessed yet, I gave this manga a: