Books: Manga

Written by Shiuko Kano

Be Beautiful is finishing out its second season with two new manga, Shiuko Kano's Play Boy Blues and Youka Nitta's Sound of My Voice, availabe in July. O'Donnell likes to say her company offers the Cadillacs of Japanese yaoi, male-male romances by and for women.

Play Boy Blues is a Cadillac; however, that needs a look under its hood. First, the Be Beautiful volume is a continuation of a pair of Kano series. The introductory manga remains unavailable in English. So readers are dropped into the middle of two stories, with no explanation. Play Boy Blues promises readers an exploration of "Japan's erotic nightlife," but cultural barriers are a problem. In the Orient, bar hosts are to women what geishas and bar girls are to men. Both serve to entertain, accompany and amuse the opposite sex. (Same-sex situations also exist.) Sometimes service is simply drinking and escorting, but in Play Boy Blues, it's a euphemism for prostitution. PBB is about men whose business is women but whose pleasures are each other.

To buy the premise of Play Boy Blues, a reader has to buy that a middle-class, college-educated athlete will gladly give up a promising career to become a prostitute, and a construction worker looks like someone from a '80s big-hair band. The second series, Manly Construction Training, is also about construction workers who look like fashion models. It appears Kano has a thing about (gay) construction workers.