That, or I'm reading too much into it lmao. sorry to anyone who read all that. Did I even get my thoughts across clearly?
The thought was, "Harada's work is still fucked up, just not as fucked up as I thought".
Wrote a whole g'damn essay on Harada's manga in five minutes and my English paper with two sentences is staring back at me like, "Yeah Bish? You proud of yourself?"
It makes sense.
Harada-sensei is both an amazing writer and someone obsessed with f'd up people in f'd up situations. These situations are rarely if ever portrayed in a good light. This story is no exception.
I can get why people would elect not to read this specific story because of the subject matter, but it is a Harada-sensei story, and it is extremely well-written, and treated with her usual manner of ugly reality regarding the situation. Pedophilia is not glorified here at all, and the individuals involved are shown to be f'd up people, estranged from their families, pill-popping, and with some degree of deranged abusiveness when pushed too hard.
TBH, I was most disturbed at the point where Yui forced himself on Kei, but by then I did realize that, yup, this is Harada-sensei we're talking about, and Yui is not coming through this ordeal unscathed. As he shouldn't. It's really hard to read, but the ugly side of humanity often is. And Harada-sensei never pulls her punches, which is why I respect her so much, and can read any of her works no matter how distasteful the subject matter.
YMMV ofc!
Okay, I read this story two different times and took this story VERY differently both times. The first time I read this, I thought that Harada was out here trying to justify fucking 10 year olds (or however old he was idr).
I got hung up on the lines about a child can love an adult and an adult can love a child but overlooked his friend saying, "but there's a line you can't cross" and also her being absolutely disgusted by her father's poem to a "child-lover" while accepting Yui and aligning herself with him as an "us" v society (bc they're both gay and were just using each other as a convenient normalcy cover from the beginning). I also got hung up on Nii-chan's confused state of "oh but oji-san loves me? why is everyone looking at me with pity? Why is mom punishing me" bit... This isn't justifying that guy having sex with him (that dude was a pedo), it's justifying his love for the oji-san as a naïve child and his memory of that love.
Also the second time I read this I paid a bit more attention to a part where Yui tells his friend nii-chan never had the intention of enacting a "child porno revenge" from the beginning, it was fake, which is why he was acting so stupid and "cowardly" about it. This makes the story MUCH more uh, morally acceptable? than I originally thought. Because its about the idea of a love stemming out of the two main characters meeting when Yui was a child, which is kinda hard to get, in a manga covered in sex and pedophilia. I'd compare it ideologically to the film "Like Sunday, Like Rain" (2014). Furthermore, they weren't really able to have a loving relationship until they were both adults and could put their regrets behind them. Also a final thought, I don't think Nii-chan was a pedo at all, just reliving what happened with that ojisan/ trauma of so many bad things happening to him as a child through those books and pretending like he was going to do the same thing to Yui. When his real intention is even in the very beginning "if this child can purely love me with his heart, then society was wrong at that time". Because from his perspective that oji-san loved him and he wants to justify it because he loved the oji-san, but he never intended to go through with it because he knew in his heart he couldn't cross that line/ which is also why he was so angry afterword (facing the truth of his past)- that and being abandoned again.
Oh, also before Yui knew anything about his past he also thought he was a pedo which is why he was like, "I don't think he loves me, in part, because I grew up" which isn't it and is explained in the bit before Yui rapes Nii-chan.
The characters being unreliable narrators is why I had a different impression the first time I read this.