I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #slice of life(123)

At an all-male boarding house, tenants come and go as their life circumstances change. One of the stories involves a re-encounter as Ryouta, a photographer, rooms with the person he loved in high school. In the second story, Sugano's affair with a married man closes him off from the companion who truly loves him, until his lover's wife becomes pregnant. More shounen ai than yaoi, these stories are easy and realistic slices of life.

Tanihara owns and runs a shabby corner smoke shop and confectionary and takes care of Chisuzu, the very cute daughter of his ex-wife. Older, careworn and hemmed in by responsibilities and circumstances, Tanihara has no hopes for the future, no dreams left, no thoughts that there may be someone out there who could love him. That is, until he meets Dr. Takafumi Saji, the physician who has taken over the local pediatric clinic, who happens to be gay and who is attracted to Tanihara's 'type'. A mature and easy-going story about real adult men. I liked it better than its prequel, Yume Musubi, Koi Musubi.

A friend does his best to make the boy he loves feel better when he never receives any chocolates on Valentine's Day and realizes he probably never will.

A series of oneshots in which violence and control are sub-themes: (1) an abused boy finds love in the arms of a kind widower with a baby daughter; (2) a middle manager who cannot smile falls for a new office worker who can't stop smiling; (3) a pair of salarymen negotiate their way through a master/pet relationship; (4) a pair of schoolboys with deceptive appearances negotiate their way through a master/slave relationship.

After a forced separation from his beloved friend, Motoharu, Kyouya returns to Karatsu to dispose of his grandfather's estate and put his unrequited love behind him. He does not expect his feelings to be returned. Against a backdrop of small-town life and traditional Shinto festivals, two friends reconnect after years of separation. As usual, Honjoh Rie's characters and plot feel authentic, but lack facial micro-expressions. The manga includes a few oneshots which are more comedic.

One night, Mizushima, an assistant at Nanami Florist, steals a single rare white bloom from an exotic flowering shrub in a stranger's garden. The next day, wracked with guilt, he prepares a bouquet as an apology for the owner, unaware that his activity was already caught on camera. Before he can present his gift, the shrub's owner, Fujisawa Morihiro, confronts him at the shop and ends up hiring him to create a floral arrangement for the entrance to his mansion. Mizushima is pleased by this turn of events, and drawn to the loneliness of this wealthy man, but a mysterious young woman approaches him and warns him that his life is in danger. Are her accusations against Fujisawa legitimate or figurative, and has she exaggerated Mizushima's peril? Mizushima feels impelled to ignore her advice, setting a new series of events into motion. An interesting story premise (so far) which escalates quickly.

Taichi, impoverished, underemployed and hungry, falls onto Kouhei, a deaf boy with great homemade obento, who's looking for a note-taker to help him understand his college classes. Slowly, they come to respect and like each other, but with a disability like hearing loss, misunderstandings arise, and Kouhei has slipped into isolation and loneliness all too easily. Will Taichi be able to pull him back into a spirited life?

A man's inability to speak his heart allows misunderstandings to arise with his lovers and problems to go unreconciled. When his first love makes a sudden reappearance, will he change his habits?