Digital Manga, at their book site emanga.com, recently gave reviewers the chance to check out a variety of their titles online. I thought I’d take the opportunity to see what their Harlequin offerings (manga adaptations of romance novels) looked like. My Background With Romance First, the caveats: like most women, I have read romance novels in the past (although most recently, I’ve been dabbling in the smutty imprints, like Blaze), and while many of them are incredibly formulaic, that’s not […]

This collection of four connected short stories by Fumi Yoshinaga has more in common with Ooku than her yaoi works. For one thing, all of the love relationships demonstrated — and there are several variants included — are either male/female, friendly affection, or familial (parent/child). For another, the setting is a kind of historical fantasy, revolving around a castle and its baron. Two adopted brothers wander out of the desert to become bards for the baron, where they find an […]

Well, that’s quite a switch. It’s as though someone said, “Ok, you’ve established all the characters, with their relationships and believable motivations, in volume one. Now let’s just have them boink a lot.” Seriously, The Moon and the Sandals volume 2, in contrast to the first, has lots of sex. It’s as though the twin points of appeal of yaoi manga were split into two different volumes. The last one got the love, while this one is all about the […]