By Hinako Takanaga
Published by Blu
Rating: Mature

I’d like to start this review by saying that Hinako Takanaga is one of my favorite yaoi mangaka ever. I dove into her seminal work Little Butterfly at the tender age of fourteen, and it remains my third-favorite yaoi work of all time after Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery and Kazuma Kodaka’s Kizuna: Bonds of Love. Though they didn’t capture the emotional depth and poignancy of Little Butterfly, Takanaga’s Challengers and The Devil’s Secret were also fantastic and sexy romps that stand head and shoulder over 99% of the yaoi that ever makes it stateside. That being said, I was thrilled when A Capable Man showed up in the mail. Finally, a terrific yaoi read!

A Capable Man is a series of short stories that revolve around young men with odd quirks and fetishes and their offbeat relationships. The first pair of stories, “I Like Exceptional Guys!” and “I Like Adorable Guys!,” revolves around Shingo, a student who is obsessed with “exceptional men,” and Koji, his best friend since elementary school. The twist? Koji has been exceptional all his life to impress his long-standing crush, Shingo! In the next story, “Something to Hide,” a student who’s in a relationship with his homeroom teacher believes that he’s being cheated on when he discovers a vast quantity of beauty shampoos in his teacher’s shower. Is he being cheated on?! In “How to Satisfy Your Fetish,” Daisuke, a young chef-in-training, acquires far too many fetishes for his own good, and his boss Kazuya is the only one who can satisfy them! The hilarity really does ensue in one of the most genuinely funny yaoi stories I’ve ever read. In the final short, “Kleptomaniac,” a cute student named Yanagi notices that his lifelong kleptomania has morphed into a fixation with the personal belongings of his resident advisor, Tsuchida. This last story is absolutely my favorite of the book: it’s adorable, sexy, tells about coming of age into romance, and features Resident Advisor love (full disclosure: I’m a resident advisor). All in all, the selection of stories is fantastic—a non-stop bonanza of adorable awkwardness, strange kinks and quirks—and flat-out sexy.

As I mentioned in my review of Kano Miyamoto’s Two of Hearts, I am bothered by power manipulation in relationships that gets justified in some screwy way as “true love.” Needless to say, it raised my hackles a little bit to see A Capable Man‘s title story to prominently feature a rape scene in the beginning where Koji loses his temper in a fit of jealousy over another of Shingo’s “exceptional men,” and proceeds to rape him. Fortunately, Takanaga does not justify Koji’s actions, and, in fact, the whole sex scene is disturbing and clearly more about power and frustration than love. Koji feels immense shame afterwards and realizes what a terrible thing he did. Fortunately, the boys’ close friendship pulls through the trauma, and after a rather revelatory fight they make up and tentatively decide to start their relationship over from the beginning. In the second part of their love story, “I Like Adorable Guys,” they do ultimately consummate their relationship again, and this time they do so with love and understanding.

Hinako Takanaga’s work is all the potential of yaoi with few of the flaws. Yes, the ukes are a little femme. Other than that, though, the ups are boundless. The characters feel very real, and they react as real people could, the art is gorgeous and very cute, and adorable humor is abundant in every story. This work even deals with subject matter that I find distasteful (rape) in a way that ultimately leads to a very rewarding story. In relation to her other translated works that I’ve read, I’d say that it’s not as good as Little Butterfly, but is even better than her excellent Challengers and The Devil’s Secret. Definitely check this volume out if you like yaoi at all or want to give it a try. You won’t be disappointed!

A Capable Man is available now.