Title: Future Lovers
Author: Saika Kunieda
Publisher: Deux
ISBN: 9781934496350
May Contain Spoilers
Kento Kumagaya is a simple man, with a simple wish for happiness. He just wants to have a happy family. A doting wife, loving children, and his grandparents, all living together and chasing after domestic bliss. When Akira Kazuki blows into his life like a typhoon, Kento has some serious thinking to do. Akira is beautiful, carefree, and gay, and a single night with him has shaken Kento’s dreams of the future. Can he still find his happiness, in a slightly altered form?
I loved this book. It’s funny and sweet, and shows that love can transform your dreams of the future. After being dumped by his candidate for the ideal housewife, Kento drinks himself into a stupor and ends up in Akira’s bed. Imagine his shock when Akira begins to have his way with him. Imagine his dismay when he begins to enjoy himself so much that he loses control. Imagine going to work on Monday, and learning that Akira is the new teacher at his school! So much for forgetting all about that little indiscretion.
Kento and Akira are total opposites, and every encounter is marked with humor and an awkward tension. As Kento learns more about Akira, his expectations for the future shifts and evolves, as well as his idea of what will make him happy. Under pressure to produce grandchildren for the grandparents who raised him, Kento is at first resistant to this riot of emotions rampaging within him. Like a bull in a china shop, he smashes through one cherished wish of the future after another, and his thoughts always turn back to Akira. This is a couple that you want to see work out their differences.
Also contains the short story, “Winter Rabbit” about Shu, a college student in Tokyo, and Minaru, who was abandoned by his mother and raised by Shu’s parents. When Shu’s pulse starts to pound whenever Minaru is near, he decides some distance is needed between them, and so he heads off to college. Two years pass, and his mother calls him, concerned about Minaru. Shu races home, and he and Minaru must work through their feelings for one another. It was a sweet romance, but it just didn’t hold a candle to the title chapters.
Grade: A
Rated for Mature
Review copy provided by Deux
October 20, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I love Future Lovers and highly recommend it to anyone who isn’t wholly adverse to the idea of Boys Love stories. It’s a joy to read, funny and emotionally stirring, starring characters who couldn’t possibly be any different from each other at the start of their relationship.
October 21, 2008 at 6:32 am
[...] Ferdinand is not too impressed with vol. 1 of Blank Slate at Prospero’s Manga. Julie enjoys Future Lovers at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Guest reviewer Gizmo takes a look at vol. 1 of Shoulder-A-Coffin-Kuro at [...]
October 21, 2008 at 9:24 am
[...] at Prospero’s Manga. Julie enjoys Future Lovers at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Guest [...]
October 22, 2008 at 2:32 am
[...] Ferdinand is not too impressed with vol. 1 of Blank Slate at Prospero’s Manga. Julie enjoys Future Lovers at the Manga Maniac Cafe. Guest reviewer Gizmo takes a look at vol. 1 of Shoulder-A-Coffin-Kuro at [...]
May 1, 2009 at 11:37 pm
[...] still finds it to be fairly solid and superior to the second story. Julie over at Manga Maniac Cafe loved the book [but gives some spoilers in her review]. Kuriosity’s Lissa Pattillo, writing for Comic [...]