Dog Style

Miki and Teru are high school punks with dirty mouths to match their dirty attitudes, but underneath the cigarette smoke and trash talk, each harbors much more tender feelings for one of the beautiful and well-known Kashiwa brothers. When they wind up nursing their hurt feelings at the same abandoned building, neither floppy-haired junior Miki nor bleached-blond sophomore Teru planned to fool around. Miki decides Teru is just like a stray dog: mean, hardened, unwilling to become a "pet" despite looking for love and acceptance. The likeness earns Dog Style its title and begins the story of two rough punk kids stumbling unexpectedly into sex, and further into emotions neither of them really wanted in the first place.

The first few pages of Dog Style volume one are a confusing mess to a reader unfamiliar with the series, as a half-dozen characters appear very quickly and it isn't clear which ones will be important to the story later on. The fact that Miki and Teru are the book's yaoi couple doesn't even become clear until about midway through the first chapter, when they appear in panels alone together. Once the two of them head off running, being pursued by delinquents from a rival school, the random facts and characters tossed at the reader in the first chapter start to make sense, and the actual yaoi part of the story begins. Between the scene changes, the seemingly unrelated information and the amount of new characters showing up in every page of the first chapter, I wasn't sure I was actually going to like Dog Style at all.

Then I got to the sex.

Modoru Motoni draws excellent scenes of wacky antics complete with exaggerated facial expressions and comic violence, but when it comes to intimate scenes her style becomes one of rough, detailed beauty. She always knows the exact moments to detail: the lazy swipe of tongues, Miki's mouth opening just so around Teru's cock, Teru holding a pack of condoms in his mouth to tear one off with a hungry look in his eyes. Each detail is real and fascinating; this is what we want yaoi foreplay to be. They're men, so it's dirty, not delicate, but they're passionate as well and serious about finding, giving and receiving pleasure together. Both Miki and Teru are interested in exploring this new game they've stumbled into, transforming what could be formulaic yaoi sex scenes into a curious, developing mutual exploration of bodies and senses.

The story of Miki and Teru and how their new relationship changes things with their best friends, the Kashiwa brothers, develops a little further in this first volume, setting up for more story and relationship development to come. As it happens, Teru isn't as good at sex as he thinks, and Miki's got to do a lot of training before his "stray" will become a good "pet." Luckily for the reader, this should lead to a lot of fascinatingly detailed sex scenes in the next volume!

The English version of Dog Style, published by Kitty Press, is about as basic as yaoi manga can come. A brief afterword by Modoru Motoni, explaining the origin of the manga, is the only real extra. Everything else is Kitty standard, from the average paper and printing quality to the lack of translated sound effects, and the sometimes awkward translations. In comparison to the recent beautiful release of The Crimson Spell, Dog Style looks pretty bad, but in reality it's not actually worse than any of Kitty's other publications.

While the plot of Dog Style in the first volume is nothing to get excited about, the hot sex, lovely details and the promise of Teru's "sex training" in the second volume is enough to have me looking forward to the conclusion... if for nothing more than to find out if Miki has the talent to turn his "stray" into a seme.