Family

It's sick and it's wrong, but I'm a big enough girl to openly admit it: I kind of have a thing for incest manga. Something about the forbidden aspect of brother-on-brother love just trips my triggers, and I'm willing to overlook a whole lot of bad characterization, lame story or poor plot devices to get some nice filthy family smut. So far, the English yaoi market has offered up some real gems for this particularly wicked sub-genre: the fantastically filthy Brother, Masara Minase's beautiful Lies and Kisses, and the adorably wrong anime Papa to Kiss in the Dark (soon to be released by Kitty Media). When Kitty Media published Yuuya's manga Family, I figured I was in for a real treat. Kitty always picks the dirtiest titles, and between the story of brotherly love and the very pretty artwork of Yuuya, what could go wrong?

Maybe my expectations were just too high. Family is undoubtedly pretty, it serves up some nice hot sex and it certainly pushes all the right buttons of the incest sub-genre, but somehow it just left me feeling unmoved. As it turns out, Family is actually a sequel to Yuuya's earlier work, Family Complex (not to be confused with the manga of the same name by Mikiyo Tsuda), which has never been published in English -- a fact I didn't learn until I read the author's talk section at the end of the book. The entire plot of the earlier work is summed up in the first five pages of Family, and left me feeling like I'd missed out on something important. As it turned out, I had missed out -- on the characters' motivations, the basis for their feelings, their histories together. What followed was a tangled mess of jealousies and trysts that, while certainly lovingly executed, left me blandly flipping through most of the pages, waiting for the next sex scene.

The family of Family is the Takatsu family of three brothers: Reiichi, the oldest, and Miya, the youngest, are related by blood, while Kenji in the middle is actually adopted and not related to them at all. Reiichi and Miya have both fallen in love with Kenji, and while Kenji claims to love them both, it's Reiichi he seems to have chosen. Or has he? Whenever Miya's around, Kenji gets pangs of guilt over fighting off his younger brother's advances, but when he's with Reiichi, Kenji becomes a crybaby desperate for Reiichi's slightest words of affection. Throw in a jealous, cross-dressing cousin from out of left field, and it looks like everyone just wants to screw Kenji, regardless of his wishy-washy personality.

Lacking the emotional buildup or connection from the first book, Family trips along from senseless plot point to senseless plot point, then tumbles into sex scenes with about as much provocation as a lonely wife in a straight porn flick when the dishwasher repairman comes knocking. At least Yuuya is kind enough to give us a couple of threesome scenes -- that Holy Grail of yaoi manga! While the three-ways are beautiful and ridiculously hot, those few pages of all three Takatsu brothers naked and sweaty doesn't make up for the predictable blandness of the rest of the book. The two-part, unrelated short story at the end of the book, "Choumaru," is better developed and makes more sense than the entire six chapters of "Family," but that can't save the entire book from itself. Maybe if someone had licensed Yuuya's Family Complex first, the publication of Family would be a satisfying conclusion to a forbidden love story, but as it is, Family is a conclusion without a beginning, and cannot stand on its own.