I Want to Be Naughty

Student councils at high schools in Japan are apparently all-powerful - if you believe what you see in BL manga, anyway. In Mei Sakuraga's I Want to Be Naughty, the student council at Towa Aikawa's high school keeps tabs on all of the school delinquents, and Towa is at the top of their list. His bleached hair, pierced ears and naughty class-skipping ways have drawn the unwanted attention of the student council members, but Towa doesn't care about their threats. He only cares about getting up to his special retreat on the roof of the school, where he hangs out with Mikado Shirahane, the smartest, sexiest guy in the school. These two polar opposites have struck up a strange friendship, and despite their differences, Mikado promises he's on Towa's side, and seals the promise with a kiss.

As if it isn't bad enough that Mikado has Towa questioning his sexuality with his kisses and touches, Mikado has a secret identity that gets accidentally revealed, and Towa decides that Mikado is really his enemy. For Towa, being different isn't a matter of rebellion or acting like a delinquent to get attention. He smokes, bleaches his hair and pierces his ears because he wants to. It's a part of who he is, just like his feelings for Mikado. Fierce independence makes Towa a unique character in the face of cookie-cutter cute blonde ukes in dozens of BL manga. The title of the manga reflects Towa's attitude: he's bad because he wants to be, and neither the student council nor Mikado can make him change his mind.

Towa might be a unique individual in his high school, but when it comes to Mikado's advances, he's just like any other uke. Of course, it's a genre convention of yaoi that the uke isn't supposed to want to do the "naughty" things that the seme insists upon, but the convention gets tired and unwieldy when the uke only seems to be objecting for propriety's sake. Sakuraga's ukes all share this same strange quality, both in the main story and in the three forgettable short stories collected at the end of the volume. Even though each is pursued by a man he cares about, when it comes to sex, they all fight to the very end, even while their internal monologues tell us they enjoy it! Coming from a Western perspective, this storytelling technique becomes confusing and frustrating, because we just want our cute boy couples to be happy! Cultural differences between Japanese tradition and Western expectations put up a barrier, and keep me, at least, from fully enjoying manga written this way.

The storyline of Towa and Mikado lasts for a little over half of the book, and the other half is taken up by three short stories, each more forgettable and formulaic than the last. The quality of the entire book suffers from dark, messy printing and an overabundance of screentones - the light or dense dots that create shadows and greys in manga panels. The screentones obscure the black text in many places, so I often had to carefully scan the page to make sure I hadn't missed any words hidden in a character's hair or sleeve. Screentones even invade the speech bubbles, usually kept clear of color to retain readability. Messy printing and poor placement of lettering is a problem throughout the entire book, but it seems like it may have been a problem in the original Japanese volume rather than an issue of the English publisher. Otherwise, Kitty Media's translation is clear and the presentation is up to their usual standards for their reasonable $10.99 price point.

In the broad spectrum of high-school BL romances, I Want to Be Naughty falls pretty firmly in the middle. It doesn't quite measure up to the best, but it has enough personality to set it above the worst. If cute, struggling uke boys and smirking, forceful seme boys are your thing, then I Want to Be Naughty is just the thing for you. If you need a little more originality in your BL manga, don't go looking for it here.