Tag: Taiyoh Tosho

What We’re Thankful For This Year

~ sou ~ Leave a comment
It’s never a bad time to take a moment and appreciate all that yaoi has given us…

It’s that time of year again — at least for the folks who celebrate Thanksgiving 🦃 — where we fill our bellies with all kinds of festive delights, spend just enough time with family for some sort of decades-brewing drama to surface, and promptly retreat to a secluded space to continue reading that BL you’ve been meaning to get around to.

Sou after Thanksgiving dinner, or after a large serving of big tiddy BL

Whether it be personal relationships or developments in the world at large, there’s never a shortage of sources of stress and despair. Luckily, I’ve found that BL is a reliable mood lifter in both the good times and bad — it’s just the thing I need to make me go, “Maybe this Chungus life isn’t so bad after all.” (Well, that and pumpkin pie piled high with Cool Whip, but sadly neither of those things are exactly common in our corner of Japan.)

When I proposed this post theme to my fellow BLog members, they asked whether “things to give thanks for in the BL sphere” meant BL tropes, changes in trends, specific BL series or characters, or recent BL news. I decided not to limit the theme so as to release as much BL gratitude from the depths of our hearts as possible — so get ready for our unfiltered gracious yaoi ramblings.

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Discovering Passion: Guri Nojiro’s “It Was The End Of Spring”

~ ames ~ Leave a comment

Read on Renta!:
It Was The End Of Spring by Guri Nojiro

Japanese:
Sore wa Haru no Owari ni
それは春の終わりに

Links:
Guri Nojiro Twitter
Taiyoh Tosho Twitter
Taiyoh Tosho Official Site

Have you ever had one of those moments where you think about all the people around you, and you just feel different? Everyone else feels such strong emotions, gets attached to people and things and ideas, laughs loudly and shouts in excitement and yells when they’re angry. But, not you. You’ve never felt anything that big before—nothing in the world has ever moved you or made you possessive or made you yearn for something more. But what if something—or someone—could show up in your life and teach you what it feels like to truly desire something, to feel frustration and sadness and longing?

That’s the main premise behind Guri Nojiro’s It Was The End Of Spring. Released in early 2021 as Nojiro’s first ever compiled commercial work, It Was The End Of Spring has all the characteristics of a Guri Nojiro manga—stunning, soft linework, gentle and realistic characters, and a penchant for slow-paced, warm storytelling mixed with occasional humor and bittersweet emotion.

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BL Anime to Look Forward to in 2024

~ sou ~ 3 Comments
Gay edit of this meme by u/olafl on Reddit. Animu added by yours truly

Anime has been an important piece of BL fandom for decades, and thanks to online streaming services, it’s now more accessible to overseas fans than ever! Plus, the popularization of simulcasts in recent years has made it so that fans the world over can watch shows basically in real time together each week, and revel in the joy of screaming their reactions with fellow fans over social media.

As much as I love reading the original manga of my favorite series, there’s just something so special about seeing the world in full color, hearing the characters speak, and getting new tunes in the form of those catchy OP and ED songs to add to your playlist each season!

When it comes to BL anime adaptations for television or the big screen, sadly the number of new works coming out each year is but a teeny tiny fraction of the plethora of manga being released, and they’re typically but a blip on the radar to anime fandom at large. However, that just makes it extra exciting when a new BL anime is released! Not only is it fun for established fans of a manga to see their favorite characters and scenes animated, but anime adaptations are also a great way to introduce even more people to the original series, thus adding to the overall hype for a title and growing the BL community as a whole. A win-win for everybody!

It’s a new year and a new anime season is upon us, so I figured I’d give a quick rundown of all the BL anime we can expect this year — as well as a few potential projects in the works that are definitely worth keeping your eye on 目

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Like a bug attracted to nectar: Akira Minazuki’s riveting “SMOKY NECTAR”

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Read on Renta!:
SMOKY NECTAR
by Akira Minazuki

Japanese:
Smoky Nectar
スモーキーネクター

Links:
Akira Minazuki’s Twitter
Akira Minazuki’s Instagram

Around the time the team first started this BLog, Ames and I headed to a BL café event showcasing Harada, Mitsuaki Asou and the subject of today’s post, Akira Minazuki, and their work, “SMOKY NECTAR”. Already hooked by the gorgeous art adorning the café walls, imagine my elated surprise when, one July day, I found myself assigned to the translation check of that very same manga. ‘Motivation boost’ doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s not just me either; everyone on the team worked painstakingly hard to bring this masterpiece to English-speaking readers in the perfect form it’s worthy of.

Give a girl with a hidden gothic heart a vampire-themed BL and you might as well win her over for life—and well, I’ll follow Akira Minazuki forever, because “SMOKY NECTAR” is one of the greatest manga I’ve had the pleasure of checking at Renta!.

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Renta! Staff BL Awards 2023

~ Admin ~ 8 Comments

New Years is the perfect time to look back on the last twelve months and think to yourself… “What was the best BL manga I read in 2023?” Best-of lists are common this time of year, so we wanted to get in on the action and make a list of our staff’s favorite BL titles a la Chill Chill’s BL Awards. However, our list is less a ranking of the absolute top popular titles as voted by our users (you can find that by checking the “best sellers” list), and more just us—as a team of BL fans—wanting to celebrate some of our favorite titles that were added to the Renta! site this year. (The 2024 Chill Chill BL Awards should be happening again in march, with people already discussing the nominees, so let’s look forward to that in the coming months!)

Without further ado, the categories are…

Favorite New Series
Favorite Continuing Series
Favorite Seme
Favorite Uke
Favorite Up-And-Coming Author
Amazing Art
Favorite Renta! Title
Favorite Cover
Favorite Couple

To make sure it wasn’t just our main blog team pushing our favs we’ve already talked about at length, we also invited Nan, Agedashi, Anne, and Snow from our Japanese side to share some of their favorite titles they got to work with this year!

For each category there’s a good mix of responses, showing just how varied BL fans are in their tastes. However, in the spirit of not making this post too ridiculously long, we’ll just highlight two or three staff comments for each and then list the rest of the choices below.

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emo café: B+Library collab showcasing Harada, Akira Minazuki, and Mitsuaki Asou

~ ames ~ 4 Comments

Nestled in a narrow, trendy side street in Tokyo’s youth fashion district of Harajuku is a bright pink building named emo café, a tiny collab café that partners with mangaka and publishers to turn manga into a culinary experience. emo café is relatively new, having started up in the last few years, and follows in the footsteps of other BL cafés like Toriko Mangaten and ComiComi Studio Machida (r.i.p.).

I first noticed emo café when they did the second B+Library collab, featuring two absolutely wonderful manga that are on our site—Jimi Fumikawa’s I Seriously Can’t Believe you… (one of my all-time favorites!) and Jyanome’s Twilight Out of Focus—as well as Ichikawa Kei’s incredibly famous Blue Sky Complex (licensed by Futekiya).

There’s also been a café for Kurahashi Tomo’s Someday I’ll Fall For You, and a café for Tsubame Koshiora’s There’s Fanfiction About Us?, as well as a handful of other series. Emo Cafe’s had a lot of great stuff on offer.

When I saw they would be doing a third B+Library, this time for Harada’s Happy Shitty Life, Akira Minazuki’s Smoky Nectar, and Mitsuaki Asou’s The Farthest Love in the World I knew we had to go—especially considering Happy Shitty Life is one of our localizations, and Smoky Nectar is coming soon. Unfortunately, because of the massive popularity of all three artists (each one of them being a veteran in the BL genre) I once again couldn’t get in.

…That is, until they extended the end date by a week. Sometimes it pays to sit on Twitter constantly. -w-)b

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“Hotaru Dies Tomorrow” by Fuyu Saikawa

~ Admin ~ 1 Comment

Read here:
Hotaru Dies Tomorrow

“Saneatsu, about Hotaru, she doesn’t exist.” 

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, it’s not so foreign of an idea (I would hope). Hotaru Dies Tomorrow tells the story of a high school student, Saneatsu Asada, whose parents give him a novel he becomes engrossed with; it’s a dreamlike Murakami-esque book about a girl, Hotaru, who could be straight out of a Sylvia Plath novel. 

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