Book Review “Sasaki and Miyano Volume 1” by Shou Harusono
As far as manga romance series go, “Sasaki and Miyano” is by far my favorite. While, at the time of writing this, I have read up to volume nine, but I will be reviewing each volume separately. Since “Sasaki and Miyano” is also an anime, I will be comparing the two mediums. So that there is no confusion, I am reviewing the English translated version of the manga and the English dubbed version of the anime.
Just to be clear for any of you who have not heard of “Sasaki and Miyano” before clicking on this review, this is a boys’ love series, which is something that I will cover a lot in these reviews, as well as feature in my own works, so if you are not interested in reading anything featuring same-sex couples, please click away now. For everyone that’s stuck around, I highly recommend that you read this book beforehand because there will be spoilers ahead. Now that I’ve got the warnings out of the way, I hope you enjoy my review of “Sasaki and Miyano Volume 1”!
The first thing that I want to draw your attention to is the cover. The cover art tells us so much about the main characters’ personalities and their current relationship. We can see the two boys are sitting with their backs pressed against each other. This shows that the two are close, but not romantically involved. Miyano is facing the reader, while Sasaki has his back to us. Throughout the volume we do get to see both characters’ points of view, and, as you see in the book, Miyano is upfront and honest about his thoughts and feelings, while Sasaki keeps his feelings hidden from Miyano.
Our BL fanboy, Miyano, is sitting with his knees up close to his chest and his legs crossed, which tells us that he’s timid and closed off. He’s holding a boys’ love book of some kind open as if he was in the middle of reading it, but he’s looking off to the side, toward, but not at, the boy sitting behind him. At this point, he is aware of him and is interested enough to look up from the book he’s reading, but not enough to give him his full attention.
Meanwhile, Sasaki is sitting with his legs spread apart and his knees up, but far away from his chest. This indicates that he’s more open and confident, while also giving off delinquent slacker vibes. His head is turned all the way to his left and his gaze is fully on Miyano. Miyano is the center of his attention. His right hand is supporting his chin as he looks to the side, but his left arm is stretched out, resting on his knee and forcing his body to stay facing forward. This represents his inner struggle. He wants to be with Miyano, but he’s blocking himself from completely giving into his feelings.
Before we move onto the contents of the book, I wanted to talk about Miyano’s thought bubble on the cover. Given the fact that this is a boys’ love story, him saying, “BL ship request- denied!” is hilarious. He loves reading BL, but he’s not open to being in that kind of relationship himself. “Sasaki and Miyano” is a romcom and that thought bubble makes sure you know it.
Not only does this volume start off with an old-school BL trope, but we get meta commentary from the BL fanboy himself about it, plus we haven’t even started the first chapter yet. In this first scene, we can tell that Miyano can, and will, make anything relate to BL in some way, even if it’s someone getting beat up. While his thought process is comical, it doesn’t detract from the seriousness of the scene. After calling someone for help, it looked like he was about to go try to break up the fight himself but was stopped by an older student who told him that he would stop them. As the older boy was walking away, we are led to believe that Miyano has already started to develop feelings toward him by showing him blushing, a sparkly background, and him talking about having “a secret longing”, just to have it all ripped away in the very next scene where, three months later, we see Miyano getting annoyed at Sasaki calling him cute and any hint of romantic feelings from Miyano are gone. It even shows Miyano pushing Sasaki’s hand away. This is a great introduction to their story. It shows how they first met and the stark contrast between then and where they are in their relationship when the main story begins.
The first chapter focuses on Sasaki borrowing BL manga from Miyano. It’s obvious from the way that they interact that they had become somewhat close between them meeting and the present, but this is the thing that really brings them closer. Borrowing Miyano’s manga gives him a reason to see him more often, have more things to talk with him about, and is a great way to learn more about him.
This volume has three separate flashbacks, all from Sasaki’s point of view. I, personally, am a fan of this particular storytelling technique, if it’s done properly, that is. Flashbacks can be tricky. They can make the story feel choppy or disjointed if there isn’t a proper transition or they can be completely unnecessary and add nothing of value to the story. Thankfully, that is not the case here. Shou Harusono does a beautiful job with all three flashbacks. The transitions are smooth and the information given to us is important to the story.
The first flashback we see is in chapter two. While the first part of the flashback is simply a recap of the fight scene at the beginning of the book, this time we see it through Sasaki’s point of view. We see from this that Sasaki wasn’t too worried about the fight itself and, under different circumstances, would have most likely walked away, simply being annoyed at the noise from the commotion. The only thing that seemed to interest him was the cute kid on the phone that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure if they were a boy or a girl and he only stepped in to break up the fight because he didn’t want them to get hurt trying to break it up themselves. In the second part of the flashback, Sasaki was able to get Miyano’s name, confirmation that Miyano is, in fact, a guy, and a message from him, thanking Sasaki for stepping in, from Hirano, Sasaki’s classmate and the one that Miyano had called for help.
The next flashback is Sasaki and Miyano’s second and third meeting. In the last flashback, Sasaki was bummed that he never got to see Miyano’s face, but he finally got to when Miyano came to his classroom looking for Hirano. This meeting seemed to make him even more conflicted about his feelings toward Miyano, but, at the same time, solidified his attraction to Miyano. Their third meeting seemed to happen later that same day after school when Miyano offered to share his umbrella with Sasaki. This was the start of them going home together on a seemingly regular basis and the first time Sasaki called Miyano, Mya-chan.
While the first two flashbacks made it clear that Sasaki was physically attracted to Miyano, the final flashback showed us when he really started to fall in love with him. Sasaki had just gotten beat up by the guy from the first fight when Miyano came across him. Sasaki saw how worried he was about him. It was Miyano’s kindness that seemed to seal the deal for Sasaki and led to the first time that he tried asking Miyano out. This, of course, led to him being rejected with Miyano assuming that Sasaki was joking.
Most of this volume is filled with jokes and funny moments and feels more like a collection of comic strips that you’d find in newspapers at times. This is not a bad thing by any means. These four panel strips are a tried-and-true method for comedy for this medium and just happens to give me a hit of nostalgia as well. While I love me some top-notch comedy, I’m not the best at providing the most insightful commentary on it, so I’ll have to leave the jokes themselves for someone else to cover.
For a book that focuses so heavily on comedy, it does an amazing job packing just as much of a punch in with its serious scenes. The shift in tones from comical to serious is well executed. It feels natural instead of jarring and Harusono did a masterful job deciding which of the more serious scenes to end with a joke and which ones to let hang. Not only does “Sasaki and Miyano” get you to laugh with its jokes, but the characters emotions are conveyed so perfectly through their thoughts and expressions, background effects, and the pacing in each scene that it’s almost harder not to feel their emotions yourself.
Tonal shifts can be another thing that’s difficult to pull off properly. I believe that the most important part to focus on when doing a tonal shift is your characters. Most, if not all, of you are probably going, “Well, duh,” but hear me out. I have read, and wrote, works that have tried and failed to successfully switch from one tone to another with some shifts making it feel like you’re reading a completely different book altogether. The problem I noticed with all of these is that the character’s core personality, unintentionally, changed with the tone. This happens when the author tries to change a character to fit the tone instead of working with their character to see how they would react in the situation they are putting them in. Essentially, what I’m saying is that I think the best way to go about shifts in tone is to make sure you are focusing on your characters and their personalities first, as if they were real people rather than a lump of clay that you can reshape over and over again. That’s just my opinion, but if any of you have different opinions on the problem itself or how to fix it, feel free to let me know.
Episodes one and two of the anime stayed pretty true to volume one of the manga. There were slight variations in the dialogue, one extra scene, the cultural festival side story that you get bits of in between the chapters, the bonus story at the end, and the comic strips inside the front and back covers were cut, the first flashback was continuous instead of being interrupted in the middle by Miyano, and, of course, the addition of music.
As far the dialogue goes, I felt like sometimes the wording was better in the anime than the manga and other times the manga said it better. Probably the most glaring differences between the two is that in the anime Miyano is called Mya instead of Mya-chan, the words senpai and kouhai are not used at all, and the original Japanese terms are used for the otaku lingo instead of being translated; like using uke instead of bottom and fudanshi instead of BL fanboy. There were two scenes in particular that really caught my attention and both of them were in episode two. The first was when Sasaki went to the bathroom after the pocky game scene. The dialogue in the anime was the complete opposite of what he said in the manga. In the manga he said, “He’s never had his guard up before… but I guess that’s over now. He was mad at me.” The anime version was, “Is he… letting his guard down? Seemed like it back there. He usually gets mad.” To me, the anime version makes way more sense and I have to say the same for the next scene as well. The scene in question was Sasaki’s last line in chapter seven and the last line of episode two when Sasaki is lying on his bed, upset about Miyano receiving chocolates from thirty-six people. His line in the manga was, “Who started this anyway?” I found this line confusing because he wasn’t clear on what “this” is that he’s referring to. The anime, however, was much more specific, saying, “Who the hell went first, I wonder.”
My favorite part with the music, and where I think it makes the biggest impact, is during the pocky game scene. The music is fun, upbeat, and a little jazzy, but is pretty quiet in comparison with the dialogue until Miyano decides to give in and take a bite. Right before he sighs and leans over the desk, the beat and the volume of the music ramp up before cutting out completely. All you can hear is Miyano exhale, then the loud, echoing snap of the pocky stick as he bites into it. This scene is a great example of music being used to change the tone within a scene. First the music is playful to indicate that this part of the scene is comedic. It gradually ramps up to “ramp up” anticipation for whatever is coming next. Finally, it completely cuts out to make the audience pay attention to every single noise, which, in this case, is the sounds of Miyano eating the pocky and his clothes rustling as he got closer to Sasaki’s hand, giving the scene a sensual feel.
To wrap things up here, I highly recommend this series. Both the manga and the anime are amazing and I seriously cannot praise them enough. Whether you have been a BL fan for a while now, or you’re new and curious about boys’ love, this is a great series for all of you. Funny enough, I stumbled across BL by accident, just like our favorite fudanshi, and my introduction into this world was none other than the anime, “Sasaki and Miyano”. Now, less than two years later, I own over a hundred volumes of BL manga and novels that I am still adding to to this day as I delve deeper and deeper into this obsession.
I hope you all enjoyed my review of “Sasaki and Miyano Volume 1”. I will be coming back to this series in the near future, but in the meantime, I hope you guys will enjoy my review of “Tokyo Ghoul volume 1” by Sui Ishida that’ll be coming out next week. Also, you can check out my original short stories, poems, and art under the projects tab if you’re interested in seeing what I can do. Follow me on Facebook so that you can stay informed for when I post new content. Let me know what you thought about this review or if you have any recommendations for a future book review by commenting below.
Ba-bye for now and I hope to see all of you guys again next week!