been meaning to read this for awhile but only had the courage to pick up a shuzo oshimi manga last night. i have a lot of thoughts but first things first this becomes genuinely painful to read in the latter half i could physically feel it through how much i kept sighing every page bcs i was stressed out by how cyclical their relationships are and how yohei for most of the story feels like a hamster trapped in a running wheel. i want to approach this manga in a more nuanced way (not just straight up read this as a queer story since that would prob elicit a diff take from me) bcs i feel like eroticism and sexuality and masculinity are intersections rarely explored this intimately in media. at first i rlly thought this was gonna be the conventional self-acceptance story but i guess this isnt really a story you can read and interpret expecting neat commentary on queer identity. that was just my initial impression. the more i sat with it the more i realized it was less about the desire to transition into another identity and more about the murkier psychological territory of masculinity itself. theres just so much emphasis on “becoming a man” “boys will be boys” and “manhood" over and over like god its so imposing in the narrative and oshimi is pretty deliberate from the beginning that kei is neither fully woman nor man and i kept trying to locate it within existing words like oh! wait nonbinary? agender? but reaching the end i think the point is that the story resists categorization altogether. it also says a lot that so much of the manga’s imagery is so liquid. like bodies blurring or melting into each other and faces or bodies dissolving together. maybe im reading too much into it but it really feels like a visual manifestation of the elusiveness of selfhood and how identity itself is viscous and impossible to simply poke and pin down. i woulddd really loooove to dissect this more someday when i recover from my writing fatigue bcs theres so much here to unpack but i digressss...... but yeah i think oshimi did an incredible job portraying relationships that r so so toxic and messy and parasitic (but considering this manga gets discussed as a trans story a lot i wouldnt rlly call this a good trans rep per se bcs yeah it's there but i spent the entire manga questioning kei and mitani’s intentions toward yohei more and was more frustrated reading someone as spineless as him get passed around bw the two of them like a blunt) but i feel like oshimi is less interested in representing queer identity responsibly and more in exposing how sex and gender can turn into something raw and grotesque,, i mean my favorite scene in the manga is literally when yohei was trying to self-castrate to “crush the man” inside him. like. fuhhhh...... that is such a horrifyingly profound way to portray the inherent opresiveness of masculinity. i really loved the idea as a gender is a social construct believer that sex is something invasive lodged inside the body that needs to be mutilated out of yourself to feel free. that shit moved me. first manga in a while to make me clutch my head and stare at the floor