On Bended Knee

On Bended Knee
By Ruri Fujikawa
Published by 801 Media
Rated 18+

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Hibiki and Wu Xiong are childhood friends, now grown up and settled into the roles planned for them by their parents: Wu Xiong as the next heir to his family’s corporate empire and Hibiki as his bodyguard. Each has harbored secret love for the other over their many years together–something that neither is willing to own up to until a brush with death forces them both to face the truth. “On Bended Knee” is the first of several short stories in this collection by Ruri Fujikawa, establishing the volume’s dominant theme, “learning to accept one’s true feelings.” The other stories feature two doctors who secretly love each other (“Slight Fever”), a university student and teacher who secretly love each other (“I Won’t Lose to the Sun!”), a model and his manager who secretly love each other (“Cinderella’s Lure”), and so on.

On Bended Knee is a very typical collection of boys’ love stories in which the characterization and plot are developed only to the minimum extent necessary to get the two main characters in bed together, something I tend to find excruciatingly dull. Still, there are some nice elements to this collection that make it more readable than some. First of all, though the artist adheres diligently to the establishment of seme and uke roles (one of my least favorite characteristics of boys’ love manga), she stops short of the non-consensual sex frequently seen in the genre, and even mostly avoids the questionably-consensual alternative in which the uke spends each sex scene looking tortured and frightened by something he supposedly wants. I will never understand why anyone finds that kind of thing enjoyable to read and I was grateful to find it absent from most of this volume.

Additionally, all the characters are grown adults engaged in full, rich lives and one of them–a chef in love with his maître d’ in the volume’s final story, “Your Chef”–even identifies as gay, something oddly rare in the genre. The relationships are warm and genuinely loving (if not satisfyingly developed) and the art is actually a good cut above the norm for short yaoi comics.

Though it is hardly a boys’ love masterpiece, On Bended Knee is at least readable, pretty to look at, and romantically palatable, providing an attractive, inoffensive diversion for fans of the genre.

On Bended Knee will be available on July 22nd, 2009. Review copy provided by the publisher.