Never Hollowed By The Stare

Ore ga Sukinara Hizamazuke – Sato Tsubame

At Toto First Bank’s head office, the competition is cutthroat for its elite employees. Matsuda and Kato are members of the sales department on the 21st floor. Having joined the team at the same time, Matsuda sees Kato as his ultimate rival. Whether it’s in regards to their conquests with women or their reputation at work, whenever Matsuda thinks he’s one-upped Kato, he ends up getting overshadowed by Kato’s accomplishments, much to his chagrin. One evening in the office, Matsuda finds out his girlfriend has cheated on him, severely wounding his pride. But when Kato sees his frustration, he says the unexpected. “You have bad taste, obsessing over these boring women. You should choose me”… And the very next moment, Matsuda finds Kato’s lips meeting his own!

If You Love Me, Kneel Down is a rivals-to-lovers story about two bankers who joined the company in the same year. Kato is Division A, and Matsuda is Division B, and their divisions compete to close the biggest deals with various companies.

Kato’s division is leading, and Matsuda can’t help but be bitter about it, although he tries to be as civil as possible to his nemesis. Matsuda is also known to be a playboy and currently has a girlfriend, who later cheated on him.

While working overtime one night, he butted heads with Kato about his taste in women. Then, to his shock, Kato kissed him and confessed he liked Matsuda. Matsuda didn’t know how to react, especially when Kato kept wooing him with poker-faced earnestness and occasional grabby hands.

My favorite part is the dynamics between Kato and Matsuda and how the cover is a play on that. We see Matsuda seated in a power pose with Kato in the submissive kneeling position. Note Kato’s smiling expression.

In the manga, Kato as the seme, takes the lead wwhile Matsuda appears to lose control whenever Kato touches him. However, Matsuda has yet to realize the power he has. Kato would bend over backward to give Matsuda whatever he needs, and in one instance, he bends his knees to save Matsuda.

The two MCs are bankers, with Matsuda being the more serious worker and Kato working only to be noticed by his crush. There was some heavy banking business going on. Even with the financial dialogues, it was far from boring with the many side characters humorously gossiping or creating conflict for our MCs.

The office interactions were fun, and I was even hoping the division heads, who also entered the same year and thus rivals, would have their own manga. They were gorgeous in that serious megane-type way.

This is one of those stories where the seme dub-conned his tsundere uke into gayness. Somehow, this negative aspect was offset by how good the manga is as a whole. Overall, an unexpectedly swoony take on the saying one only notices the person ahead of them in a race.

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