Amayadori Wa Basu-Tei De – Kano Ayumi

This whole incident started with a phone call from Ikushima’s younger siblings in a bus stop, where he had the most unfortunate luck of meeting happy-go-lucky boy, Ariie. Ikushima may look pretty, but his seemly bad and cold attitude gave him the nickname “queen”. Even though he doesn’t think he’s wrong (actually what he say seems right, justified even) but his good intention is always taken the wrong way. He blames it on his extremely serious look. Stumbling upon the queen’s soft side, Ariie used the information to his advantage and started following poor Ikushima. Will love blossom from this seemingly weird pair…?

Taking Shelter from the Rain in the Bus Stop is the main story of this volume. It has such a cute opposites attract premise between a blunt guy with a scary face and a cheery popular guy who can charm any body.

I was first drawn by the art in the cover and the special illustration inside. However, I was a bit disappointed with the manga artwork itself because the characters lacked expressions.

The story started with a promising meet cute/meet disaster where scary-looking Ikushima poured coffee over Ariie because of an incident with a crying child. Right after that, the happy-go-lucky Ariie befriended Ikushima after he discovered he was a doting big brother to 3 younger siblings. I really wished the manga went with this thread.

Unfortunately, the story got sidetracked by Ikushima’s roommate who was there to stir unnecessary trouble. There are no love triangles, more like the roommate was one of the rare persons who didn’t like Ariie and was sowing seeds of discontent between the pair. I lost interest in this part and I ended up skimming. It didn’t help that the dialogues were uninteresting and the ending was a whole lot of nothing.

Ushiromuki ni, Ai which roughly translates to pessimistic love is another chapter with an interesting premise but failed to deliver. This is about a very, very pessimistic guy who was so insecure he frequently texts his boyfriend that they should breakup because he thought he was not good enough for him.

The bright spot in this story is the boyfriend, Onitake. He is a workahohlic salesman who actually saw the good in the insecure Hinoyoshi and was always trying to reach out. I struggled to like Hinoyoshi. I understand what it’s like to be insecure but seriously, this guy is just plain annoying, with his constant need for reassurance.

This story also suffered from boring dialogue, which could be due to the translation. The ending was also blah.