Ninth Life Love by Kojima Lalako

Rating: 5
Juné 2012 - Taiyoh Tosho 2011
1 volume
Translation: Jocelyne Allen

Happy, sweet, mellow, Ninth Life Love is a very 'nice' manga, and delivers pretty much what you would expect it to from its soft and pretty cover illustration. It's a pleasant leisurely read, the artwork is pretty in its fluttery gentle way, the character illustrations are expressive and have a natural feel to them, and for some people this is exactly the sort of thing they look for in BL manga. Me, I need, I don't know, a bit of ugly in my manga? Which you certainly won't find in this book, everything's just too nice. There's nothing ostensibly wrong with it but then there's nothing remarkable about it either, it's an easy read for whiling away an hour or two but otherwise forgettable.

There are four stories in the book with the main story, Ninth Life Love (what a tongue-twister), taking up half of the volume and three additional one-shots. The main story, about a boy whose dead cat comes back to life as a human (with cat ears and a tail), is actually pretty good. The condition God gave to the cat was that he couldn't have sex otherwise he'd turn to foam and disappear, a rather strange condition if you ask me but this is BL so whatever. So although the couple are overjoyed at reuniting, the danger of the cat-boy disappearing is a constant cloud over their heads, a setup which gives the story a bittersweet taste throughout as the reader wonders whether they'll get a happy ending.

When I say this is an easy read, I mean that the story quickly pulls me in with little effort, I become absorbed in the feelings of the characters and the pace of the story guides me to the end without my attention waning. This is something the manga accomplishes easily. What it fails to effect is any deep or lasting impression. The characters in all the stories lack personality, there's not enough depth to the stories, not enough exploration of feelings nor themes. I think the premise of the main story offers a wealth of themes to explore, like the concept of a second chance at life, the transience of life and feelings, the constancy of love, none of which was really touched on by the mangaka. This could possibly be due to the limited number of pages she had to work with, the ending was certainly rushed, but whatever the reasons, I felt that there was a lot of potential to the story that was unrealised.

In the afterword, referring to the last one-shot the mangaka says, "I get told that my story feels like uke x uke, just because they're sweet guys who love flowers..." I think the uke x uke comment applies to most of the couples in the volume, the characters are all a bit wishy-washy sweet, which is part of the reason I didn't personally care much for any of them since I prefer a manlier man myself. Of course there are many readers who do like these types of characters and this style of story so I'm not surprised that there are fans of this manga out there (it made the top 20 of the popularity poll Kono BL ga Yabai! 2012); so although not one for me, there's still enough good about it to recommend it as a one-off read to readers whose tastes lean this way.