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33/50: don't stop believin' (dayoo, "lovers on the last train")

Hello. I know it has been a long time since I last posted. I wish I had a good excuse, but the reality is that I skipped a week, and then one week became two, and then two weeks became close to two months, and I found myself simply unable to write. Yes, the holidays happened in between, and yes, I did do some travel, some friend-seeing, some rest and relaxation. I watched "Heated Rivalry." I held my friends captive to watch "100 Meters." I went to a Korean spa, and ate Yemeni food for the first time, and spent New Year's Eve in an overly-warm New York apartment bathed in the smell of raclette singing Auld Lang Syne and watching our host open a blind box that was supposed to oracularly represent what was in store for us in 2026. (We got the Butterfly Dream Skullpanda, which I understand to be very rare and thus portentous.) And then I came home to my apartment, and went back to work, and simply did not write anything about bl.

I've thought a lot about how writing is a discipline, a practice, and a ritual. To me, it is as much, maybe even more, these things than it is a hobby, the result being that what enjoyment I get from it is delayed, sometimes purely hypothetical. I have to want it, and I have to want wanting it. And even though it is something I can do, am even sometimes good at, and am recognized as having some small talent for, I frequently do not want to do it, and do not want to want to do it. What gets me sitting in front of a keyboard to do it is either (1) blacking out in the grips of a new obsession or (2) shame. In this case, I made a commitment to do fifty posts on bl manga, and by god, I will see it through.

Well, I told myself all this three weeks ago. And as you can clearly see, nothing happened. When one week becomes two, and two weeks become close to two months, it is hard to get back on track. Writing is a discipline, a practice, a ritual, but unfortunately, so is not-writing.

At a certain age, inertia becomes a driving force, sometimes the only driving force. If you are a stable, pragmatic person, and nothing tragic has happened to you yet, it is very easy to decide, "This Is Fine." Your life has been long, but hopefully, it will be longer still, and in light of that, any dissatisfactions in your life suddenly seem immaterial. What is imperative is to keep going. To give voice to discontent, to struggle for something different, threatens to derail all the progress you believe you've made. Might as well keep going down the same track. Might as well stay on the same train.

Dayoo's "Lovers on the Last Train" finds its main character Harue Shindo in just such a dilemma. At 42, he has never had a boyfriend—or any relationship, for that matter. Despite his bland exterior, his workaholic persona, and his total lack of dating history, Harue is a man of capacious, though cryptic, desire. In food as well as love, his eyes are bigger than his stomach. He wants a tonkatsu lunch set that he can't finish eating. He wants one more drink after overtime, before he has to go back to work the next morning. And he wants a fairytale forever love, but is terrified when it comes sauntering headfirst into his life in the form of Fujishima Yoshitaka, a suspiciously handsome wedding planner with whom Harue accidentally matched on a dating app.

There are no obstacles to Harue and Fujishima's love. They are attracted to each other instantly. They get along well. Fujishima is good-looking, outgoing, accommodating when it comes to Harue's inexperience, and finds Harue's purity and innocence one of his most attractive features, rather than something for which Harue should be ashamed. Harue, on the other hand, is straightforward, honest, and appreciative of Fujishima's romanticism and idealism. They spend a night in a hotel. They even manage, eventually, to exchange contact information. And yet, despite all this, the story comes to a standstill, as they try to navigate to the next step, which is not at all obvious even though they both, very obviously, like each other.

Harue is exactly who he says he is: 42, and gay, and a total virgin in love and sex. But so is Fujishima. He is 100% who he claims to be—it's just that who he claims to be seems impossible. Dayoo is not interested in unexpected or uncomfortable depths. There are no skeletons in Fujishima's closet, except for that of his pet cat who tragically passed away a month before the story begins and whose likeness Fujishima wears as a charm necklace. Faced with the 100% perfect man of his dreams, Harue experiences a total mental collapse. He was never immunized against love to begin with, and Fujishima's uncanny ability to catch Harue at just the right moment and sweep Harue off his feet leads Harue down the path of foolish behavior. He finds himself googling "what does it mean to hold hands with someone in a dream?" Instead of drinking a juicebox gifted to him by Fujishima, he stores it in his own fridge for over a week. He starts to worry about the way he looks, the way he smells. Desperate to present his best possible self to Fujishima, he doesn't realize that the only thing Fujishima really wants from him is to simply show up as himself. There is no better way to kill momentum than through overthinking, and Harue's overthinking ends up tying Fujishima into knots with him.

If vulnerability is showing yourself as you really are, opening up your soft underbelly trusting that it will not be torn to shreds, then there is incredible vulnerability in asking for exactly what you want. Not what you think you should want, and not what you think you deserve, but what you think good and lovely and want for yourself. As we get older, we become accustomed to not getting what we want. Eventually, we stop even asking. "When you want something but it's just outside of reach, and you think you can handle the pain of missing out on it, you end up wasting your chance to get what you want," Fujishima's friend scolds him. "Eventually, you get to the point where that pain becomes normal, and you're stuck in a loop of losing whatever's important to you." Growing up, Fujishima realizes, is not making peace with lack, but going all out to get the things you think are important.

Harue learns this too when, embarrassed of his messy, musty overtime self, he dodges a dinner invitation with Fujishima and catches up instead with an old crush, now happily married with kids. Once, Harue would have been fine settling for a quiet, nonconfrontational acceptance, the friend who was understanding enough not to ask questions. But what he really wants—what he needs—is someone who will enthusiastically, proactively love him, enough to overcome the anxious attachment Harue has developed through his years of inexperience. That person is, of course, Fujishima, who reassures him that "when you are 100% yourself, that alone is genuinely perfect for me."

"Lovers on the Last Train" is light on character development and plot and dramatics, but Dayoo has a careful, lyrical touch with their writing. Of particular note is an early monologue from Harue where he compares his lack of relationship experience to an empty drawer that he has always ignored and is now forced to acknowledge. Dayoo's strongest work is in the opening pages, which is actually a flash forward to a year later, when Harue and Fujishima are dating. Exhausted from a long day's work, and wrapped up in the arms of his loving boyfriend, Harue finds himself casting a spell: Please don't have second thoughts. Stay with me forever. The juxtaposition of the comfortable domesticity of their lives with Harue's quiet desperation towards Fujishima is so delicious that if there's one thing I could fault Dayoo for, it's that they skimped out on the "getting along" part of Harue and Fujishima's relationship in favor of the more conventional "getting together" story.

(Side note: does anyone else feel like "Lovers on the Last Train" feels like a spinoff, as if Fujishima were a character in another story that Dayoo forgot to publish? The pet cat, the ex-lover that Harue briefly glimpses who may or may not be the same lover that catches Fujishima stalking Harue on his soba date with Ida, the former client who divorced his wife to be with Fujishima— these all feel like details referencing events that Dayoo assumes we're familiar with and threw me for a loop when they were all dropped without follow-up.)

I originally had a four-parter planned for #33, but it was unfortunately mostly me panning some series I'd read and found lacking. But in the in-between weeks, I realized that wasn't the energy with which I wanted to start 2026. I had purchased "Lovers on the Last Train" on a whim while in New York, browsing the Kinokuniya shelves and thinking—berating myself—about not-writing. I carted that volume to the new year party. It sat in my bag when the host opened the blind box to reveal The Butterfly Dream. That felt portentous. Do you know what The Butterfly Dream is supposed to symbolize? Fantasy, mysticism, but above all, transformation. It is a reference to Zhuangzi, who once dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up unsure if he were a man who dreamed he were a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamed it was a man. "Lovers on the Last Train" is unrealistic, but, well, isn't love often unrealistic? What makes something "unrealistic" anyway? In dreaming that such love can be possible, that it can be possible for Harue and Fujishima, that it can be possible for me and you, do I not transform reality? If life is just a dream, then I can dream into life the unreality of dreams. Isn't that what bl is? A little dream of love, of transformation, for ourselves as well as the characters.

"Lovers on the Last Train" is available from Seven Seas.

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