08/50: bizarre love triangles ("secondo piatto," "close the last door")
I used to joke that every bl generation gets the "Banana Fish," and specifically the Yut Lung character, they deserve. Perhaps every generation also gets their own version of "Close the Last Door." It's an irresistible setup: the main character has an unrequited crush on his straight best friend, makes a mess of himself at the straight best friend's wedding, drunkenly hooks up with another (male) wedding guest who is in love with the bride, stuff happens, happy ending as the two leads learn to move on and love each other. In "Close the Last Door," it is Nagai who is in love with his younger, bubbly coworker Saitou. After the wedding, he finds himself ranting to Honda, who reveals that he was the bride's ex. They get drunk, sleep together, and begin a friends with benefits relationship that is complicated when the bride elopes with another man just one day into the honeymoon. In "Secondo Piatto," Hyunwook is forced to grapple with his childhood friend Heesun marrying his police academy classmate Minseok. At the wedding, he discovers that Minseok's childhood friend Wonyoung has been in love with Minseok this whole time, and, well, they get drunk, sleep together, and begin a friends with benefits relationship.
The similarities in premise (if not plot) between the two series makes it easy to pick out what could be genre (manga vs manhwa) or generational (early 2000s vs 2020) differences. "Close the Last Door" is guilty of many of the critiques one could lob against early 2000s bl as a genre. The characters deny being gay (or bisexual) and, if pressed, would likely describe themselves as only gay for each other (or, in the case of main character Nagai, gay for Saitou and a victim to a lethal combination of Honda and alcohol). The character designs are generic, the seme dark-haired and the uke blond (though not frail or weepy or feminine). Much sex happens while the two mains are intoxicated, and there is a sexual assault scene (but not between Nagai and Honda!). Nagai and Honda manage to bumble into pseudo-marriage and cohabitation without so much as a "what are we?" conversation, and even a year into their relationship are still unable to be honest about their feelings for each other to each other, much less to other people. The two women in the series (Saitou's ex-wife Remi and Nagai's ex-girlfriend Ryoko) are reduced to catalysts for the main (gay) romance, and Ryoko in particular can come off like a harpy (though Yamada Yugi can't help but imbue her with a feisty charm, the curse of a good author). There is even a spin-off featuring an incestuous relationship (!) between Honda's two older brothers, who appear in "Close the Last Door" volume 2 as confusing side characters if you did not read their dedicated volume.
In contrast, "Secondo Piatto" is enlightened, woke even, at least by 2025 standards. Wonyoung is openly gay and identifies as such, even to Minseok. Hyunwook begins the story self-conceptualizing as straight, but tries hard to grapple with his sexuality when he begins sleeping with Wonyoung regularly. The pressures of homophobia feature in "Secondo Piatto"; it is a story that definitely believes gay people are real, as opposed to just a function of the plot requiring two men to fall in love. Where Ryoko cannot move on from Nagai and also has an interrupted tryst with Honda, Heesun is steadfastly into Minseok and is perfectly correct about why she never married Hyunwook. She is a blameless, charming character whom you could hold nothing against. Hyunwook and Wonyoung talk openly about their relationship and negotiate their boundaries, while Nagai and Honda are petty, scrappy, and constantly allowing Saitou to upturn the fragile balance of their relationship. Hyunwook gets the "fully smitten top who would do anything for his partner" treatment. His yearning is explicit, emotionally healthy, and mature, full of demonstrations of his commitment to Wonyoung and his explicit, emotionally healthy expectations for what a relationship with him would look like. Honda, on the other hand, tolerates Nagai's antics until they both reach a breaking point, after which he has a mental breakdown where he can barely express his feelings, gets embarrassed, and then gives Nagai a blowjob before sending Nagai back to deal with Saitou. I am not joking when I say this is how "Close the Last Door" volume one ends.
I grew up in a world where there weren't many bl dramas or movies and the biggest gay ships were largely noncanonical (even, as in the case of Supernatural, the noncanonical status became more and more strained). We called shipping two male characters in a noncanonical gay relationship "slash." This allowed us to differentiate it from yaoi or shounen-ai or boys' love/BL, where one could still ship a noncanonical relationship (the losing side of a love triangle, for example) but it would never be dismissed out of hand as impossible simply for being gay. Even after all these years, I am used to, even more comfortable, living in a space where I read canon against itself, where my pairing fights the story somehow, where every love story is by definition a struggle. I chafe at being handed an easy happy ending, even if I know that's the bargain I struck with the author when starting a story. I know, I know—I should probably be in therapy.
It is easy to see why Hyunwook and Wonyoung would fall for each other and end up together in "Secondo Piatto." Their romance is so very legible to the reader, the main takeaway of the story. Wonyoung yearns to be transformed into someone completely new who will fall in love with a completely new stranger, and together they will become two strangers who are in love with each other and have absolutely nothing to do with Wonyoung's past and Minseok. But love is honest, love is kind. Love means knowing and accepting the other for who they are, which is what Hyunwook offers. He sees Wonyoung, all of Wonyoung, and doesn't turn away. Minseok could never see Wonyoung as he really was—but then again, Wonyoung never let him. As for Hyunwook, he has to learn that love is something to fight for, instead of an inevitable reward you are given for standing silently by. You can learn lessons on healthy communication from "Secondo Piatto." It is a good manual for what to want in a relationship.
But what can we say about Honda and Nagai and "Close the Last Door?" They truly feel like two people who happened into a circumstance where they needed each other, who never dig themselves out of that hole. In a way, "Close the Last Door" has the air of the slash fanfic. You could easily see a world where there was some main canon featuring Saitou and his wife, and Yamada Yugi got it in her head to ship two side characters (Saitou's doting coworker and his wife's ex-boyfriend) and ended up writing a whole doujinshi about how they get together. They butt heads, they struggle, they seem to be fighting against the genre's expectation that they should end up together. Their happy ending is not the point, because it was never the plot. It is so besides the point that Yamada Yugi even keeps Saitou around for much, much longer than you would expect. After all, he has main character energy. By volume two, Saitou is fully a third wheel in the Nagai-Honda household, to the point where Yamada even pulls out the classic "if the two of us were dangling off a cliff, who would you save?" test. (The answer will delight you, if you're a sicko like me.)
Which is to say, I love "Close the Last Door." Don't get me wrong; I liked "Secondo Piatto" a lot too! The strength of Hyunwook and Wonyoung's interactions, their open communication with each other even in uncomfortable situations, made it a refreshing read, and there are some moments of such sharp writing about the weight of longing and codependency that I took many, many screenshots. But "Close the Last Door" is so messy, so human, so full of bad decisions and characters tolerating bad behavior from each other. Honda and Nagai argue and have sex and sometimes have sex while arguing and it makes me clap like a seal every time. If "Secondo Piatto" is about drawing boundaries, "Close the Last Door" is about greed and not having to confront your choices. Nagai wants everything. He wants to have his cake (be in a relationship with Honda) and to eat it too (love and pamper his idol Saitou). He does not want to put other people's feelings first. He doesn't want to have to choose, and above all, he doesn't want to admit to Saitou or Honda that he's chosen Honda.
This has always been Yamada Yugi's sweet spot: vivid, human characters who are messy and bad with their words, who never quite say "I love you" but who find ways to make themselves understood. In the world of Yamada Yugi, it is better, sometimes, to let things go unsaid. In Bonus Track 3 of "Close the Last Door" volume 2, Honda has to tell Nagai about his brothers. (This is literally Honda fulfilling his destiny of being a side character in another canon!) But through it all, he is vague and elliptical. "So they're really like that?" Nagai asks. "Probably, but I haven't confirmed it," Honda replies. His brothers' relationship is something Honda has never asked about, will never ask about, but fully understands. He begs Nagai to keep it a secret and act like he doesn't know.
In the conversation that follows, Nagai and Honda manage to say "I love you" over and over again, without actually saying anything of substance. And this is how the main story of "Close the Last Door" ends, with Nagai and Honda bickering and getting suckered into little jealousy games by Saitou and still bad at having an honest conversation with each other and still being so, so in love. Maybe that's toxic and a red flag in 2025. But "Close the Last Door" works for the same reason slash fanfic works, because its creator wrote a story just because she wanted to see these two particular characters in love. As Mary Oliver might say, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles to show you're a green flag or a world class yearner. Sometimes, it is enough to let these two characters love what they love, and that is each other.
"Close the Last Door" (and the spinoff "Open the Door to Your heart") was once upon a time licensed by DMP's imprint June. Some places still offer a way to buy the print versions. "Secondo Piatto" is available through Manta. I read the explicit version here.
