This manga tells us about an unrequited love, a romance that in my opinion will be friends to lovers, or at least I hope so.

The story is set in school, where two classmates who have friends in common, but who are not related to each other, however due to life circumstances end up becoming friends.
Yuji who is our protagonist, accidentally hears that Yamato is Gay, which makes him connect everything and realize that he is in love with his friend, despite all he does not treat Yamato differently, on the contrary their friendship grows even more.

The end of the first volume left me with a feeling of annoyance, since I wanted to continue reading, I really hope I can follow the story because the relationship looks very beautiful, since our protagonist does not force romance, nor does he move away from his new friend.

The drawing is beautiful and the story charming, deserves 5 stars and more.

Hello everyone and welcome to Gray’s Nook where I discuss and review manga, short stories, and novels! In today’s blog, I was graciously allowed a copy of “Koimonogatari: Love Stories, Vol. 1” by Tohru Tagura from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I am very excited that I was able to review this BL manga as it was on my radar to pick up, and I’m over the moon to have been able to read it. Thank you Diamond Book Distributors and NetGalley!

Yuiji Hasegawa is the main character of the story, thus far–As we watch the story progress in his POV. In the beginning of the novel, we notice his character is empathetic towards the second main character of the story. He knows that it isn’t his business to meddle in such affairs, but he can’t help but watch Yamato–or should I say, observe? Yuiji is fairly cautious at keeping his distance from Yamato until an event with a study session allows them to become more acquainted with one another.

After this study session, Yuiji finds himself liking Yamato more and more as a person and good friend. He openly admits to Yamato that he had overheard a conversation between Yamato and a mutual acquaintance about his sexuality. However, Yuiji makes it clear that while he knows about Yamato’s orientation, he isn’t someone who will air something like that out to anyone as it isn’t his business, and that he likes him. As a friend– (BUT NOT FOR LONG >___>//It’s the first book I’m already rooting for this ship to sail okay???)


Yamato Yoshinaga is the second main character of the story, he’s a cool and calm character with a radiant personality. However, behind that placid disposition, he is silently yearning for someone to speak openly with about his truth. He’s a mature character, knowing he likes men–he doesn’t act impulsively on his emotions. Yamato cherishes the feelings he holds for people, and he doesn’t take advantage of his relationships with others he cares for. He’s careful to hide his feelings, and in doing so he’s also struggling with accepting himself.

His character is by all means, noble, even if he states that he feels like he is lying to everyone. Yamato knows that he likes men, and he also understands that his feelings are one-sided, but he won’t just actively jump on anyone offering up ‘services’ to him. I adore his character and morale, as he states to people that he is young, and he is learning still about his heart and desires–and he wants to follow what his heart tells him without being forced by others. However, his greatest hurdle–accepting himself and his own heart.

This is the first volume in the series, and it’s not a jump into the bed and let’s have sex ordeal in this story. It is WHOLESOME, and a slow burn romance. This story is about growing into yourself, learning what you like and don’t want in a relationship. Understanding one another, and learning to face life’s hardships along the way. I enjoyed this volume immensely, and I couldn’t believe how fast I read through it… I’m in mourning.

If you’re looking for a boy’s love romance with two main characters slowly getting to know one another, and developing a solid relationship in the process. I’m very sure this is the book for you, while this is only the first book. I have high hopes for this novel and what will transpire in the future volumes, overall this has been a great read. I can’t wait for the next one!


STORY RATING:
4.5/5 ★★★★⋆


As always, thanks for reading, and see you all on the fictional side~!

the pacing of this was a bit slower than i thought, usually manga goes a lot faster. this is more of an exploration of this teenager's journey of trying to figure out his sexuality and how it affects the friendships and relationships around him. the art style is very manga traditional, detailed and nice.

This was such a different love story than what I am used to. I really enjoyed the characters and their complexity and interactions. This is definitely a slow burn. Each main character is exploring and finding themselves in their own way.
Love the art.
The only issue I have with this manga how it was scanned in. The pictures are in extremely low resolution to the point I had to squint a lot to make out words. Having to strain my eyes to enjoy a manga is not ideal.
I get this maybe their idea of a water mark, to discourage pirating, but I'm not trying to have even worse eye sight than I already do. I hope they fix this for the next volume.
I definitely look forward to knowing what happens next in this series.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tokyopop for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is about the friendship that blossoms between Yuji and Yamato after they're paired up in a study group. Yuji is cautious and slightly internally prejudiced when he first starts to talk to Yamato because he overheard that Yamato was gay, but soon after getting to know him he becomes more empathetic and begins to realize that Yamato being gay isn't a big deal.

As my first potential BL, there isn't a lot of BL or romance in the first volume, just the start of a very deep and almost relaxing story. The characters just drew me in. I'm not sure if this is typical for the genre, but I really loved all of them. Yuji's transformation was amazing and watching Yamato stress about being in the closet to all of his friends, except Yuji and feeling guilty because he hasn't opened up more.

I really enjoyed the first volume and was honestly sad when it was finished. I'm probably going to pick this up in trade.

This book happens at a slower pace than most manga, so if you're buckling up for a ride, you might want to relax and be prepared to smell the roses. Basically his book is a slow progression of a teen boy trying to figure out who he is as a person, what his sexual identity might be while trying being a decent friend to someone who has come out as gay.

I'm always a little leery of titles that are marketed as BL, simply because I never know how much sexual content they're going to contain and I can't get away with much in my teen collection. Thankfully, Koimonogatari (not to be confused with the Monogatari series volume of the same name) has no sexual content in the first volume and honestly very little romance. This first volume focuses mostly on the friendship between a gay high schooler and his straight friend and it's actually pretty darn refreshing!

I really enjoyed this so far. The characters were likable and I felt like we slowly were learning about Yoshinaga along with Hasegawa. the art style was nice but the format from netgalley wasn't great and a lot of the smaller writing was impossible to read.

Koimonogatari is a slow exploration of two boys’ perspectives, Yuji and Yamato’s, on love. Yuji is learning what it means to have friends or find out you have friends in the LGBTQ community. He wants his friends to be happy and he does what he can to let them know he supports them. Yamato is struggling with his feelings for his straight friend, telling his best that he’s gay, and learning that Yuji knows. He thought he was alone and that if his orientation was ever discovered he would be ridiculed. That this didn’t happen, threw him.

The book has a great flow with natural point of view changes. The development of the characters and rising anxieties is, mostly, well done. There were a few times where I didn’t believe the panel showed enough anxiety, but I wonder too if that was on purpose. If you are trying to hide bits yourself, you would also try and hide emotions linked to those secrets.

There was another part of this book I thought was brilliant. Basically, and I’m paraphrasing a quote from Yuji, ‘we don’t have to know everything to be friends, we just have to be there’. I thought that was the crux of who he was as a character as well as what the book wants the reader to know. Friends, no matter their gender/sex/orientation, don’t need to know every little secret or detail about their other friends, they just need to be there when someone needs them. Yuji supports others so much, though, that he forgets to take care of himself, resulting in the perfection that is the last panel. This book shows both the necessity of doing everything you can to support others while also showing what happens if you don’t have support yourself. It truly is okay to be selfish every once in a while.

Koimonogatari draws the reader in because it is a soft, lazy read about teenage boys navigating relationships. It’s not a fast-paced romance, but an exploration about what love means and can turn into for different people. I would recommend this to anyone who likes LGBTQ and school life manga.

Gentle story of budding friendship between a gay teen and his straight classmate which offers each of them a new perspective on the various relationships in their lives. Quiet Hasegawa's keen observations reveals to him that his classmate Yoshinaga has a crush on one of his best friend who is straight.. Hasegawa confronts Yoshinga but says he won't out him as long as he doesn't "attack" his friend. From there, we watch the boys interact with each other and intermingle their sets of friends as the two become confidants. This book is an honest exploration of what it means to be a male in Japan generally, and gay specifically. Note - this is not for your stereotypical manga fan looking for the fast changing plot of many shonen and shojo titles. It is mostly characters hanging out together while making spoken, and unspoken, observations about each other. But for readers interested in the interior life of Japanese high school boys, this quiet volume is the ticket.

I couldn't engage with the story and didn't find it interesting or finish it, no matter how much I pushed myself; I liked the art, though.

This was a story I was really looking forward to reading but I couldn't make out a lot of things. The digital resolution wasn't good. However the parts I could read was good.

I was attracted by the cover art first and the summary of the plot second. Unfortunately, the beautiful art was not enough to keep me engaged with the storyline. The tone of this manga, at least in volume one, was very slow, subdued with the faintest beats of emotional tension. I wished that I had a couple more volumes in this series to binge read at once to see if the story picks up on further volumes, but just by going how indifferent I felt after finishing the first volume I am not compelled to follow-up with this story.

I do think that this manga has its readers, especially those who are tired of the melodramatic, over-the-topic manga. This may be the manga for them if they want a quiet and realistic unfolding of friendship and queer stories.

This was super cute. It deals with friendships and how dose one deal with if on if their frends is gay. How in this case how they become closer and really good friends.
There was many sence that just melts your heart I found myself gushing alot. The only problem I had was the story was too short.
The one criticism I have is that the art two of the male character where similar that I had a bit of trouble telling the two apart.
I will be wanting to read more from this author.

I am usually sucker for a good BL manga, especially set in high school. Tha's why I had such high hopes for Koimonogatari. I must say I am mostly... confused. I think the biggest problem was formatting of the ARC, that was unreadable in the lot of places and it made whole experience very very unpleasant. I am not the only reviewer who had such problems, which is a shame.

Story is about a young high schooler who finds out that one of his closest friends is gay and is in love with their mutual friend who is very oblivious to the fact. Very interesting concept, right? From what I recognized, manga focuses on self-discovery, friendships and growing as a person. Pace is quite slow, so I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who likes their fast-paced stories. It also felt kind of monotone from time to time.

I am pretty sure I'd have better experience if formatting was better but I can't really say if I liked art of Tagura or not. In the end, if you get chance to read physical manga, try it. It's not the best BL out there but it's not definitely the worst.

Hasegawa Yuji accidentally discovery that his classmate Yoshinaga Yamato is gay. Seeing Yoshinaga in a new perspective, Yuji doesn't want to judge without knowing the boy. But he ends up empathizing with Yoshinaga when he realizes that he likes his best friend who is arguably straight.

Even though he tells himself he shouldn't get involved, the opportunity arises for the two to be friends and Yuji begins to care more than he should about his friend's feelings.

I really liked both Yuji and Yamato, they turned out to be quite remarkable characters and I liked the way their friendship grows over reading. It is also nice to follow the different views of each one of them in each chapter.

Despite having some problems with how similar the characters are, not knowing who was who in some scenes. The story itself is very interesting and I liked the way it evolves in this first volume. I am very curious as to what will happen next.

Thank you to NetGalley and TokyoPop for providing me an advanced reader copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

This is primarily a story about self-discovery, as narrated by Yuji and his closeted gay classmate Yamato. At the beginning of the book, Yuji has some backward ideas about how Yamato being gay may influence his behavior. However, he eventually becomes more open-minded as both boys spend more time together. Personally, I don't like seeing homophobic mindsets in stories that aren't specifically discussing oppression, but I understand how the writer might have been compelled to display and disprove some common misconceptions about how gay men think and behave.

Unfortunately, this was somewhat derailed with the introduction of an older gay teenager who essentially assaults Yamato and plays it off as a joke. The inclusion of that event was very jarring and definitely soured my enjoyment of this book. While harassment from older people is something I and other gay friends have had experience with, I don't feel it's a wise idea to put into young teenagers heads that the first fellow gay person they meet will inevitably try to assault them. Older people taking advantage of children who lack an adequate support network and understanding of healthy boundaries is a complex and traumatizing issue in our community, and discussion of it needs to be nuanced and not played off as a joke, even in a fictional setting.

Aside from that event, the aspect of this story I appreciated most was that Yuji and Yamato are both written as narrators. Most stories I've read in which one character is learning to understand someone different from them typically don't include perspective changes. This often leads the protagonist's outsider perspective to inadvertently other the individual and community their increase in understanding is focused on. While this book is not perfect, I did enjoy seeing both boys' thinking displayed equally. Hopefully more narratives with similar intent will continue to utilize this pattern.

This manga is very sweet and realistic. I enjoyed the dynamic and the support of the friend group. The story did develop a little bit too slowly for me and I couldn't really connect to the characters. I would still recommend this to anyone who wants to read a soft and slow burn romantic story with strong friendships at its core.

Koimonogatari: Love Stories, Vol 1 (2020/05/18)
Rating 2/5 Stars
Disclaimer: Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy to review.

This was a cute slow burn Manga to read. I really enjoyed the writing style and the art design. Although this was a love story between Yamato and Yuji, I really appreciated the slow burn and build up we got to see for the characters as their relationship blossomed. We also got to see Yamato discover new friendships while also failing for Yuji which was really interesting. Unfortunately, I had a hard time connecting with the characters and this isn't an all-time favourite manga for me.

Thank you to the publisher for giving me a free copy :D

Gotta be honest this was a pretty standard manga. I wasn't mindblown and the bonding between the maincharacters of in one volume was in my opinion a bit too fast.

The art style was good but also pretty basic. I do hope for this to be more diverse in the future but for now it was pretty bland.