Super Morning Star Volume 3 Review
In the end, all I’ve done is stand in Kaido’s way. Honda, mentally beating himself up again. It turns out… I haven’t changed at all since high school.
Aspiring tokusatsu actor Ryo Kaido and recent graduate Kyosuke Honda (currently job-hunting) met and fell in love at high school and have been sharing an apartment ever since then. But their dream of living together as each pursues their very different careers is foundering fast. Kaido has encountered homophobic bullying at the studio where he works from the older cast members and Honda has exhausted himself trying to find work so that he can support both of them.
But Honda is a complex and conflicted individual, and his only solution to their present predicament is not to sit down and have a long talk with his partner, but to walk away, saying, “Let’s break up” without even giving Kaido the chance to reply. Kaido falls apart. Left alone in the empty flat, he can’t sleep, can’t eat and he has a gnawing pain in his stomach. ‘This whole place is filled with Honda’s shadows. It’s so cold here without you.’ He forces himself to go to the studio and get on with work and there, his fellow actor Matsubara (who has been quite hostile), eventually apologizes. Is it too little, too late? Kaido, exhausted and ill, collapses and is rushed to hospital. Later, when Kaido is on meds and recovering, Matsubara reveals that he is also gay and was at the same college as Honda before dropping out to pursue acting as a career. His earlier actions were the result of his fears of being outed too – but now he feels guilty and wants to make amends.
Meanwhile, Honda has been staying with his college friend Kawasaki who lends an ear (and a couch) while Honda tries to make sense of what he’s feeling and what he’s done. Ironically, it’s now that he’s offered a job – the very thing he’d been striving for so that he could shoulder the financial burdens of sharing a flat, helping Kaido to pursue his acting career. But he makes no effort to contact Kaido, telling himself that this is all for the best. Is it really the end of their relationship?
There’s something deeply affecting and relatable about the way Kara Aomiya shows Kaido falling apart after Honda walks out and I don’t think I’ve read another Boys’ Love which depicts quite how raw, painful and destructive a break-up can be.
That said, the fact that this is the mangaka’s first manga series shows in a number of ways. Kara Aomiya refers back to significant past incidents by using darkly shaded panels that are difficult to read and this makes it hard work for the reader to unpick important plot points. I’m all for subtlety and encouraging the reader to join the dots but this is genuinely head-scratching at times; there’s nothing wrong with a more direct method of delivering the plot. The other confusion comes from the fact that the character designs for Honda and Kaido’s fellow tokusatsu actor Matsubara are very similar. (There’s a reason for this, but even so…) Much as I love this manga, it would have benefited from some clearer story-boarding and plot sign-posting.
The translation for Kodansha is again by Andria McKnight with lettering by EK Weaver and reads well for the most part. However, I have a problem with one small but significant issue. I first read the series in French a few years ago when Taifu released it, translated by Margot Maillac. When Kaido collapses at work, the French translation tells us he has ‘gastrite’ or gastritis, which makes a great deal of sense, given the symptoms he describes (crippling stomach pain, anemia, precursor to an ulcer, caused by stress etc.). If you watched recent TV anime My New Boss is Goofy, you’ll remember that stressed-out salaryman Momose also suffers from gastritis, due to workplace harassment. But here, it’s translated as ‘mild gastroenteritis’ which is a stomach bug that is highly infectious and we all know the horrible symptoms. Without going into details, I can’t imagine any kind of sexual relations taking place when one partner is suffering from gastroenteritis – whereas the non-infectious gastritis, maybe so, if they’ve been taking the appropriate medication to calm the pain. (I can’t refer to the original Japanese so I might be in the wrong here.) And just to note here that this volume is Mature 18+ rated for some explicit content and comes shrink-wrapped.
The edition benefits from a beautiful blue colour page at the front and there are two pages of illustrated afterword from the mangaka at the end in which she refers to her first Boys’ Love manga Okama Box (there’s crossover between the two) and I wonder whether, after Volume 4 of Super Morning Star is published (due in June 2024), Kodansha will bring us that title as well?
Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
