I Got Reincarnated in a (BL) World of Big (Man) Boobs Volume 2 Review

Bespectacled otaku Nagare Otokawa suffered a truck-kun demise and has been reincarnated in a world where Boys’ Love rules (watched over by a BL-obsessed deity). Now Otokawa is blonde, slim and attractive – but his hopes of attracting a beautiful, bosomy girl (boobs are his thing) have been dashed as his classmate Sakura is a dyed-in-the-wool fujoshi and not interested in him as a potential partner. Instead, she’s shipping him with delinquent Ryuji Onizuka who’s a muscleman with ‘rippling pecs’. Unfortunately, he’s always getting into fights – but as Otokawa discovers, appearances can be deceptive: Onizuka is a gentle giant at heart and life (or the god of BL) keeps throwing them together. Literally.

The school festival is coming up soon but Otokawa feels the need to confess his feelings to Sakura. Unfortunately, she’s been writing fan-fiction about him and Onizuka and is rooting for them as a couple. “To me, you’ll always be the best seme out there,” she tells Otokawa. “Nay, you’re the manliest man in existence.” Ginga Yubuki, leader of the third-year delinquents and his sidekick Sachio Takanashi (both childhood friends of Onizuka) are helping run a butler-themed café but Onizuka’s class is doing a play – and Onizuka is chosen as the lead in Handsome Momotaro. Secretly thrilled, because in his first life, the only part he got to play at school was that of a cauliflower in The Cabbage Prince (eye-watering things happened during the performance), Otokawa finds himself cast against Onizuka as one of the fearsome ogres Momotaro has to defeat. Little do they suspect that the student council president Mutsurugi and his sidekick deputy have determined to ruin their performance.

In the second 2-in-1 omnibus volume of I Got Reincarnated in a (BL) World of Big (Man) Boobs, mangaka Tsukiji Nao continues to have a great deal of fun (but it’s affectionate fun) in sending up many of the tropes and clichés of Boys’ Love fiction. Be warned though: there’s a whole chapter in Volume 4 dedicated to Hammochin, the cute little hamster with a surprising testicular super power. Otokawa finds himself at the local cinema with the delinquents (Onizuka and Ginga love Hammochin) sitting through the movie about the furry cartoon hero.

When it comes to beloved BL romance tropes, we have the childhood friends saga in Volume 4 in which Takanashi tells Otokawa how he and Ginga first met Onizuka when they were children (and Onizuka was small and cute). Overwhelmed, Otokawa runs away, ending up on a windblown clifftop. There he meets a beautiful woman who’s planning to end her life – because she’s a ‘huge otaku’. She’s brought along all the doujinshi she’s drawn and plans to jump off the cliff with them. It’s impossible not to sense the mangaka using her own memories of early doujinshi days before the internet and smartphones and the doujinshi extracts will bring back memories for older readers of the way things used to be. How does Otakawa persuade her not to jump? Well, he tells her that he has some personal experience of otaku culture in his own family (his mother) which means he’s not in away creeped out by her revelations. Who should then appear but the woman’s daughter – and it’s none other than Sakura! Which then leads to even more problems for Otokawa… as if he didn’t have enough of his own already. Is there any way Otakawa and Onizuka can end up together?

Thanks to Tsukiji Nao’s ability to draw the most beautiful art, the main characters are all good-looking – but the horrified reaction faces pulled by Otokawa are suitably distorted to emphasize just how freaked out he is. The story is packed with references to BL and other genres of manga, and the character of Yuto, Onizuka’s younger brother and would-be idol, is one of Tsukiji Nao’s beautiful and sexually ambiguous creations (think Shiro, main character in Adekan) so the mangaka is not above making gentle fun of her own creations.

The translation for Kodansha (a tour de force, given all the cultural allusions – and Hammochin the Movie double entendres) is again by Jacqueline Fung, supported by a virtuosic range of lettering from Nicole Roderick. Sadly, there’s no colour art inside but there are character guides and ‘The Story So Far’ at the beginning of each volume, as well as a note from the mangaka about the next volume. The series seems to end with the next volume (#5 in Japan, but it looks like #3 for the US).

Silly, in the best sense of the word and – to quote the late, great Kenny Everett, ‘It’s all done in the best possible taste!’.

Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.