She Likes Gays but Not Me Volume 3 Review
Trigger warnings: This manga has a parental warning about Explicit Content and also contains references to suicide and homophobia.
Jun Andou has hidden his homosexuality from his classmates and after befriending schoolmate and gifted artist Sae Miura, the two started dating. But Jun has also been having sex with a much older man, Makoto-san, and when Sae sees them together, she realizes that their relationship is a sham. Even though Jun desperately wants to have a ‘normal’ family, he doesn’t feel sexually attracted to women. Sae, a fujoshi who lives for BL, tries to sympathize and understand who Jun is – but when they’re arguing in an empty classroom at school, a classmate overhears and outs Jun. This drives Jun – already at his limit – to attempt suicide. Fortunately, although he’s seriously injured when jumping from an upper-floor classroom, he survives his injuries. His desperate act also leads the school to introduce HR sessions discussing tolerance etc.
At the end of the school year, Sae – who has won an art prize – seizes the microphone at the closing assembly and makes an impassioned speech to her fellow students, including Jun who has returned for the final day. She explains her obsession with BL and her relationship with Jun (without naming him) and makes a plea for tolerance and understanding. Even though one of the senior staff tries to take the microphone away from her, she perseveres, to the cheers of the students – and Jun goes up on stage as she insists that she still loves him, even though she knows he can never love her in the same way. They kiss (at her instigation) to the cheers of the other students.
Jun and Sae have come to a new understanding – but Jun has unfinished business he needs to address before he can move on with his life. He and Sae decide to go to the seaside together but with the ulterior motive that he can visit the family of ‘Mr. Fahrenheit’, the young gay man with whom he struck up an intense online friendship but never met in real life. Tragically, the young man took his own life after his older boyfriend died of HIV and he has left a Queen CD to Jun as a farewell gift. But when Jun and Sae go to his house and are met by Mr. Fahrenheit’s grieving mother, they are faced with a shocking revelation about the young man Jun never met face-to-face. Will this knowledge help the two to move on? And how about their classmates at school? Have they all gained in knowledge and acceptance about celebrating and embracing difference?
She Likes Gays but Not Me reaches its third and final volume and it’s a sad and sobering thought that the author of the original (semi-autobiographical?) novel, Naoto Asahara, died in 2023 at the young age of 38. This volume is very much about Sae and Jun’s friendship and how they find a way of sustaining their close friendship without being romantically involved. In this respect, the message is an affirmative and positive one, encouraging tolerance by showing how mutually beneficial their friendship has become. Both have had to change their ways of thinking and there have been some deeply painful experiences along the way but they’ve emerged more resilient by the end. These are the positive aspects of the way the story resolves and it’s reassuring that it concludes on an optimistic note. However, even though Jun comes to understand why his relationship with the much older Makoto-san (who has a son Jun’s age) is not a healthy one and will never go anywhere, the mangaka’s depictions of the two really emphasizes (as noted before) the age difference between them. Jun is always shown as young and frail alongside his male classmates, with eyes as big and expressive as a shojo heroine’s (he and Sae sometimes look like twins) which is bound to influence how we view him in relation to the others in the story.
I’m also uncomfortable with the way Sae’s obsession with Boys’ Love is portrayed as it seems curiously old-fashioned. The novel was published in 2018 by which time BL had evolved and moved away from most of the old tropes that gained it and the more strident fujoshi a bad reputation. As for her theory about god being a fujoshi and creating Planet BL, at least it eventually makes Jun laugh but it seems a strange way of looking at and validating her favourite genre in reading (and drawing). So, where I might have felt secure in recommending this wholeheartedly, its Mature rating makes it a problem for secondary school library shelves as does the fact that it comes across as very much the late author’s worldview and a very personal one at that. Makoto-san’s explanation to Jun as to what drove him to seduce him also feels unconvincing (although that could be just the way the author wanted it to sound). There is also the revelation of another underage relationship (although implied, not graphically portrayed in the text) which, along with the mentions of suicide and depiction of parental bereavement, make this a really difficult recommend overall, even if the two main characters emerge stronger from the harrowing events with a greater understanding of each other’s problems.
The final volume for Yen Press is translated by the ever-dependable Leighann Harvey with lettering by Rochelle Gancia. There are helpful translation notes at the end and four attractive colour pages at the beginning, including a double-page image of Jun and Sae.
If you’ve been following the story of Jun and Sae since the first volume, you’ll want to see how they come to terms with their issues and with their feelings toward each other. But the problems with the issues in this story and the way they’re explored often outweigh the positives in what was – I think – meant to be a hopeful message about Jun’s future.
Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
