Teacher/student relationships have (unfortunately) been a steady part of romance manga for decades, and that goes double for BL. Some series sneak it in on the sly, while books like this one tell you upfront what you're in for.
...BUT I'M YOUR TEACHER (Seito no Shucho Kyoshi no Honbun), by Row Takakura. First published in 2001 and first published in North America in 2006.
PLOT:
Mr. Yahiro is a handsome, delicate young substitute teacher. He's loved by his colleagues, his students love him, but he himself is in love with the tall, strapping teen Koga Kyouchi. Koga is constantly, aggressively eager for sex but Yahiro has to walk a constant tightrope between his career and his passions. As Yahiro's assignment comes to an end, that tension only grows stronger.
STORY:
I've been upfront on this site that I'm generally not a fan of teacher/student romances because they are built around an inherently inequal foundation. ...But I'm Your Teacher tries to counter this by making the student the aggressor in the relationship, but Takatura only serves to make it more awkward by marrying it to the same old seme/uke formula.
Mr. Yahiro might be a little older than most ukes of the time, but he's just as much of a swoony, sensitive push-over as the rest. In comparison, Koga isn't as cold and rapey as many of the semes of the era. Indeed, the story makes a point about the contrast between his rough exterior and his emotional sensitivity towards Yahiro and others. Still, he's the one always pushing for more and if the two of them interact for more than two or three pages then it's almost certainly going to end in sex. You'd think that Takatura could at least mine some quality melodrama from the tension between Yahiro's professional life and his love life or the six-year age gap between him and Koga, but it's largely glossed over in the name of generic passion.
Of course, being a BL manga from the height of the seme/uke era this book comes with all the usual pitfalls. In the second chapter Koga starts saying how Yahiro's kindness will end up making him "the perfect rape victim." Half a dozen pages later, Yahiro gets sexually assaulted by the parent of a child he's tutoring, which serves only as motivation for Yahiro to run back to Koga's arms and treat him like a man instead of just a student. Those two chapters are it for their story, and the rest of the books is taken up with short stories of variable quality.
As you might expect, age gap romances or similarly taboo relationships are a running theme here. The only exceptions are "Scandal Kiss" (which is about a relationship between an actor and his stuntman) and "Happy Honey Baby" (about an 18 year old and his salaryman boyfriend playing house while babysitting the former's infant niece). Even then I have my doubts about the second one, if simply because he's drawn so young. It wouldn't be the first time this publisher changed a character's age in a BL manga. It really doesn't help when said salaryman boyfriend seduces his significant other with a line about how caring for a baby "makes me feel like I'm watching you as a baby." "Bloom" is also something of an outlier. Not only is it about a pair of step-brothers getting together but it's also the only comedic piece to be found here. Even then, the pacing is so brisk that any potential comedy in the disconnect between the ordinary Nozomu missing his beautiful stepbro's blatant flirting is lost.
"Voice Box" and "The View From the Lens" were the ones I found most questionable in content. The former is about a teenaged sex worker who is busted by a journalist who blackmails him into unpaid sex, which ends with the teen falling for him immediately afterwards. The latter is about a photographer who becomes sexually obsessed with his latest model/muse. This takes a darker turn when the photographer reveals that he LITERALLY WENT TO JAIL AND WAS REGISTERED AS A SEX OFFENDER because he had done this before with other underaged boys. Somehow this statement is not a prelude to murder but instead a dramatic confession that plays out as the lead-up to the inevitable sex scene. I was already getting worn out with these short stories because they tend to follow the same story and emotional beats, but seeing this much justification for characters who are just creeps took things a step too far.
ART:
Row Takatura's art is not bad, particularly for the era it was released in. There's something about the combination of the rich blacks they use along with their delicate linework that's kind of striking. I also like the way they draw faces. While it's true that everyone here has at least a minor case of Dorito chin, it's countered by their dark, expressive eyes and finely-drawn hair. Everything below the neck is a little more dodgy, as Takatura is also guilty of drawing lots of spidery, weirdly jointed hands. She also goes a bit too far at times with her ukes, drawing them in such a short, feminine way as to make them look even more inappropriately young than they are. She's also not terribly good at sex scenes, all of which become nothing but a jumble of limbs, faces, invisible phalluses, and way too many fluids.
PRESENTATION:
Media Blasters was never terribly careful about their manga releases and that certainly shows here. There are pages that where the edges were clearly cut off, and I suspect the letterer chose to use a thin Arial-esque font more for the sake of aesthetics and space-saving than for readability.
RATING:
...But I'm Your Teacher makes no pretense about its fondness for forbidden romance, but even the fujin who are into this sort of thing will find themselves getting exhausted after reading over half a dozen variations on the same theme, each of them more rushed and questionable than the next.
This book was published by Media Blasters under their Kitty Media imprint. It is currently out of print.
