Holiday Review: FIRE IN HIS FINGERTIPS

 This year has been a stellar one for manga aimed at adult women.  Not all of them are strictly josei, but the variety and amount out there is proof the the Josei Reinaissance is still alive and well.  Today's review is the rare printed example of the smuttier side of josei.  Is it as burning hot as the title implies or merely a damp squib?

FIRE IN HIS FINGERTIPS: A FLIRTY FIREMAN RAVISHES ME WITH HIS SMOLDERING GAZE (Yubisaki kara Honki no Netsujo: Chara Otoko Shobashi wa Massugu na Me de Watashi o Daita), by Kawano Tanishi.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Ryo is a capable young woman, but her life is thrown into chaos when her apartment building is destroyed in a fire.  Her only option for housing for the moment is to temporarily move in with Souma, an old friend and one of the firefighters who saved her.  Soon enough the two start having sex, but Souma can't figure out how to get his non-horny feelings through to her.  Meanwhile, Ryo is conflicted between her growing lust for him and her desire to be more than just one of Souma's many easy lays.

STORY:

I really wanted to like Fire In His Fingertips.  So much of the ecchi manga we get is aimed squarely at hetero men, so it's only fair to license some for hetero women.  It's rarer still to see something like this in print - most of the time, these sorts of books are confined to digital-only sites like Renta.  This is also a strong choice for a license, considering there's been something of a mini-craze for firefighter-related anime and the friends-to-lovers premise is a strong and well-proven premise for romance.

There's just one thing missing: unambiguous consent.

Let me set the scene for you, as what I'm about to describe is pretty much how every sex scene goes down in this volume.  Souma starts things off with suggestive touching and a lot of talk that boils down to 'aw yeah, you want this.'  Ryo puts up a token resistance, suggesting (if not outright stating) that Souma is a pervert or hopeless man-slut.  Within the space of a few panels, Ryo is rendered helpless with horniness, and the next handful of pages is just them going through the paces with all the humping, moaning, and squishy sound effects that you would expect.  

Yet Souma never bothers to ask at any point if Ryo is OK with anything he does, regardless of where they are, what she says, or the status of their relationship.  That seems to be his big character flaw; he tends to act first and talk things out later, and he lacks the emotional awareness to do things like 'talk about his feelings' or 'ask for clear consent.'  Thus, to move things along Tanishi has to keep clumsily dropping scenarios to impress upon Ryo (and the reader) how strong, caring, and dreamy Souma is on the job since he's not so great at demonstrating it in the bedroom.

Meanwhile, Ryo seems to have a lot of internalized guilt about sex and her hypocrisy is even more frustrating than Souma's communication issues.  She's extremely judgmental about his sex life, as if she's somehow better because she doesn't sleep around.  Yet she also feels incredibly guilty about the pleasure she feels with Souma, wondering if she's no better than Souma's other one-night-stands because of it.  She's no more honest with her feelings than Souma, but her insistence on slut-shaming Souma and herself at every turn gets increasingly annoying with each new chapter.  Sadly this is all too typical for this type of manga, or any sort of erotic manga for that matter, and it's immensely frustrating Would it be so wrong for Ryo to initiate sex every once in a while?  Would be so bad for Souma to ask if she wants to do it and respect her personal boundaries? I certainly don't think so.  If anything, I think it would have made the story a lot less problematic, which would allow the reader to savor the smut without guilt.

ART:

The standards for smutty josei like this tend to be rather low, so it's easy to see why this series got pulled from the metaphorical pile for print.  Tanashi's characters are not necessarily that unique, but she's got a good sense of physicality and our leading couple are cute.  While she doesn't indulge in all the excesses you see in hentai manga, the sex scenes here are far less censored than we usually tend to see in josei.  This is definitely not a book one should read in public, let's put it that way.  If anything would have improved the art here, it would be giving the panels and pages a little more space.  Everything is busy, even when the leads aren't getting busy, and she leans a lot of on close-ups to do a lot of the work for her in-between sex scenes.

RATING:

I can support Fire In His Fingertips in theory, but its hang-ups about sex and consent keep me from enthusiastically embracing it.  It's still better looking than a lot of its peers, though, and if you're in it just for the smut you may end up having a good time with it.  

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 3 volumes available.  2 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

Don't forget that our annual Holiday Review Giveaway is underway! Let us know what your favorite manga of 2020 to get a chance to win a $25 RightStuf gift certificate.  Click on the link above for more details!