Review: FINDER

 We are rested and ready to return with a month's worth of bad romance manga!  Let's begin with...well, "classic" would be too strong for this series so let's say a notable one from BL of the past.

FINDER (Fainda), by Ayano Yamane.  First published in 2002 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Akihito is a freelance photographer who wants to use his skills to expose the seedy underbelly of the criminal world.  Alas, he's quickly capture by the powerful gangster Asami, who proceeds to rape Akihito, ruin his film, and set him free.  Akihito hates what Asami did to him, but remains determined to fight crime in his own way.  Meanwhile, Asami finds himself increasingly drawn to Akihito, protecting the young man even as he pursues him for the sake of his own pleasure.

STORY:

Finder finds itself in trouble right from the start because Akihito is hopelessly DUMB.  He wants to be this great undercover photojournalist who captures damning evidence in the name of justice, but the way he makes no attempt to protect himself as he wanders haplessly into danger reminds me all too strongly of an old-school shojo heroine.  He might as well walk around with a bell on his neck and a neon sign above his head saying "PLEASE CAPTURE AND ABUSE ME."  You think that his attitude might change a little after Asami trusses him up like a kinky Thanksgiving turkey and literally shoves his film in the one dark place that film should never go.  You'd think that Akihito might change his behavior a little after that, but he continues to barge into trouble only to get raped again and rescued by Asami (who thinks a pledge to put him into jail is just playing hard-to-get).

If there's one thing I hate in BL, it's the genre's long-standing reliance on rape as both plot device and sign of affection.  Finder is guilty as hell of this offense on both counts, to the point of ludicrousness.  Akihito and Asami's first encounter is not treated as a traumatic punishment but more like a hot one-night stand.  When other people rape Akihito it's a bad thing, but when Asami does so it's because he's so passionate that he just can't control himself.  Rape is done so frequently here that it becomes trivial, and in the eyes of Asami it's just another act of foreplay.

The strangest part is that their story ends two-thirds of the way through the book.  The rest is taken up with mostly unrelated short stories that aren't much better than the main story.  The first involves a rebel kid who is saved from a train groper by an older boy who punish him with sex for smoking on school grounds.  The second story is the shortest and least rapey of the lot, as two teen boys believe their fathers are having an affair only to end up in a relationship of their own.  The third is the ridiculously named "Risky Society," where a trio of vigilante superheroes who are being hunted down by forces that want to turn them into test subjects.  Two of them get injured in the process and it turns out the best cure is a round of good old-fashioned buttsex.  The final short story is nothing more than a another smutty encounter between our leads.  

I can see what Yamane was trying to go for with Finder.  She wants to craft a dark and intense story of star-crossed lovers separated by the law and their own notions of morality in regards to both crime and homosexuality.  It's a concept that's ripe for both high drama and hot conflicted sex. Unfortunately our main couple are little more than ciphers there to fill the uke and seme slot.  That means that the sex is not only violent and uncomfortably non-consensual but also empty and meaningless, and that is true for the story as a whole.

ART:

Yamane's art doesn't deviate too much from the pointy, stylized conventions of BL art of the early 2000s, but I do appreciate that like most of her ukes, Akihito is drawn to be lithe but not overly femme.  In comparison, Asami looks like your stock seme: ridiculously broad shoulders, a face that is at once both overly narrow and weirdly lantern-jawed, stylishly floppy hair, and an single expression stuck somewhere between "leering" and "dull surprise."

She certainly goes hard when it comes to the sex.  Her sense of anatomy is OK and most of the sex scenes are unremarkable...save for that first sexual assault.  She goes hard there, throwing in not just bondage and rape but also drugging and catheters.  It's quite a shock for how early it occurs, and I don't know if it's meant to be titillating, uncomfortable, or a bit of both.  

PRESENTATION:

I read the DMP release, the second of this manga's three different releases.  While it's certainly an improvement over the Central Park Media release, I haven't had a chance to compare it to the more recent SuBLime re-release to see how much they changed the translation (if at all).

RATING:

Finder could be deliciously tawdry if it leaned more on its hardboiled world of crime and less on its endless loop of rape and pursuit.  It's slightly better looking than some of its peers but modern readers would probably do best to leave this one lost.

This series is published by Viz via SuBLime, and previously by Central Park Media and Digital Manga Publishing.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 10 volumes available.  All 10 volumes have been published and are currently in print.