I generally don't keep up with a lot of digital-exclusive BL if simply because there are so many companies and services offering it that it's nigh-impossible to keep up with everything that gets licensed. That's why I was surprised to see this pop up in a recent sale on Bookwalker.
THE SCENE OF MY RUMSPRINGA (Rumspringa no Joukei), by Kaya Azuma. First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2023.
PLOT:
Oswald wanted to be a professional dancer in New York City, but things didn't work out. Now he's stuck somewhere in Pennsylvania, dividing his time between sex work and working as a waiter/bouncer at the local bar. That's how he meets Theodore, a naive young man from the local Amish community out on his rumspringa. Oswald ends up taking Theo in and the two start to fall for one another, but can their love survive a visit to Theo's hometown?
STORY:
You don't forget a manga premise like "that BL manga about an Amish guy on rumspringa." I certainly didn't. I remember hearing about it in passing on Twitter over half a decade ago, back when the series was new in Japan. Finding out it had been licensed was a pleasant surprise. The only greater surprise was that this gimmicky premise was turned into a really good story.
Once you get beyond the gimmicky premise, The Scene of My Rumspringa is a fairly familiar tale. A cynic is forced together by circumstance with a hapless, cheerful, naive person. After some time, the cynic warms up to them and they fall in love. Eventually there's a third act misunderstanding before the couple comes together in one big dramatic declaration of love. It's the stuff of a million romance novels.
That's not to say that Kaya Azuma is doing everything by the book. They get some good fish-out-water comedy out of Theo's ignorance of the outside world, and they mine a lot of drama from Oswald's tragic backstory between the loss of his mother, his father's death in Vietnam, and his failed career as a dancer. The fact that Theo is Amish serves not just as a narrative hook but gives the story some real stakes. Rumspringa is a time for freedom for young Amish folks, but it comes with a firm deadline for them to return, where they must choose whether to remain Amish or leave their community forever, and this gives the story some more urgent stakes than expected. The conflict between obligations to one's family versus one's own desires is a big, big theme here, and it's handled quite well.
Curiously, Azuma doesn't make that much of a deal out of the fact that this is technically a 1980s period piece. Indeed, based on some newspaper headlines and the albums the two listen to, this seems to be set sometime around 1984. That obviously doesn't matter much to Theo and his lifestyle, but it should matter a lot to Oswald. After all, he's a gay man working as a rent boy in a small town at a time when homophobia was the norm, gay rights were virtually nonexistent, and the AIDS epidemic was well underway. I kept waiting for something like that to pop up for Oswald, whether as part of his tragic backstory or as the set-up for a tragic ending. Azuma ignored all of that completely (save for a few slurs from some minor reoccurring troublemakers), keeping the focus on Theo and Oswald's romance. You can argue that doing so makes the story less realistic, but whoever said BL had to be realistic? Sometimes it's just nice to get swept up in a well-written gay romance with a big damn happy ending.
ART:
Rumspringa was only Azuma's second professional manga, which makes it all the more remarkable how polished it looks. The characters are graceful and handsome, and she brings some incredible nuance to their faces and movement. They also handle the sex scenes quite adeptly, pacing them well and spacing them out to the most dramatically impactful moments (even if she has to draw the wangs rather vaguely to comply with censorship standards). There are little moments of quiet beauty scattered throughout the book: the moments where Oswald dances, a dramatic moment where Theo's older sister literally lets her hair down, Oswald and Theo under a full moon in the rolling countryside. It's just a gorgeous book, beginning to end.
PRESENTATION:
I wish I could give some credit to the folks who worked on this, but unfortunately since this is under the Media-Do/MediBang umbrella and they tend to work with shady bargain-bin translation agencies, no staff credits are listed anywhere in the book. That's a shame because save for some minor typos, the translation is fine. I also like the way they use both different fonts and slightly different grammar to distinguish when characters are speaking English versus Pennsylvania Dutch. My one big quibble is with the size of the text, which always seems a little too small for the space given. This is the only time in my decade-plus of reviewing manga where I had to zoom in on my digital reader just to read it.
RATING:
Oh how I wish The Scene of My Rumspringa could have been licensed by someone who would have put it into print. It's far too good to languish in digital obscurity, as its author takes its gimmicky premise and turns it into a lovely BL romance that deserves a wider audience.
This book is published digitally by Media-Do. It is currently in print at most major digital manga storefronts.
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