REVIEW: Senpai, This Can't Be Love! (manga) by Shinta Harekawa, translated by Leo McDonagh

Senpai, This Can't Be Love! is a BL manga one-shot (I think??). I bought my copy new.

Review:

Yanase is a veteran CG designer who's been assigned to mentor Kaneda, one of two new hires. Although Yanase is skilled, confident, and generally friendly and easy to get along with, he has no idea how to deal with Kaneda, who does his work well enough but behaves so coldly that Yanase is convinced the guy hates him. 

In reality, Kaneda idolizes Yanase, the person who inspired him to become a CG designer in the first place. He's so determined not to be an embarrassing fanboy that he doesn't realize how he comes across to Yanase. 

As the two of them work together more on a big new project, Yanase gradually begins to understand his trainee more. Even as Kaneda's enthusiasm for the work reawakens Yanase's own enjoyment, it bothers him that Kaneda is putting him on a pedestal.

Ugh, I needed this to either be a longer volume or a two-volume thing. The seeds for something really good were there, but there wasn't enough time and space for it to grow.

Yanase felt familiar to me, and I realized partway through the volume that the character he reminded me of was Yuri on Ice's Victor Nikiforov. They were both talented professionals, highly respected veterans in their fields, but with hidden struggles related to their careers. Both of them had their joy for their work renewed by younger mentees.

Victor and Yuri had 12 episodes to get to know each other - Yanase and Kaneda, unfortunately, only had 150+ pages. Yanase was a great character - in comparison, Kaneda was much less fleshed out. I really wanted to see more of both of them. I especially wanted Kaneda to have more of an on-page chance to show that he was learning to think of Yanase as a real person and not just his unapproachable CG designer idol. Presumably they had plenty of time to get closer and more comfortable with each other during the time between chapter 5 and the bonus chapter (one would hope, since the bonus chapter is the volume's sex scene), but I needed more of that on-page. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd have traded the sex scene for more "Yanase and Kaneda getting to know each other."

I've seen this referred to as "volume 1" in couple places, but the volume itself doesn't say it. If there really is more to this, I'll absolutely read it if it gets released in English. On its own, this volume isn't quite enough, to a painful degree.

Extras:

One page of full-color artwork.