Delivery for You: sometimes you just need yaoi!

 

Guys! Sound the yaoi alarm, because I have read what? More yaoi. Exactly what I deserve really. Today it’s Delivery for You by Teku Rin. Something I will quickly say, when it comes to BL and manga, I think the art style dictates how into something I’ll be or how interested I will be. I don’t want to be reading something where the characters look weird – and thankfully they didn’t here.

The blurb says that Izumi Fukaya is a shut-in bachelor whose only joy in life is seeing the handsome delivery man who drops off his packages every day. Every time Ryouta Tsuchiya arrives with another delivery, the contents of the boxes are only half the excitement. Determined to make himself seem cooler to match Tsuchiya, Fukaya has yet to realise that Tsuchiya already thinks he’s the whole package – and they’re both about to find out the already have everything they want right in front of them!

The very first thought I had when I saw the concept of this BL was that it reminded me of the side couple, Tsuge and Minato, in Cherry Magic, where Tsuge isn’t so much a shut-in, but he’s very introverted and you only see him and Minato meet and getting to know each other when Minato delivers stuff to Tsuge, and Tsuge tries to keep seeing him by ordering more stuff. Anyway, love the concept.

We open on Fukaya finishing up work at this laundry shop that he works at and rushing home so that he can get this figure he’d pre-ordered six months ago. But not only is he excited for the figure, he’s excited to get to see the super-hot delivery guy as well. Fukaya sees Tsuchiya as many things he’s not – a phrase he uses himself – and he wants to get a face and body like Tsuchiya’s, so ends up buying a bunch of stuff, just so that he gets to look at him for a bit longer. Those feelings do eventually develop into actual liking and loving. Fukaya wants the hot boy, and he’s honestly so right for that. But because he has such a low opinion of himself, he then aims to make himself “cooler”, and the woman who owns the laundry place he works at tells him to start with his body.

The entire manga is just one volume in four chapters. I think I read the entire thing in maybe half an hour. Mind you, when I got it, I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ll dedicate my day off to reading it”, thinking that I’d need like an hour plus – which I have for other manga. Did not think it would be over so quickly. I knew that it wasn’t going to be especially deep – which it wasn’t, in the slightest. You do learn little bits about both Fukaya and Tsuchiya, like that Fukaya is a shut-in who loves manga and video games, and that Tsuchiya did horrendously in school, so no universities would take him, and that he has a brother and a grandma. That’s more or less every detail, and I’m not even joking. But it was a cute little thing over four chapters where, like the blurb says, the two of them have what they want in front of them. What they feel they lack in themselves, they see in the other. Tsuchiya sees that Fukaya is always thinking, overthinking where he isn’t. Fukaya realises that for all of his overthinking and assumptions about Tsuchiya, Tsuchiya hadn’t made a single assumption about Fukaya and only saw him for what he was presenting. Oh, and then they sleep together at the end of it, because why not? They love each other. I enjoyed it as a quick little read – I much prefer manga that has already completed serialisation over something that seems to just keep going.

Then there was also two chapters of another story called The Real Reason Why We Aren’t Popular. You don’t get a blurb for this, and it’s a completely different story to Delivery for You. This one is about Natsume and Igarashi who have started university, came from the same high school, but have totally different vibes. Natsume has a sporty vibe and really struggles in crowds and talking to people, whereas Igarashi comes off super chatty, super charismatic, but everyone thinks he’s just there to sleep with a bunch of women. They both have a common interest that they want to get a girlfriend. Now I will pose one question: Why is there heterosexuality in my good Christian yaoi that may or may not have shown a man getting fingered a few pages before? Anyway, turns out that everyone thought that since Natsume and Igarashi were so close that they were actually together – it was that trope. But because Natsume was on the baseball team in high school, he’s the built one, and also not weird, so girls were drawn to him more and then eventually you see Igarashi getting jealous of girls giving him attention, instead of Natsume giving it to him.

Finally, the yaoi finishes with a final little bonus chapter of Fukaya and Tsuchiya and Fukaya once again worrying. It didn’t really add much, but once again, it was cute.

This does follow the trend of every other BL that I’ve read that seems to finish in a small number of volumes – I don’t know how to break it to everyone that one is a small number, sadly – is that you don’t really get to know the characters all that much. I’ve said it many times before that it’s just something that comes with the genre. Obviously, more volumes and more content would allow you to know everyone better, but if you can tell the story successfully in a shorter time, I don’t really see an issue. The whole story was literally just about Fukaya and Tsuchiya, so there didn’t need to be an outside world that was built. I don’t think Fukaya really needed friends or family, because I don’t know what it would have added. I am aware that it would have added more depth to his character to see his family dynamic, but in the context of a single-volume manga, I don’t think it would have been necessary. So, yes, more volumes and content would have let us know the characters better, but that’s the case with every manga.

I really enjoyed this for what it was – a cute little one-shot kind of story.

Okay, bye!