It's yaoi time with Seven Days Monday - Sunday

Sometimes you just need yaoi, and that’s how I came to reading this, Seven Days Monday to Sunday by Venio Tachibana. This wasn’t actually the first Seven Days book that I saw online. I don’t remember which the first was, but with the other one that I found, it gave me the impression that it wasn’t finished, even though it may well have been.

The blurb says that on a whim, high school third-year Yuzuru Shino asks out first-year Toji Seryo, who is notorious for being a weeklong lover – he’ll date the first girl to ask him out Monday morning and promptly dump her by the following Monday! The boys start dating, and by Tuesday, the first inklings of attraction hit. Can these two put words to their feelings before Monday comes, or are old habits too hard to break?

First of all, absolutely loved the concept of this because I knew exactly what was going to happen. Like, the divas were going to say, “Nope, we’ve only got one week, and we’ll break up at the end of it.” But obviously, they were going to not want to break up by the end. Mama, that’s just how these things go. That’s why I love romance so much. I know what’s going to happen, and nine out of ten times, it’s always the same, and everyone is going to end up, if not happy, then better than they were before. Like, even if they don’t end up together, they’ll be happy, or it’ll make sense that they’re not together. Something I will say, I’m sure I’ve seen this exact trope done somewhere else. The version I’ve got came out in 2019, but the internet tells me that it was originally published (in English) back in 2010, but just as Monday to Thursday, and the last days came out in 2011. So, this has been around for years – a literal decade – but I just don’t remember where I saw it elsewhere. I know it was in one of the BL shows I’ve watched where there must have been a character who did the same thing, and I know this is going to bother me.

Shino has gotten into the school on an archery scholarship. And Hoka, the school, used to be an all-girls school with the middle school attached to it still being all girls, so a lot of the student are, as the manga puts it, sheltered rich girls with a limited perception on what boys are normally like – as in not all rich and princely. Shino ends up being the first person to see Seryo on Monday morning because he’s waiting outside the school for a pizza – which is wild in concept. He mentions his class is in study hall, which fine, but why are we ordering pizza first thing on a Monday morning? Just in general on a Monday I can understand, but first thing? Mamas, we’re in high school, and we haven’t pulled an all-nighter. It was wild. Seryo ends up pulling up, so shockingly, like the blurb says, Shino asks him out for the fun of it, but doesn’t expect Seryo to actually say yes, and the two end up starting to date.

You see dribs and drabs from both POVs, since there’s very limited space. You see the reason that Seryo gives everyone seven days is that he’s explicitly trying to find love, and he ends up breaking up with people after that week after he doesn’t develop feelings. My logic is that that’s wild. Why are you dating people in hopes you’ll develop feelings. It makes me think of Van from Head2Head, how he asked Farm to be his boyfriend in hopes that he’d grow to love him. And that he only asked him out because he didn’t want to lose Farm to anyone else. Anyway, getting back to this, Seryo asks Shino his first name, or his given name (Yuzuru), because since his older brother, who I don’t think got named, was in a relationship with a girl also called Shino and she’d basically throw herself at him, rather than his brother – who she was actually with. Even though it seemed like he’d cut things off completely with her, she’d stuck around because she’d gotten back with his brother, but even then, it seemed like she was still trying to get Seryo. I don’t know, she felt weird to me, as a character.

The version that I have is a singular volume, so my expectation was that it was going to fall into the same pit as every other singular volume BL, or limited volume BL, where there just isn’t enough space to fully explore the characters. That you just get what you get. And this was very much the same, which I fully expected. Shino and Seryo seemed like they moved very fast – admitting they loved each other at the end of the week. I’d say that’s a spoiler, but this has been out for long enough. That was… a choice. A week? Boys? I could understand the logic of not wanting to break up at the end of the week because they had been through some things together, and were really seeing the other for who they were – getting to know each other – but fully in love? Let’s be serious. Let’s stay playful together. I think this would have worked much better had they not said love, and that they just wanted to not break up. Saying that, I did like how it went at the end. They broke up, like Seryo always does, but then immediately asked each other back out, that was cute. Like neither of them wanted the week to be over. Saying that, even in Seryo’s brain, you see at one point there’s no hard and fast rule that he breaks up with them by the end of the week. I think it was just that he thought about his feelings.

Now that I’ve read it, I don’t actually really remember learning much, if anything, about Shino, other than the fact he has a sister and that he used to (?) be in the archery club. Now, don’t get me wrong, I did write that he got into the school on an archery scholarship, but it didn’t seem like he went… ever? He got on Seryo’s case for skipping. There was definitely more backstory to Seryo than there was Shino. I think you saw more of who Shino was in the present, rather than his backstory. He was the type that girls would ask out because he was hot, but his personality ended up being the opposite, so they’d always dump him, thinking he’d disappointed them, kind of tying into the sheltered rich girls that populated the majority of the school.

I think I read this whole thing in an hour while listening to a country album, and despite the flaws I’ve mentioned, I still enjoyed it. It was a nice, easy little one-shot thing where two boys fell in love. What can I really complain about since I bought it with a gift card?

Okay, bye!