i HATED chapter four, masamune is a moron, he is willing to let jin kill him and live with guilt forever, to protect a guy trying to kill him, and the feeligns of some stupid chick, and so jin wont be a "murdered" so instead jin being feeling guilt of killing some guy he doesnt care about masamune prefers if jin kills the man he loves. that makes COMPLETE sense...NOT!!!

Maeda-sensei's art is competent, but she improves somewhat in smoothness within her later pieces (with the notable exception of Temptation, which is surprisingly well done, considering it is dated 2005!). This 2007 collection had times where the anatomy was so awkward (such thick necks!) that I became distracted from the story. The emotional believability of her characters is also a bit off at times.

The stories have a pattern of great thought and care put into a deep, carefully paced and developed beginning and middle, and then--blam!--a glib ending. Slapped in, off-the-shelf type endings, almost as if the mangaka ran out of time.

There is also a strong pattern of 'love at first sight' and easily gained happy endings, which, with the great conflict at the beginning, carefully developed middle, ends up largely disappointing and superficial.

She does better in her modern day stories where she doesn't promise a lot. For example, the last story was light-hearted and fun, and that is all it ever promised. When she starts to get into deeper plots and psychologies and great historical eras, she can't maintain her genius.

The vast variety of historical time periods (and lovely, well researched backgrounds and outfits) is amazing, and the creative story 'large' concepts are wonderfully intriguing, but they all tend to unravel at the end, making the tight weaving at the beginning a waste.

All the stories were really cute, probably nothing too memorable though. I liked the 1st and 5th ones the best. And the last one was really funny XD I just wish some were longer, but hey, whatya gonna do?