Danny is an American teenager living in Japan. He came to Japan to improve his karate, but fell in love with Shinobu, master of a dojo.
1 Volume (Complete)






I thought the first half of the manga was great: funny, likeable characters, and some nice tension between the two guys. So what could go wrong? Namely: the mangaka foolishly tried to shoe-horn sex into the series when it would have been better off if it had stayed a cute shonen-ai series all the way through.
I say shoe-horn the sex in because it played out like any stereotypical rape scene between a domineering seme and his spineless uke. But guess what? Those kinds of scenes only work when we know from the get-go that the seme has a massive entitlement complex and the uke looks like a 12 year-old boy. Pick up a manga like that, and as a reader, you know right what's coming from the first page. But in this manga, you didn't actually have that: the uke is a highly skilled martial artist and the seme is a giant puppy dog. This type of seme never pounces on his uke, and that type of uke never allows himself to be pounced on. But the mangaka needed to have sex, so convoluted circumstances were introduced to make the seme "snap," and no explaination was given as to why the uke didn't resist. With all his karate skills, the uke should have been able to put up one hell of a fight, but instead we got a lame "Oh no, he's bigger and stronger than me..." Isn't the whole point of martial arts that size and strength don't have to matter? But I digress.
After we get our surprising sex scene, other things in the manga start going awry: the uke goes from level-headed to needlessly stupid. The seme's personality becomes inconsistent, switching from cute to serious and back again. And the plot takes a somewhat angsty turn. Why the angst and non-con? It was so abrupt and unexpected from what had previously been a mainly comic story that it changed my opinion on the manga from it being a keeper to one I deleted after finishing. It wasn't so bad that I felt like I was reading two different mangas, but there was definitely a (to me unpleasant) difference in tone and quality between the first and second half to the manga.
I read the whole thing but this manga just had nothing going for itself.
The art is ugly (but that's just me), the plot is extremely shallow and so are the characters.
Danny's non-japanese origin isn't even a theme here, the karate plot is not very detailed and not interesting either.
Depth is seriously missing here.
I honestly can't find any good points! I disliked the art, the characters and neither the plot nor the sex scenes were any good.
Only waste your time here if you are into karate love stories or you dig the art style, otherwise most other yaoi stories are going to provider better stories and better characterization.
I liked this a lot - from beginning to end. The seme is an American farm boy who, like the previous reviewer noted, is like a giant puppy dog, but that's part of his charm, IMO X3 I think it balances with the calm, serious demeanor of the uke sensei.