Plenty of good men to go around, but Kaya wants the bad boy.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Tomu Ohmi
Translation/Adaptation: JN Productions
What They Say
Kyohei has left the family firm to start his own business, and Kaya is at his side as his indispensible secretary…but only at night. By day she’s still the executive secretary for Erde, a subsidiary of the company Kyohei just quit. The increased workload isn’t a problem, but when the president of Erde discovers that Kaya is seeing an ex-Tohma Corp. executive, he starts to question her professional ethics! Will being vampire’s secretary put an end to her career?!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I knew it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that Kaya had been working two jobs for two competing companies. That someone just happens to be her current other boss Takasu, whose featured on the cover along with Kyohei for this volume. He’s certainly the better looking of the two, as Kyohei looks like an alien in that pose… or Benedict Cumberbatch. (I’m going to get hate comments over that statement, aren’t I?)
Kaya is at her most flustered during this entire volume. She sits in the middle of meetings between the two men as they try to outwit each other. Kyohei thinks he’s playing the foolish human, and all the while Takasu just smiles benevolently. I could tell from the start that he must have known about Kaya and Kyohei’s relationship, and continued to believe what he knew even after they deny it.
That doesn’t stop Takasu from proposing to Kaya.
I expected a love triangle at some point. However, Kaya doesn’t take the bait. She admits to Takasu that if she married him she’d probably be very happy! However, the heart does what it wants. The best part of the whole confession is that he let’s the offer stand and brings it up again, in front of Kyohei, after Kaya finally decides to end her working relationship with Erde and Tohma Corp to go work exclusively with Kyohei’s new company. You know what Kaya? Takasu is too good for you.
Kyohei is such an asshole, and Kaya knows it! She berates herself over it, she has good men throwing themselves at her, and yet she keeps going back to Broody McJackass. We get it, the sex is great, but he’s an abusive and controlling brat of a man, forget the vampire stuff. Kaya is practically the poster child for a relationship abuse hotline by now. Kaya is hopeless, she knows, she resolves to be hopeless and wracked with jealousy and confused about the lines she keeps drawing to define her strange relationship. Even the author seems fed up with Kaya’s foolhardiness, and she’s writing the damn woman’s personality! This is what happens when your characters take on lives of their own.
Not that Kyohei is any better with his emotions. He’s breaking all sorts of rules and convincing himself it’s because he likes watching people dance to his tune. Yeah, he’s fallen hard, of course he has. This is a romance story, he has to have some redeeming qualities at some point. He just wants to be the bad boy, sure. Too bad his actions and words speak otherwise.
It was only a matter of time before the vampires made a return to the story in a proper way. After all, it’s Kyohei’s culture that is supposedly causing the issues we’re seeing in him. The break from Tohma Corp marks a turning point in the story. Kaya thought she had her situation figured out, but then she meets Kyohei’s associates. It’s clear going forward that this clash of societies is going to be the new obstacle to this relationship. Duty and pride over what the heart wants.
Marika is a girl you want to hate the second you meet her. She is the perfect catty, stuck up vampire, and acts like Kyohei’s girlfriend. He’s reaction to her certainly doesn’t seem cordial, but they appear to be intimate with each other anyway. I would guess there’s some obligatory requirement of vampire society that the two are together at all. Only vampires can be lovers without strings attached, but humans are always food. Or at least that’s what Kaya surmises.
The big question is, how is Kaya going to deal with the other woman?
In Summary
Kaya is so frustrating. At least she realizes that everything she is going through is self inflicted. All of the work and sex and emotional turmoil is made more complicated by her not speaking her mind directly to the cause of it all. How I wish her elevator outburst had been heard by Kyohei. With the work situation finally straightened out, Kaya is free to devote herself entirely to her one and only, totally undeserving boss. Now she just has to break him free of his cultural bounds and tell off all his vampire clan buddies, that should be easy as pie, right? Good luck girl, you’ll need it!
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: March 4th, 2014
MSRP: $9.99