Sometimes you can stumble into the job of the lifetime – if you have the stamina.
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Sho Aoi
Translation/Adaptation: Steven LeCroy
What They Say
“We all have our kinky fetishes and secrets… What’s your favorite sex toy? Can you show us how it works? We all want to have some fun…”
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With a large influx of hentai manga arriving recently, I was glad to have a fair bit of material to sample and see what I could discover. With Sex Toys, I get my first experience with Sho Aoi and it worked out pretty well. What we get with this volume definitely works in its favor for me as the seven chapter run is all about one particular story. We also get a bonus unrelated chapter, but what works for me when I get exposed to a new creator is that I like to see what they can do with a longer view as opposed to a series of short stories that are predominantly about the festishes, the quick banging and moving on to a gag before ending the story. Sex Toys works even better in a way as each of the chapters covers one day in the lives of the characters involved so it has a decent sense of timing and progress about it.
With this storyline, we’re introduced to a young man named Kyosuke whose big dream is to be the best garcon in Tokyo. Unfortunately, he’s pretty bad at it and has worked at several restaurants with poor results so far. It’s nothing in particular but rather that he’s just not very talent at it and makes easy mistakes. What does him in is that at the current restaurant he’s at, he ends up tripping on something under the carpet and spills what he was carrying over a pair of very attractive young women. The expected moment hits as the manager is all apologetic and insists that he’ll fire him, but the women make the counter offer of hiring him themselves for their own project. Kyosuke is confused – and the layout of it all is pretty rushed so it’s certainly understandable – but Kyosuke now finds himself employed by them. And that’s dangerous because they run a company known as Lips Japan that they built from the ground up that specializes in women’s underwear and lingerie.
While the initial idea that he may just be their personal slave certainly isn’t a bad one to run with, what happens instead is that the women, sisters Ai and Mai, have been watching Kyosuke for a bit and intend to his him as their ideal model for a new sex toy for women that they want to build. Using bio-rubber and extensive research into how his body works in so many various situations, Kyosuke isn’t exactly eager for this since they put him through the wringer in a big way with multiple sexual encounters each day, albeit with a touch of science and measurement as the girls do their best to figure out how he works. Kyosuke is just caught up in it all since he’s just so deferential in general as part of his garcon training so it’s easy to see why he goes along with it. It’s not exactly willingly, and it’s hard to say he’s having fun, but he learns so much across it that you have to laugh at the various situations that the girls put him through.
It is primarily the elder sister Ai that does this and we see that there are some real feelings that are coming across there as well. Kyosuke is a little frantic at times with what they do, but you can see some affection growing there too. But when you get the story from Ai’s perspective for a bit and see what she’s experiencing while riding him as much as she can to gain more data, you also see the more human side of her. But there’s a cunning side as well that amusingly comes into play when Kyosuke’s girlfriend from the country comes to visit him, all dolled up to fit in with the Tokyo styles, and Ai does what she can to try and keep them separate. It’s Mai that sees through things clearly and there’s some cute twists with it since we see a bit of how Kyosuke and his girlfriend have misread each other for awhile as well, leading to some challenges while Ai conspires to keep Kyosuke to herself.
With a decent if simple storyline to work with, Sex Toys does well in that regard but it needs solid artwork and situations in order to make it really fun to read. Luckily, it pretty much hits the mark there as Sho Aoi has a really great style to his works with character designs that are nicely rounded and avoid being sticks. Some of the early layouts are a bit busy and overdone, but as the book moves along it definitely does things much better. The character designs are very appealing and since it works pretty much with just four characters, the focus is solid. The bulk of it works towards Ai and Kyosuke encounters, sometimes with Mai measuring things, and a couple of brief bits overall with the girlfriend, but the variety works nicely. While there’s a lot of good scenes, I really liked the way Ai and Kyosuke interacted with each other and their scenes definitely had a certain excitement about them with the intensity of it and the great character designs.
In Summary
With a standalone volume here, Sex Toys gives us a seven chapter story that runs across seven days with one young man caught up in a difficult situation of becoming a sex toy. I hadn’t read anything from Sho Aoi before but this introduction to his work definitely makes me interested in seeing what else he does. There’s a good sense of fun about many of the scenes even as Kyosuke is pushed to his body’s limits in order to gain the date the sisters need to build the ultimate sex toy. Which has its own hilarious reveal towards the end as the whole book goes kind of silly in order to get a happy ending. And a happy ending it is. There’s some very fun sex scenes in this, solid character designs and a sense of humor that made me laugh quite a few times at the predicament and the gags themselves. Definitely a fun book.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 18+
Released By: Project-H Books
Release Date: May 14th, 2014
MSRP: $17.95