Creative Staff
Story/Art: Kobato Takahashi
What They Say
When you’re reunited with a childhood crush years after innocent love first blossoms, it’s best to keep your cool! But what if an irresistible attraction springs up in the place of sweet memories? Can reality ever be as exciting as cherished fantasies?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After reading Kobato Takahashi’s Stardust Traffic work, I was definitely looking forward to seeing how the standalone story compilation would play out. Stardust Traffic offered a series of interconnected stories within a location, less so about characters, that manages to engage you with the kinds of varied lives that existed there. With Sweet Emotions, we don’t get that light connection but instead just a number of stories of young love and lust that sometimes makes the big connection while at others times falls a bit short, which is a nice change of pace. What’s also interesting with this work is that combines a lot of material from different sources and times of creation, so you can see the overall evolution of Takahashi’s work. A lot of it definitely feels like early material though as there isn’t quite the polish there and a decent roughness that sometimes works in its favor.
One of the main themes of this volume is that people are very interested in each other but there’s an inability to actually say it, which leads to awkward situations. Such is the case with the opening story of Hagari and Nozomi. She’s enjoying having a sexual relationship with him while not having it as any more than that after the two neighbors first met at a bar and had a good time together. As the months went on though, Hagari finds that he wants more out of her but realizes that he’s just one of many men in her life that she does this with. Made worse by the fact that he hears it through the thin walls between their apartments. There’s an amusing twist to it all of course, but it works out in an interesting way as we see him with struggling with the idea of losing her by admitting his feelings or just going as long as he can since he knows it can’t last one way or the other. There’s naturally some fun sex amid all of it, but I liked the honest friends with benefits issue that arrived in it and seeing how much it bothered him.
Another story that works a similar idea of communication involves a young man named Serizawa and his female boss, Kirishima. They’re keeping their relationship secret for obvious reasons but even when they’re together, she seems to be holding back a lot. Enough so that she never spends the night and that worries him. When he does manage to convince her to go on an overnight trip to a hotel, he works his hopes to find out how she really feels. Naturally, there’s some confusion about what the real issue is, which is that Kirishima is a real gusher in bed and that’s kept her from really letting herself go all the way with him because she finds it too embarrassing and it’s caused issues in other relationships. That, of course, is like a challenge for Serizawa and the two end up in a really fun way throughout it. Communication is always an issue to some degree but it’s a great and positive moment as we see how once she admits the truth, the two end up in a far better and more meaningful relationship.
Secrets also populated another story that I really enjoyed as we get to meet the couple with a young lady named Kana and a guy we only know as Teach. He was her tutor when she was younger, but nothing happened even though she was quite interested in him. They ended up getting together as adults, though there’s still several years between them, and she amusingly keeps referring to him as Teach even though he doesn’t quite like it. The problem is that he’s best friends with her older brother and he hates keeping the relationship secret. But with his own rough and tumble past as a hooligan, he can’t imagine him wanting him dating his sister. With a big change in his life coming through that puts him in a respectable place, it’s fun to see how he wants to come clean with his friend about it, but when he goes to their house to do just that, Kana gets a good run at him first in her room, which is all manner of great and wrong in a lot of ways. It’s good, silly fun but it has some great sex in it as Teach really redoubles his efforts with her after finding a good future ahead of him.
In Summary
With ten stories of love, sex and romance here, Sweet Emotions has a lot of good stuff going on here. It’s fairly standard sized chapters to be sure and that means it has a good mix of story and sex to pull it all together with. Takahashi’s artwork definitely isn’t quite as detailed or polished as some artists out there, but it has a good sense of fun throughout it that helps to work past that a bit, even with the original work censoring that was provided here. That’s less of an issue for me than some as it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story or the situations. Some stories naturally work better than others, but I like the variety we get here and that once again it’s a work that pretty much avoids doing anything in college or school based for the most part. Dealing with adults, relationships and varied sex is so much better.
Content Grade: B-
Art Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: B-
Text/Translation Grade: B
Age Rating: 18+
Released By: Project-H Books
Release Date: March 12th, 2014
MSRP: $17.95
