Blood Honey+ Manga Review

Content:

Yuki Akabane is a young man working as a nurse whose primary job is to draw blood.  His main purpose for this is because he’s a vampire… sort of.  Yuki is a distant descendant of vampires, which means he has none of their powers or weaknesses, but he is fond of the taste of blood.  Soon, he finds himself running into a man by the name of Osamu Mayuzumi who seems to have an addiction to donating blood.  By chance, Yuki discovers that the man’s blood is delicious, and as such he begins to draw his blood regularly off the books.  Eventually, though, Osamu stops showing up, and Yuki is confronted by his superiors for his actions, offering to let him off if he gives himself to him… sexually.  Before that can happen, though, Osamu bursts in and beats the hell out of the doctor.  It turns out that Osamu was donating blood in order to keep his hot-blooded personality under control (it doesn’t make sense, but whatever) and he only trusts Yuki to draw his blood.  Then they decide to have sex and become a couple.

In the second chapter, Yuki and Osamu are forced to part, and our perspective changes to Osamu as he tries to keep his hot blood under control in his new school.  Osamu soon runs into problems as a student named Kiri Kurosu, who looks suspiciously like Yuki, tries to seduce him.  As things progress, Osamu’s hot blood becomes stronger and stronger and he comes close to having sex with Kiri, but stops short and declares that he can’t betray Yuki.  Then Yuki pops up and explains that Kiri is his nephew (who has more vampire blood and slight attractive powers) and he was simply testing Osamu to see if he loved him or just his needle.

In the third chapter, our perspective shifts to that of Kiri.  He decides to start bugging Osamu and Yuki, but they quickly send him off to get disciplinary training at a temple from Osamu’s friend Taro Yamada.  Kiri thinks things will be easy and he can simply use his seductive powers on Taro, but they are ineffective and he is forced to do a good amount of manual labor.  Kiri soon becomes fed up and tries to escape using his followers from school but in the process overhears that they more or less consider him to be nothing but a whore.  He breaks down and runs back to Taro, which, despite Kiri’s breakdown involving him giving out sex too easily, results in the two having sex.

The fourth chapter is pretty much just pointless, questionably written smut.  It details how Osamu and Taro met, which comes down to the still very hot blooded  Osamu constantly challenging Taro until Taro suggests he proves his commitment by having them jerk each other off.  Yup.

The beginning of Blood Honey seems to be striving to tell something of a story, detailing the romance of Yuki and Osamu as they stumble together, even though it is a tad loose in its narrative.  In the first half, they might reach close to some graphic scenes, but they carefully avoid crossing the line into pornography.  This starts to culminate in Kiri’s chapter as he comes to some realizations about himself, but then it all comes crashing down and the rest of the book is more or less just pointless sex.  And even then, the actual smut is limited to a handful of panels and not even shown in a great amount of detail.  It’s a shame, as if the book had focused on the story it could’ve been a decent romance, and if it had focused on the smut it could’ve at least been a decent sexual tool, but as is it just ends up falling short in each regard.