3 a.m. The lights are off. The airport is still.
A quiet light softens my silhouette over by my bed. These days, it’s my tablet. The light only goes as far as hilighting my face and a book which I’m wildly flipping with great fervor.
At that time of night, I’m only reading one thing. At that time of night, I want things hard, heated, ruthless, and maybe a little cute. While I have my usual staples of authors to read, for this one night, I grabbed Sex Nanka Kyoumi Nai, hoping I’d have something crazy.
As usual, I thought wrong. When was I ever right about manga?
(Note: images after the cut may be NSFW)Â
Sometimes, sex doesn’t mean a thing
Reading porn in the middle of a night is a wonderful exercise to put my brain in the gutter and turn it into the messy gunk that it is. Nothing relaxes me more than a good sexy josei, a smutty BL, and a desperate H-manga. Sometimes, I grab a racy seinen. But years of Golden Boy reading has set my standards so high on the seinen ecchi genre that I usually shy from ecchi seinen titles.
Nowadays, after you’ve read the first one, they tend to be the same. If they’re not doing S&M, it’s a harem orgy waiting to happen.
Still, I had hopes that Sex Nanka Kyoumi Nai would follow those tropes. Instead, I felt guilty for thinking of sex as a passing entertainment.
Apparently, for some people, sex does mean something.
Sex is never really about sex, is it?
Reality bites me after the first volume and I realize that this title, erotic as it appeared, had little interest in the very act itself but was more concerned with the bonds that tie people towards the act.
The title says it all. “I’ve got no interest in sex.” And this translates well against the erotic backgrounds of first love, curiosities, heartbreaks, trust, and dominance.
The comic is mostly a compilation of people’s sexual affairs, reminiscent of H-manga tropes but they managed to veer the attention away from the sex and focus on the people. It seems that Kizuki Akira and Satou Nanki explored sexual themes frequently through titles like Ichigo no Gakkou and Usotsuki Paradox. I’ve only read Ichico no Gakkou and while that title had an interesting scenario solution to the old H fantasy of screwing your student and getting her pregnant, Sex Nanka Kyoumi Nai focused more on the intense emotions and motivations that surround the sexual act.
But that isn’t exactly new, isn’t it? Well, Kizuki and Satou’s execution makes an entire difference. The two of them tore people from pages of H-manga and made them characters who have lives beyond the NTR, bondage, and incest. Depending on the situation, Kizuki’s innocent moe style becomes dirtied, at times, even violated. But when Satou’s story kicks in, the once faceless hentai character turns into someone quite real. At times, strangely, someone you can suddenly relate to. You feel their fears, curiosities, apprehensions, and insecurities. Â You also feel their strengths, courage, and affections. It’s a title that faces the problem and the circumstance of sex head on. It is fearless in capturing the repercussions of our sexual decisions and our sexual responsibilities. At the same time, I feel its fear in how sex has made ‘sex’ uninteresting because of how we’ve consumed it.
I enjoyed this series a lot. It’s still erotic enough to put a blush on my face and strong enough to make me reflect on my own decisions towards my own kinks. It reminds me that at the end, there are still two or three or more people who can get affected by one intimate act which we can easily take for granted. In this day and age where sex has lost its magic, Sex Nanka Kyoumi Nai highlights our disillusion, our entertainment, and our ongoing love and hate affair with sex.
It still turned out to be a nice 3 a.m. read.
Series Information
Sex Nanka Kyoumi Nai by Kizuki Akira (art) and Satou Nanki (story)
Published by Shogakukan
Serialized in Ikki
Buy at Amazon.co.jp, Honto.jp
