Oyaji Romance Manga Selections

I consider myself an advocate of the delicious oyaji.  At least advocate sounds better than raving fangirl madly attempting to brainwash others. *ahem* As a follow-up to my oyaji BL manga primer, here’s a selection of great romance manga featuring older men.  Romance for adults.  Not necessarily the naughty kind, but the grown-up kind.

You’ll notice this list is much smaller, especially since I went ahead and independently covered a number of the titles.  Unfortunately, romancing older men isn’t a terribly common theme, at least not as the main focus of a manga. I don’t use the label “romance” lightly.  A genuine, powerful draw between two characters must be the main focus to make this list.  So here’s a selection of my favorite titles featuring an oyaji in a romantic story within some selected shoujo, josei, seinen, and BL manga.

Dowth may be like 1000 years old, but he’s still got it.

Love, Hate, Love. by Yamashita Tomoko

Love, Hate, Love.

“I can’t recover from hating something I once loved again.“

Love, Hate, Love. is a josei romance manga by the very talented and versatile Yamashita Tomoko.  That should be all that’s necessary to convince others to read it.  But in case it’s not, I have a little something more.  Truthfully, I wanted to make another detailed oyaji themed post, but I keep getting side-tracked by these great titles I want to include and end up covering them instead.  So it’s been a bit unbalanced with lots of josei manga lately.  But don’t worry (or breathe a sigh of relief), I’ll cover something raunchy to off-set it at some point~

February 2011 Manga Recommendations

It’s that time again–10 manga for the month of February (early~).  It’s a shoujo-y month apparently.  Some old, some new.  Some long favorites, some passing fancies.  All enjoyable.

February Manga Recommendations:

Oyaji BL Manga Primer

At some point, you get tired of reading manga about 16 year old kids.  You crave something different.  The further you get away from age 16, the more prominent this feeling can become.  Thankfully, there’s a trend within BL that gives us some grown, adult men and it’s been growing in popularity:  the oyaji!

“Oyaji” literally means father, but is also casually used to refer to middle-aged men. The lower age limit to qualify as an oyaji is typically early 30’s.  Common oyaji “cues” include visible signs of age like wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, an established family, and, of course, crotchety old man behavior (my favorite).   Within manga, there’s certain character types associated with this term.  The majority of oyaji seem to fall within the 30-45 year old range, particularly for BL.

Yamada Yugi teaches us oyaji moe points

First, if you’re completely new to this subgenre, here are some of the most highly regarded mangaka that reliably produce fantastic older men.  Their works are a great place to start and are relatively well-known, so I’ll only briefly mention a few of their relevant works.

• Ono Natsume (basso)- noticeably older, professional men
• est em – all types, very versatile
• Yamashita Tomoko – natural characters
• Suzuki Tsuta – one of the best at the gentle,  sweet type
• Nishida Higashi – mostly salarymen (this is a good thing).  Kudos for having real oyaji, including some in their 50s (and still hot!)
• Naono Bohra – her oyaji feel more fetishy, but there’s many and a wide range of them

This would be best titled “shin’s Oyaji BL Primer” because it isn’t all inclusive (too much!) and I’m blatantly playing favorites.  Hey, what can I say–it’s my blog and I think I have decent taste in oyaji. ♥ I’m not including everything, as I’d actually like to finish this list at some point (yet I know I’ll add to it later).  So this will be an overly large manga snippets post describing my favorite oyaji within those works.  And boy do I love my oyaji.

So here’s some hand-picked BL works that I’ve enjoyed which feature an older man, whether top, bottom, in the middle, on the side… I don’t discriminate!