Naomi Aoki, $0.99, ISBN 978-1386197447
Romantic Suspense, 2017
Naomi Aoki’s Dangerous Lessons is a genuine first entry into the series The Yakuza and the English Teacher. The story in here will continue in the next entry, so it’s a series series we’re talking about here.
It is a common joke, or maybe a truth coached as a joke, that expatriate English teachers are in Japan just to live out their weeabo fantasies of finding a Japanese partner or a collection of sex dolls, whichever comes first, while pretending to be a native Japanese all this while.
His decision to come to Japan and teach English had been an easy one having always had a fascination with the country—history, language, and pop culture.
Despite that red flag, for James McKay, this stereotype isn’t true… mostly because he doesn’t have much of a personality to begin with to mark him as anything at all. He is quite new to the scene and is immediately pegged to be pegged by our Yakuza bad boy older man Gou Kitayama.
Yes, this story is set in Japan, but for some reason, the locals adhere to the gaijin system when it comes to names. Guess sometimes wanting to shag a Japanese doesn’t always mean you also respect the culture.
This story has a lot of Yakuza drama, which allows Jamie to get into trouble a lot and Gou puffing up his chest and insisting that Jamie is his, his, his.
All this would have been fine if the author hadn’t skipped a few important steps when it comes to the romance. Gou sees Jamie for the first time and flies immediately into “Mine! Mine! My one and only best onahole!” Jamie sees Gou and immediately starts having wild and horny dreams about him.
In other words, the romance jumps from hello to “MINE! MINE! MINE!” in the blink of an eye, and this is not the most believable love story as a result. Instead, it comes off like a romance done by an author that has to catch a flight so she’s making some drastic short cuts in her story.
Still, things may not still be so bad had this been an erotic romantic suspense and the author planned to up the heat to make up for the lack of relationship… wait, is that a fade to black love scene? There goes the one last chance this story had to salvage the romance…
Meanwhile, the more dramatic moments aren’t too interesting either, because I have little emotional investment in the poorly drawn main characters. Jamie has no personality, he is whatever reaction that is needed in a particular moment in the story, so his whole shtick boils down to “horny, blinking, stammering damosel in distress”. As for Gou, he’s just “Yakuza” and “MINE!!!” with just a very thin string linking these two words.
My overall reaction to this story is indifference. The main characters and their story never come alive at all for me, despite how the author had so many opportunities to make me care in this pretty long story—the $0.99 price tag is a “special price for the introduction to a series, hoping that you’ll be hooked to buy the rest of the more normally-priced stories in this series” thing, instead of a reflection of its length.
The whole thing just screams “accelerated-speed fan fiction”, and I can’t imagine how this dead and flat romance is capable of sustaining my interest over a few titles. So, I’m here, and now I’m out.
