Beauty and the Beast

[Excerpts from Jeanne:] "If you can have a comic take on a tragic situation, intercut with riffs from detective fiction, science fiction and a few other genres-- well, that's what you have here. ... At any rate, we have a journalist and newscaster, Suzuki Toranosuke, who hasn't worked in a while. Six years ago his scientist lover Shouichi, who'd been getting more and more engrossed in his research, failed bijinto4.jpgto come home one day, and Toranosuke's been on the skids since then. His long-suffering landlord, rather more of a flamboyant okama than Toranosuke, comes by to dun him for the several years' overdue rent on a regular basis. One day a teenager faints in front of his door. Toranosuke takes him in and starts the search for his identity."

The rest of Jeanne's excellent review can be found here.