What comes to mind when I say the words boys love?
Is it the now it’s humorous, now it’s angsty worlds of Junjou Romantica and Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi, or the adult dramas like Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love series?
How about the bright comedic fun of Love Stage or an older series like Gravitation?
Whatever you thought of—Given is something entirely different.
Ritsuka is a talented teenage guitarist. He’s good enough that he’s in a band with two twenty-somethings: Haruki the bassist, and Akihiko, the band’s drummer.
Lately, Ritsuka has lost his edge. After starting out as a teen phenom with his guitar playing, at 16 he’s lost his enthusiasm and doesn’t know why.
A mysterious transfer student starts following Ritsuka around, asking him to teach him how to play the guitar.
This transfer student—named Mafuyu—is a little weird at first. He has a deer in the headlights stare and doesn’t express himself easily. He owns an expensive electric guitar, and Ritsuka wonders why he has it if he doesn’t even know how to play it.
Eventually—maybe out of boredom—Ritsuka agrees to teach Mafuyu a little guitar. Mafuyu tells him there’s a melody that keeps running through his head, and one day, he sings it in a wordless la-la-la way to Ritsuka.
Ritsuka is amazed to hear the quality of Mafuyu’s voice. He invites Mafuyu to session with him and the rest of the band.
Given is not for the impatient. The story moves an inch or two per episode, with Mafuyu’s past being revealed little by little. It’s a tale of young love and the loss of a loved one to suicide, which explains Mafuyu’s numbness and inability to show emotion.
As Ritsuka gradually realizes his feelings for Mafuyu, none of the hijinks one usually sees in teenage BL stories happens. There’s no mixed signals, no stupid misunderstandings that blow up into crises. Even the female classmate who’s attracted to Ritsuka and divulges Mafuyu’s past to him, hoping to get him to reject Mafuyu, is later ashamed of what she did.
Every character in the story is treated with dignity, including Haruki and Akihito, the twenty-somethings who each work three part-time jobs to support themselves as they pursue music as a career. Haruki is silently attracted to Akihiko who still lives with his ex-boyfriend Ugetsu, but without the relationship part anymore, as Ugetsu now dates another.
Mafuyu joins the band as rhythm guitarist and vocalist. For their initial performance as a foursome, he’s tasked with putting lyrics to the melody he’s brought to the band. He tries to find the words, but finally tells them he couldn’t.
On the night of the performance, the rest of the band assumes they’re going to play the song as an instrumental, but as the song begins Mafuyu opens his mouth and starts to sing.
It’s an astonishing vocal performance, raw and emotional. The slow build over nine episodes reaches its climax in this song, and all one can do is watch, open-mouthed and in tears, with chills running down one’s spine, as Mafuyu finally expresses all his feelings about his lost lover.
Given is only eleven episodes, but the manga story is continuing and a movie is in the works for 2020. With its unusual—for boys love—gravitas and adult-level regard for its characters, I’ll be there to watch whatever comes next.
