Kei Kitahara, a visionary screenwriter who has taken postwar Japan by storm, has made the difficult decision to lay down his pen for good after he realizes the people he's been basing his characters on have all met unfortunate ends. He spends his days in misery, waiting to die, until a reason to live finds him in the gutter, too drunk and beaten to move. Kei can't help but be attracted to his savior's bewitching innocence, and the urge to write about him grows stronger by the day. Knowing he can't take the risk, he vows never to use his pen against him, but will temptation prove too great?

Sleeping on Paper Boats has art and story by Teki Yatsuda. English translation is done by Adrienne Beck and lettering by Deborah Fisher. Published by SuBLime (October 14, 2025). Rated T+.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Although Sleeping on Paper Boats takes place almost twenty years after the end of World War Two, it's still a wartime story. Or maybe even a war story – it may not be set on the battlefields of that conflict, and soldiers are peripheral characters, but both Kei and Yo are the walking wounded, if not the walking dead, and the war is inextricably tied up in that. The two men are the lone survivors of a trolley wreck that occurred when an army jeep driven by a U.S. soldier crashed into the train. They have scars both visible and invisible, and Kei especially feels like Death has been his constant companion ever since.

He means that literally – Kei sees Death everywhere. In his eyes, the reaper is his child self, covered in blood and burns with skeletal hands. He whispers into Kei's ears, driving him to write award-winning screenplays, but every person he bases a character on dies. Or at least, that's how Kei perceives it; while there are certainly deaths that happen around him, what role he actually plays in them is unclear. He's convinced that his words have done it, that writing plays with Death as his muse robs people of their lives, but the truth of that is suspect. Certainly his boss thinks so, because he uses Kei's fear and depression to force him to write a screenplay based on himself - basically offering Kei a way to kill himself. Does the man actually want Kei to die? I highly doubt it; he probably thinks he's proving a point. But Kei believes, and that may be enough.

This volume is mostly Kei's. Yo, the other survivor, does get a chapter all to himself, but he seems to exist more as an outsider despite the fact that he and Kei are sleeping together and falling in love. Yo's life is no bed of roses, either; after his mother died in the wreck, he was raised by the other women at the brothel she worked at, a profession that's illegal in the 1960s of the main story. If Kei sees himself as Death's pen, Yo feels like he doesn't have the right to exist before meeting Kei: he's an empty shell for other people to fill up. If you think that this makes for an unhealthy relationship between the two men, you're not wrong, but it's more complex than that. Everything in this story is tangled up like old yarn, and it may take scissors to sort it out.

With its dark, busy art that does a good job of capturing the feel of mid-century, post-war Yokohama, Sleeping on Paper Boats is the sort of book you put down not intending to pick up again, but can't stop yourself from going back to. That's a good metaphor for the relationship between Kei and Yo, too, and maybe the entire world of the series. They truly are on a paper boat, just waiting for the water to dissolve it; an anticipation of the inevitable that doesn't guarantee a happy ending.

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

One of the great things about doing the Manga Guide is it's not just a preview for my audience; it's one for me too. It's an opportunity to read a lot of manga that have caught my eye and get a sense for whether it's worth spending money on. I've found a lot of great series this way! But on occasion, it helps me weed out volumes that I would have been unhappy to have sacrificed my hard-earned cash on.

Enter Sleeping on Paper Boats.

Historical BL with stunningly beautiful tortured men? Oh, heck yeah! A rating of “Older Teen” indicates that there will probably be some sexy time on the page. Sign me up! I would have jumped to purchase this if I weren't getting paid to write about it.

Despite all that, I will not be purchasing this or any future volumes of Sleeping on Paper Boats.

Don't get me wrong, the art is stunning. It's on the realistic side, as befitting the historical setting and serious subject matter. The dense, detailed backgrounds bring the feeling of postwar Japan to life as a time of major social change and booming artistic creation. This is the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and Kei Kitahara is in the middle of it as a wunderkind screenwriter. Teki Yatsuda clearly wants to depict him as a sensuous, bespectacled beauty, what with his full lips and tousled hair. Much of the time, they succeed. Whether he's sitting at his desk, being tortured by the specter of death, or looking at his boyfriend Yoichiro's photos, Kei is a sexy man.

The sex scenes show just as much technical mastery of the human form, yet somehow they're unbearably sterile. There's no sensuousness to the way they physically interact with one another, no weight or sweat or… gripping. It's utterly passionless, with physical contact but no real touch. Mechanical and lifeless.

But hey, maybe the sex scenes aren't important to you. You're not here to deposit in the spank bank, nor do you really consider characters' sexual relationships to be important to a romance. Well, if you're disregarding that, the plot… also isn't very good! I mean, the ideas are good. Kei and Yo's inability to escape their past, the way they cling to each other, the specter of death tormenting Kei as their relationship takes a dark turn – it's brimming with potential. But the story moves so fast that there's no time for a moment to land. The narrative is stifled by Kei's repetitive monologues about how he is possessed by death, while I feel like I barely knew anything about his relationship with Yo. The dialogue is embarrassingly purple, clearly aiming for “literary” but landing in “pretentious and overwrought” instead.

On paper, Sleeping on Paper Boats sounded exactly like something I would throw myself into joyfully. But instead? I sleep.