When former yakuza Genji rescued a helpless leopard cub five years ago, he never imagined the creature would grow into a shapeshifter with the form of a beautiful young man.

Koshiro doesn't remember where he came from or what he truly is--but he knows one thing: everything in him longs for Genji. As Koshiro's body changes and his instincts awaken, a new kind of yearning stirs between them--one that neither of them fully understands.

His Little Amber has a story by and art by KAZKI NATSUME. English translation is done by Nomnom Namako with an adaptation by Krista Grandy and lettering by Elena Pizarro. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (March 24, 2026). Rated M.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

A lot is going on in His Little Amber that makes it one of the odder BL romances I've read for the Guide thus far. Koshiro is a leopard cub when Genji picks him up in the winter of 2000. Unsurprisingly, he's able to transform into a human boy. By 2005, when the story takes place, he's an adult (both human and leopard). According to the laws of shifter romance, he goes into rut (heat is for lady animals, authors!), and of course, he can only be sated if Genji manually gets him off. But then, suddenly, two angels show up? And Koshiro is Koh, a fallen angel who has done his time as a leopard shifter on earth? What? Where the hell did that come from?

Look, manga, I can handle weird shifter stuff. I can kind of deal with spouse-raising as a tried-and-true (or is that tired-and-true) literary trope. But shifters who are actually fallen angels out of absolutely nowhere? I feel like this is my bridge too far. It practically has Chuck Tingle energy, but without the self-aware humor.

Really, though, the bigger issue here is that there's no sense of flow to the story. It's one thing for it to open in 2025 and go into a flashback. It's another for the plot to be jumping around, throwing plot points in the air like a child with confetti. There's no firm sense of what happened when, how fast Koshiro actually grew, and how Genji feels about him. Genji's work as a…something related to the yakuza (I think he's a black marketeer, but I'm not certain) definitely ties into his tragic past, but not in the way that makes the most sense. It feels like the entire plot is precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff, ready at any moment to tumble down into the Seas of Nonsense.

The art is quite nice. It's also largely uncensored, and the characters have a good sense of solidity to their bodies. Panels can get busy, but that works with the overall writing, so it's not too much to complain about. The translation is also clearly trying its best to make everything work. It's just that the plot itself is so out there that it ended up not working for me. I couldn't find a foothold, and no matter what the genre, that's a problem.

Bolts
Rating:

I'm sure a lot of us wish that we could just pick up a lost animal that could eventually turn into an incredibly sexy figure of primal attraction. No? Just me? Well, that's what Genji, a rather troubled older gentleman, finds himself in when he randomly adopts a leopard who turns into a young man who doesn't know what masturbation is. It is funny that you can almost frame it as a stepfather and stepson type of dynamic, right down to the older of the two teaching the other how to masturbate like out of a more traditional porno. But the book never really focuses on that, probably because there's already enough drama going on here that it doesn't want to muddy the water with even more complicated situations.

I will say I wasn't expecting the story itself to be this complicated. You can break this down to a story about an old man who lost his wife and is part of a dark underground, needing to find a way to move on with this new light in his life. But a lot is going on in the background that eventually informs the relationship of the main duo to the point where the series ends up feeling a lot more plot-driven than I was originally assuming. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it does become an issue when it starts taking away from the more believable human drama. In fact, there isn't even really a sex scene in the story so much as there are just a lot of weirdly paneled masturbation scenes.

There are people turning animals, there's the old school mafia, gun trades, dead wives, and angels, because why the hell not? The funny thing is, despite all of these different story elements, none of them really grabbed me that much, and I think it's because it felt like the story was spending way too much time establishing groundwork without actually creating a genuine hook. By the time a certain plot point gains traction, the story introduces a new one, and that would end up dominating the narrative. By the time the book ends, it just sort of stops in the middle of the action, and now I'm supposed to sit here with bated breath, waiting for volume two. But I don't really feel a lot of excitement. I think this is a perfectly fine story with a lot of distinct elements that probably make it stand out, but in terms of being an actually emotional story on its own, I feel like it falls a bit short.