A scrupulous vampire happy with his mundane life finds himself perpetually tested by his bored—and very unscrupulous—coworker.

Office worker and 40-year-old virgin Minoru Sayo lives a simple, perhaps boring, life—at least until the day he is turned into a vampire! Unable to bring himself to drink human blood, he satiates his overwhelming thirst with cats. But one night, after a disastrous mixer, Minoru is pushed to his limits when a junior colleague passes out drunk, neck exposed, while waiting for the train. Unable to resist, Minoru sneaks a taste. But all is not what it seems with his hapless coworker, and Minoru's life is about to take yet another unexpected turn!

May I Have a Taste? has a story and art by Amidamuku. English translation is done by Adrienne Beck and lettering by Kai Kyou. Published by SuBLime (April, 2026). Rated T+.

Content Warning: suicide ideation

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's a cruel edge to this book that I really dislike. Perhaps it's just baked into the plot – forty-year-old office worker Minoru Sayo is living a perfectly comfortable, ordinary life when he's randomly murdered one night…and wakes up as a vampire. He's both ashamed and miserable about his transformation, trying to continue his regular life by hiding his fangs with a mask and sipping on stray cats' blood in lieu of attacking humans. But when his younger coworker Yamadera discovers his secret, he begs to be turned as well. Yamadera is very keen on Sayo's new state of being, and he's determined to treat Sayo like a monster – and to make him turn Yamadera into a monster, too.

Seen from a certain angle, this is about one man who valued his life trying to find meaning in a new one and another man desperate to escape his own life by any means possible. They're diametrically opposed and barely communicating, and Yamadera continually ignores the fact (or possibly revels in it) that he's making Sayo uncomfortable. He's jealous of Sayo's transformation and needles the older man because of it, possibly hoping that he'll make Sayo mad enough to drain him. There's absolutely some suicide ideation going on here (and one actual suicide attempt), and Yamadera is lashing out because of his own pain, whatever that may be.

Had the book been billed as more dark drama than romcom, I might have liked it better. But the back copy makes it sound like a fluffy vampire BL, when that is very much not the case. Both Sayo and Yamadera are desperately unhappy, and they desire nothing more than to switch states of existence: Sayo wants to be human as much as Yamadera wants to be a vampire. Although the two ostensibly become closer over the course of the volume, it never feels like an equal relationship, romantic or otherwise. There are scenes of Sayo licking blood off of Yamadera's leg or sucking it from his finger, and these are decently sexy, but this isn't a book you pick up for the BL content. The art is busy and dense, which will doubtless look better on a printed page than in the digital review copy I read; I do think this is going to be a book better purchased in print.

May I Have a Taste? is trying to be a dark vampire romance. It gets the “dark vampire” bit down pretty well, but the romance part is lacking, unless you enjoy a sort of grim edge to your romance, in which case, you'll probably find a bit more to like.