I Can’t Get Through the Night Alone is pretty paint by numbers BL but I enjoyed the plot contrivance, so it was an easy read and had some interesting ideas floating around in there. It’s 1950 and Seishiro is a former Japanese soldier who had a traumatic time during WWII and is working at a barman in a club. Jim is an American soldier with the occupying forces who spots Seishiro and basically falls immediately in love, then asks him to “date” him, with both men understanding that Seishiro is going out with him for access to money and better living conditions. They have to keep their relationship a secret and so Seishiro pretends to be Jim’s hired hand and moves into on-base housing with him, which seemed kind of wild regulations-wise. Jim seems to operate completely outside of the chain of command throughout this book and it’s completely unclear what his job is within the military. I did like the elements that dealt with Seishiro’s guilt over what he went through during the war and the complicated emotional experience of sex work, especially in post-war Japan. The two of them navigating their cultural differences and how much Jim loved Japan was also interesting.
However, Seishiro’s feelings progress so rapidly that it didn’t feel like an earned happy ending for me. For someone who had never considered being with a man before and who didn’t like Americans, he pretty quickly came around to being with Jim all the time, who is portrayed as seemingly the nicest man alive. Jim has his own little arc about having to hide being gay his whole life and then feeling like he could finally pursue someone in Japan, which has some good historical basis. However, both of their backstories were weirdly confusing for me to follow — by the end of the book, I still wasn’t sure why Seishiro had been working at the bar, even though his family turned out to be well off textile merchants of some kind — and why he was giving them money? It wasn’t really clearly explained, I guess he was working at the bar to flee his terrible family and was then giving them money out of obligation? Seishiro’s trauma being healed through Jim’s magical presence in his dreams was supposed to be sweet, but it rubbed me the wrong way somehow, like the magical healing sex trope except Jim’s lurking around his dreams and stroking his back until Seishiro gets over the trauma of seeing his friend dying in a cave.
A decent manga, with solid art, and a fast read, but not something I’d really recommend as the best of the genre.
