Yubisaki Milk Tea

""Goldmund, will you come back?"" ---- Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930

This magna is about love and gender in puberty in, well, a Japanese high school setting. Yuki, a first-grade high school student, had to dress up as a girl for his sister once and fell in love with his crossdressed figure. Morii, a younger girl that always looks up to the Yuki that plays soccer in middle school likes him and always wants to grow up quicker so that she can be Yuki's girlfriend. Minamo, Yuki's friendless, sensitive, and booksmart classmate, fell in love with Yuki as well but things between these two are a bit more complicated since Minamo sometimes liked Ikeda, or the crossdressed Yuki. The story mainly revolved around the love triangle among these three characters.

The story of Yubisaki (fingertip in Japanese) Milk Tea is worth a read because at its heart it's not an ordinary love-triangle or love-n-gon/DA-graph story nor a novelty-seeking story about Japanese drag queens (watch/read Wandering Son instead). It's one of those stories that's worth to retell because it portrays a rather uncommon character, Yuki's psyche very well from start to end. Yuki is fascinated by Ikeda, just like his friend in the soccer team. Much like Goldmund, he liked girls too much (which made me wonder if his parent's divorce has anything to do with it.) The best evidence for this is that he quitted the soccer team to keep his figure. Deep down, he know that he has to grow up and the androgen in him is going to make him look like a man. He know that the perfect female figure is both lovely and cruel. When the winter comes, he gave in to his sexual drive and Morri finally defeated Ikeda (hopefully I'm not spoiling too much). When reading the last sex scene when Ikeda was gone, I cried. The beautiful art near the bottom of Yuki's heart and soul is lost in sex, much like the milk tea at one's finger, after tasting. Indeed, Ikeda moves me deeply and made my doubt if the author has a very close friend who crossdresses or it's a part of his personal history.

(if you've got patience/interest to read Narcissus and Goldmund, read it instead then consider reading this... well.)

Having a crush for two girls at the same time is hard for Ikeda (MC), and through the series he often cannot choose who will be with him until the end. Add the complexity with the love for crossdressing and that's Yubisaki Milk Tea.

As Ikeda or as Yuki (his drag), both of them always thought about every actions they made throughout the series. Indecisive between the thought itself is the main problem in this story, because MC do things and regret many times of his action.

For art, this manga is nice, the girls (even the MC in drag) are pretty drawn even though ecchi scenes in this series are not as beautiful as the non-ecchi scenes.

This manga is complex, not just one guy who trampling the girl's feeling many would might say. Characters are alive, they have their own feeling and thinking, making them not like a puppet in the story.

I find it enjoyable throughout the series... well except the ending. I really hope for the better finishing but it doesn't match my expectation.

I don’t want to be biased, but I really didn’t like this manga. So this review isn’t going to be very nice. I did like that the characters are introspective and that the manga really portrays the confusion that most pre-teens experience. I did actually like that the manga seemed to be more artwork than a story.
I did not like the inconsistency of the characters a new person would be introduced but you wouldn’t see them again. I did not like the stagnate plot- you know the ending already why drag it out? I couldn’t stand that the characters couldn’t express themselves, and that the reader was kept in the dark on their true feelings as well. By the end of each chapter I was even more confused by the love triangle than I had been previously. I also didn’t like that Yoshinori (Yoshi- main character) was having sexual thoughts about his neighbor (Hidari) starting when she was in 4th grade (perv much?). I thought it had too much unnecessary nudity- lots of nipples and such and most of it wasn’t called for. But WAY too much child nudity – or suggested nudity (the kids aren’t even in high school yet showing their pre-pubescent parts). However in a list of other things that totally freaked me out were: Yoshi making out with his sister, Hidari taking a bath and telling her dad she would do everything her mother did, Hidari’s friend in the weird relationship with that older guy, Hidari and her friends near lesbian relationship, and Yoshi’s kissing his best male friend and dating him. I surprisingly cool with Yoshi using his female alter ego Yuki to deal with harder feelings, situations and to get close to the other girl he had a crush on (but that was a bit weird).
Over all I didn’t like it. the ending was flat, and simply showed what Yoshi wanted to happen in the very first place. I guess you could view it as a study in teen and preteen sexual exploration with a favorable view towards extremes. Its mature audience is needed but it really needs a smut description.