This was an incredibly heartfelt story. The yaoi label on it may discourage some readers, but it's really the story of friends falling for each other over a week. There are only 2 kiss scenes, which are both pretty much rated PG :D ( )

There is something about this manga...
While I had been aware of "yaoi" for some time, the examples I had been exposed to never really made me want to explore the genre or seek out more. The highly stylized art, the gender roles the characters were forced into, the stereotype of the culture of yaoi fangirls... none of it appealed to me. But I happen to like romance stories, and I really like reading romance stories that feature queer characters. So, somehow, Seven Days came across my radar in early 2010, as I was exploring different manga types, and when I saw that the art style was very decidedly not what I expected from yaoi, I was intrigued and downloaded a chapter of the fan-translation.

I dislike the term "yaoi", because it feels to me that it implies sex scenes and certain roles for the characters. BL ("boys' love") is my preferred term, which I started to use after reading Seven Days. At least this first volume of the two-volume series doesn't contain any sex, and the characters' relationship doesn't feel like it's being forced into specific roles of "this person is the 'man' and this one is the 'woman' and one is weepy and the other is cold", which is what I had previously found to be prevalent in the genre.

The story is about two high school boys: one is a third-year (senior), the other a first-year. It's a romance, so their romantic relationship is, of course, at the center of the plot. Shino, the elder of the two, never gets on well with the girls he dates (apparently, his appearance is deceiving), and he doesn't really understand the whole "love" thing. The younger, Seryou, serially dates girls for one week each - the girl of the week is the first one to approach him on Monday and ask. At the end of the week, if he hasn't fallen in love, then he breaks it off. The boys' relationship begins when they happen to meet up with each other on a Monday morning and Shino suggests, not entirely serious or sure why he's suggesting it, that Seryou go out with him for the week. Things go from there as can perhaps be expected by the genre.

The first volume in the story covers Monday through Thursday in the week that the boys date (thus, the "Seven Days" title). It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but in a romance manga, the question is usually how the cliffhanger will be resolved to provide the happily ever after, not whether there will be a happily ever after. Yet, when I read this volume for the first time, I felt genuine worry that the HEA wouldn't actually occur. The pacing of the story, the expressiveness of the art, it all pulled me in. Many romance novels, I can only read once, but this one, I've read several times.

The book isn't perfect. The illustration style, while being different from what I expected of BL, and while it is expressive and lovely, has some weirdness to it, and some of the panels are too strongly "pretty person to be admired" (something that I dislike in manga). Other than the primary couple, the characters are fairly flat (but this isn't uncommon in romances), and I can see how Shino and Seryou themselves might be called bland or 2-dimensional, though obviously I think they manage to avoid that. There's also a number of BL clichés which have tried to work their way into the story, such as the shrill/harpy girl who interferes, or the aforementioned panels of pretty people to be admired, but for the most part, I don't mind them here. As a whole, I found this book to be compelling and I keep returning to it. ( )