The Search
I think everyone in the fandom knows that before Kuroshitsuji, Yana was writing BL under the name Rock Yanao/Yanao Roku. However, I don't think any of us understood just how much work she was doing, or how much she participated in the BL community.
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Like many manga artists, Yana had her start in doujinshi. Records of her old sites go all the way back to 2001(!), when she was only seventeen. Through her site, she posted fanart and journal posts, where she interacted with other people in her fandoms. She was a big figure in the BL community for a long time. I won't go into detail on her doujin, mainly since I don't have much interest in the fandoms (Prince of Tennis, Gackt, Togainu no Chi), but her works are pretty well-documented online if you care enough to scour Japanese secondhand sites and archived versions of her old websites. Togainu no Chi is the only fandom for which she published under the name Shinjuku Glico/新宿グリコ rather than Yanao Rock. Unfortunately, since she distributed all her doujin at conventions, you'll have to buy them from secondhand sites if you want to read them.
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Now, this brings me to her original works. I absolutely love the story of Yana's success, mainly because she feels like someone I could have known in real life in the BL community. I get a proud feeling, as though she were a friend of mine. So, one day, I was doing some Japanese google searches about her work as Yanao Rock. I found one Yahoo Answer from 2008 asking if the rumours were true - to which someone replied yes, and gave a couple of titles of her BL works: 'Rolling Cinema Show' and 'No Struggle No Life!'. I'd seen the answer before, but this was when I noticed... there are no chapters in 'Glamorous Lip' with such titles. In fact, googling the titles of the manga, I could barely find any proof that they had existed at all. All I managed to find were single images of the front covers, and some old fandom sites which referenced them. They gave download links, but they were long dead. The internet archive yielded no results, either.
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This was when I started thinking about 'Hana Shounen'. When people talk about Yana's BL, they always reference this elusive work. I often came across people saying, 'have you read Glamorous Lip and Hana Shounen? They're by Yana!'. However, when I had searched for Hana Shounen in the past, I couldn't find anything apart from the cover image, which didn't even resemble Yana's art style. After doing a little more research, I found out that Hana Shounen was an anthology magazine. Yana did indeed publish two works in Hana Shounen volumes 1 and 2, but so did many other authors. And, here's the kicker - both of these works went on to be published in Glamorous Lip. In reality, Glamorous Lip was the only remaining BL manga by Yana online, containing six works that were all originally published in separate anthologies.
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At this point, I almost gave up. After trying to contact the original poster behind the dead Rolling Cinema Show and No Struggle No Life raws with no luck, I just had to accept that I would never find these two lost works by Yana. That was, until I came across something right at the bottom of Google images while searching for Yanao Rock. It was a scan of an anthology called Shounentachi 1, and it took me to one of those dodgy doujin upload sites. I looked through the scans, and almost lost my mind when I saw Yana's art in there. Only, when I looked at the chapter title, it was called 'Merrymaking Poolside'. I'd never heard of it. Then, when I searched for it, it was not mentioned anywhere online. At all. Absolutely nothing.
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This was when my search really began. I quickly saved the scans I'd found, then used Google's related images to try to find more anthologies Yanao had been credited in. Luckily, she was employed by only one BL publisher, Kousai Shobou/光彩書房, so the search engines showed me a lot of other anthologies from the same time period. I saw her name on the front of Shounentachi 2, which I also managed to find on the dodgy upload site (after a lot of effort). It turned out to be Kimi ni Negai wo, a twincest BL with yet another protagonist named after the sky (Sora), along with his brother, Toa (written with the kanji for 'distant sky').
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(Something else I'd seen thrown around a lot was that Yana stopped writing BL once Kuroshitsuji was serialised. This isn't true. She wrote three BL works in 2006-2007 at the same time as Kuroshitsuji, and Kimi ni Negai wo was the first of those. That was probably why she had twins on the brain, lol.)
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This was where I hit a roadblock. After spending days and hours and hours and hours finding all the anthologies she was a part of, I couldn't even find what particular works were inside them, nevermind scans of them. Chil-chil.net was a big help listing the majority of the chapters inside - I managed to find that she'd published a work called 'Sweet and Narrow Box' in an anthology called Moe Max 1, yet another title that had never even been mentioned online. Eventually, after a lot of searching, I was left with only two magazines that had unidentified contents: Bokura no Koi 1, and Bokura no Koi 2. They were also the last BL works she published before getting too busy with Kuroshitsuji. I assumed they had to include the works that were still unaccounted for: Rolling Cinema Show, and No Struggle No Life. (Unless there were more that I just didn't know existed - but in the end, there weren't. Yana announced she was 'taking a break' from publishing commercial BL manga on her Yanao Rock blog on the 17th of April 2007.)
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With no scans of them online, I ended up ordering a secondhand copy of Moe Max 1 to see what 'Sweet and Narrow Box' was all about, as well as Bokura no Koi 1. They arrived safely, and Bokura no Koi 1 did end up containing Rolling Cinema Show. Now, you might ask, 'Naoki, why didn't you order Bokura no Koi 2?'. Well - I couldn't. Volume 1 and Moe Max were easy enough to get my hands on. Bokura no Koi 1 even had over 10 copies up for sale on Amazon. Volume 2, though? Nothing. I searched every secondhand manga website in Japan. I did come across an obscure listing on Rakuten, only to be refunded and told it was a mistake; they didn't actually have the manga.
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I can't tell you how this stupid, stupid anthology took over my every waking thought. How can it just be gone? Why isn't anyone selling a secondhand copy? Have I stumbled across some kind of conspiracy? I looked up its Amazon price history, and found out that it had been out of stock for a year and a half, despite being in ample stock all throughout the early 2010s. That was when I decided to pin the page to my browser along with a Japanese site showing its stock status on all book websites, and just get on with my life, checking it daily. Maybe it would show up in another year.
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To cut a long story short... Lo and behold, after 1.5 years of being out of stock, Bokura no Koi Vol.2 showed up on Amazon after only three weeks of me daily checking. At that point, it was just part of my daily routine, and I never really expected anything. I couldn't believe my eyes! I'd been planning to enlist everyone's help here, too. Haha. I ordered the book immediately, and received it safely. Sure enough, I found No Struggle No Life inside. Finally, my mind could rest :)
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And, there we have it! I have uploaded all five of Yanao Rock's lost BL manga for public viewing. Sweet and Narrow Box, Rolling Cinema Show, and No Struggle No Life were all scanned on a home printer by me, so the quality isn't great, but good enough to at least document them. I'm a fluent Japanese speaker, so I will summarise all the manga on the 'Lost Works' page, but I cannot clean or typeset for the life of me. Sorry that they're not in a translated form, but this is definitely better than nothing!
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Enjoy :)
- Naoki