Cute Beast is an anthology of cute short stories. Aside from the last one, all the rest have light action, mostly kissing and touching with some sweet moments. If you're looking for light reading, this anthology would be perfect for that.

The first story, "Cute Beast," is about Onizuka and Kisaki. Onizuka is a giant, and because he loses his glasses easily, he constantly runs into walls and it makes it seem like he's purposely head butting walls. He scares all the students but Kisaki got to know him better and learned to like him. This is a good beginning story and sets the tone for the rest of the book. The way Kisaki compares Onizuka to a large bear is also very endearing.

The second story, "The Prince's Commitment," is about Prince Half-Ass, who cannot carry on a lasting relationship. All his girlfriends break up with him shortly after asking him out and he doesn't know why. When a boy named Sakura asks him out, the same thing happens. But this time, he's determined to find out what drives everyone away and win Sakura back. The story is pretty straight-forward. It's obvious even to the reader why all his girlfriends break up with him.

"Ramune, First Love, and Summer Break" has a typical yaoi storyline. Aki and Nao are cousins and were very close as children. That changed when Nao got married. But Nao's young bride died shortly after and Aki tortures himself wondering why he's glad that Nao is single again.

"Alice Reunite" is also another typical yaoi story. Sumio finds a drunk lying in the streets and props him up for a while. Takagi, the drunk, remembers that moment, and later when they find out they go to the same school, Takagi pursues Sumio.

"I'm Serious Because It's Love" is about a horny teacher who has sex with male and female students alike. But he finally falls for a student named Misato, who misunderstands one of his meet-ups with another student and starts avoiding him.

All in all, the stories in Cute Beast follow typical plotlines. However, the art is clean and pleasant to look at, and the dialogue is smooth. This would be perfect for someone just getting into yaoi, as it has many of the common elements of the genre. It's also worth looking into if you like short stories that aren't too deep. ( )

Five stories. We've got the 'misunderstood sweetie' trope, the 'guy who can't keep a relationship up with girls' trope, the 'childhood friends who grew apart and are now stuck together again,' the 'guys who meet in bad/embarrassing situation and then end up seeing each other in their new school/place of work' and the 'student likes teacher, teacher sleeps with student, student realizes teacher is a lecher and is jealous/angry.'

With the title and the cover, pink and covered in hearts, I was avoiding this expecting it to be ultra-cutesey and be full of short, sweet, dumb, pet-like ukes. Luckily (to me), this isn't really the case. Actually, I rather enjoyed this collection, as despite the fact the plots are pretty standard and lack any originality or distinctiveness in execution, it seems like this author has kind of the same taste as me when it comes to general yaoi relationship dynamics.

That is, with the exception of the teacher/student story, the seduce/peruser isn't creepy, overpowering, and manipulative, drawing the uke in like a shady man standing outside a van with a bag of candy. The ukes are ukes because they are as usual shorter and cuter and more often less aware of their feelings, but less like usual in that they have some self-respect and understand themselves to be deserving of respect from the other party as well. Sometimes, they are the instigators of sex (though there isn't much of that here, by the way). The relationships here are just a little more like 'give and take' from both sides, than the usual 'one side take the other side taken' or the just plain 'one side forcibly take, cause the other will like it eventually, right?' While I liked the last story the least (since despite the slightly-stronger-than-typical uke the seme was still a creep), it was the one that really drove home the mangaka's preference for more equal relationships, as once the teacher 'gets' the student, he's promising to not drag him into bed again till he gets older. It didn't really ring true, showing a considerate side that really wasn't there in the rest of the seme's characterization, but it still seemed to me like an attempt by the author to make things more even, even if rather last-minute.

The art here is of the big-eyes variety, but it's clean and attractive. There is a bigger variation in character design than you see in most yaoi, though none are stand-out amazing. On a slightly random note, the art isn't un-yaoi-ish really, but I realized with some interest that I could see art like this being in a non-yaoi, which is kind of out of the ordinary to me. One of the short ukes with spiky hair almost looked like he could have been a character in a shounen manga, or perhaps with those big eyes at least in an action-centered shoujo. As I'm not a huge fan of the usual yaoi styles and how similar they tend to look, this was kind of nice to me.

I feel like the writing here is slightly better than average, but that's probably just my preference for these relationship-types talking. Then again, I do feel like such relationship dynamics are a little more realistic, but then since when has yaoi been about reality? It's up to your preferences, then. It's not particularly good enough to overcome my slight dislike for short one-shots, though, so I wouldn't seek out another volume of little stories like this. If the author does have some longer ones, though, I may check them out. At this point I'd doubt they do anything too refined in characterization and development, and I can't really judge their longer-term plotting with shorts like these, but I feel quite amiable to the characters and everything else. A very light read, but enjoyable. ( )