There’s a certain kind of mysterious charm to a hotel. In those giant builds with dozens of stories and hundreds of rooms, all sorts of people can come and go at any hour of the day. Ragged businessmen, touring singers, honeymooning couples and more make the hotel their temporary home for a day, or night, or a week or even longer. Strangers life next to each other in regular apartment buildings, obviously, but the temporary abode of a hotel makes things so much more intriguing. With an empty bed and no rules, who knows what your neighbors in the hotel could be getting up to? Grand Hotel Life is an anthology of stories set almost entirely in a hotel, exploring the various kinds of erotic scenarios and secret sexual meetings that occur in a place like that.
Despite most of the stories in this anthology taking place at the exact same location, there’s a wonderful amount of variety to the 11 chapters contained in the 218 pages of Grand Hotel Life. Sure, most of the stories very simply boil down to a man and a woman who go to a hotel room and get nice and intimate together. The reasons for their trips there, though, as well as the varying circumstances behind their relationships, shake things up in each chapter. One couple might be a pair of shy singles who suddenly find themselves alone together, while another could be a loving couple trying to make up for a day of plans ruined by sudden circumstances. Seeing the contrast between each of their stories, and the different reasons for these couples to wind up in very similar circumstances, made the shared setting of these stories really engaging.
It helps that the characters of each chapter have plenty of differences in look and personality, too. Every girl in Grand Hotel Life has a strikingly different look, from a fashionable blonde-haired singer with a dreamy face to a short and deadpan scientist girl with a surprisingly sexy figure. Each of the women in this anthology have a totally different vibe, and it helped add even more variety to the stories. Their male counterparts, too, are surprisingly unique. Almost every guy in each chapter has a similarly unique look, from a handsome young man with an unintentional glare to a casual guitar player with wavy hair. It’s rare for there to be an equal amount of care and focus put into the look of the male characters in hentai anthologies, so that touch of detail was a pleasant surprise here.
The overall quality of the art, though, leaves a bit more to be desired. In regular scenes that don’t contain sexual content, the art style of sumiya isn’t half bad. There’s crisp detail put into the way hair and clothes are drawn, and characters faces are cute and sufficiently expressive, though a bit flat. It’s when the erotic interactions occur that the art on Grand Hotel Life starts to falter. While the girls in these stories have slender and beautiful bodies, they’re mostly rigid and stiff in every scene they’re drawn in. The men are equally wooden, resulting in sexual scenes that lack any kind of impact or dynamic value. It also doesn’t help that, thanks to the uncensored release of this book by Fakku, you can see the striking lack of detail put into the sexual anatomy of both genders. Other parts of the art in this book are well done, so it’s a shame that arguably the most important part of a hentai manga ends up falling so flat.
The first chapter of Grand Hotel Life, titled Dreamer’s Hopeful, is a great example of the kind of stuff to expect from artist sumiya. It starts with four full color pages of a woman named Yui dreaming about a steamy encounter with a mysterious and handsome young man. The coloring of these pages is, admittedly, a little rough. Shadows and light rays are lazily splotched onto the characters’ bodies in rough chunks, looking more like unfinished work-in-progress panels than fully rendered works. The colors used are nice, with realistic muted shades for the bodies that contrast nicely with the sharp blue color of Yui’s eyes.
These color pages only last for a short while, though. Yui quickly wakes up, confused by her mysterious wet dream. She quickly remembers that, last night, her friend took her to a social mixer to try and get her introduced to a cute boy. Her wishy-washy nature took over, though, and while she spotted a nice guy who only ordered an oolong tea, she never ended up making any moves on him and simply ordered the same drink and left. The guy she met that night was the same man from her dream, and she starts to lament her lack of a strong will. Wishing that she could do things differently and talk to him again, Yui ends up running into that very same guy at the food court. One awkward accident leads to another, and the two end up alone in a bedroom together. Their opposite attitudes quickly attract, and the two finally end up embraced in each other just like it went in Yui’s dream.
I was a big fan of this chapter, especially because of how well written Yui is. She struggles to make any kind of choice, big or small, and that anxiety is perfectly illustrated throughout the chapter. It’s also an incredibly relatable anxiety, which helped me connect with Yui even more. I especially appreciated the way she contrasted with the direct and thoughtfully blunt nature of his crush. He has a strong glare and a calculated attitude, but genuinely works to be a respectful and nice guy despite his offputting demeanor. The two blend together flawlessly, leading to one of the sweetest stories in Grand Hotel Life.
Grand Hotel Life does a great job of creating a wonderful amount of variety out of a seemingly repetitive and dry premise. Over half of the book takes place entirely in the same hotel venue, but solid writing and a varied cast of characters keep each of these stories fresh. It’s just a shame that the stiff artwork and shoddy coloring can’t reach the same level of quality. Grand Hotel Life by sumiya available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.
