Sometimes, a hentai book doesn’t need to be full of crazy orc gangbangs and demon-girl NTR and cross-dressing BDSM. Sometimes, a book can just be a compilation of classy, vanilla stories that get incredibly naughty will still sticking to the basics. That’s exactly what Homunculus has made with Bashful Break, a 12-page anthology made up of over 200 pages of fun, passionate and incredibly hot vanilla action.
The first chapter of the volume is a full-color story called No Control, running at a decently sized length of 10 pages. It’s about a highschool girl named Ayase who has the ability of mind-control but can’t seem to land a job anywhere despite her awesome skill. She also feels like she can’t use it for anything since manipulating the interviewer is against her code of honor. When her friend at school proposes she use it to land herself a nice man, Ayase mulls over the idea and decided to mind-control her friend Shirasaki-kun to get some first-hand and first-time experience with a man.
It’s a cute story that gets right to the action, but I appreciate the brash behavior of Ayase a lot. She starts out overly confident and simply doing whatever she wants, but once she actually hypnotizes a guy and has no clue what being with a man means, her sudden inexperience makes for a really dynamic between her and the hypnotized Shirasaki. There’s some really nice extra detail in this chapter thanks to the full-color illustrations. The varying shades and tones used to color the characters are softly blended together, leading to incredibly soft and supple-looking anatomy and realistic folds in the clothes of characters. Furthermore, there’s a solid amount of background and environment detail throughout this chapter that’s really amplified with the touches of color and shading.
The next chapter of Bashful Break shares the name of the full book and gives us a nice 4-page full-color intro sequence. In Bashful Break, highschool guy Akio is having a hot and steamy time with his promiscuous girlfriend Koharu. The two go at it like animals, only for things to come to end when we realize…it was all a daydream. In reality, Akio’s girlfriend Koharu is incredibly shy and absolutely afraid of anything involving sex or touching. They’ve been dating for a year, and all they’ve done is kissed once (and she cried afterward). Akio has been patient with her and held back so that she wouldn’t get scared or be afraid of him, but today he’s decided he wants to make it happen. He brings Koharu to his house to wholeheartedly plead with her to try doing naughty stuff with him.
It’s a really cute, and incredibly vanilla story. There isn’t any wild kinky action here, but it’s still really charming to see this passionate guy and his incredibly shy girlfriend work their way up from simple boob-touching to passionate love-making. Akio takes charge, but in a respectful and light way rather than forcing himself on Koharu. It’s a nice touch that makes this a really sweet story. Using full-color pages for the fantasy sequence at the beginning, but then swapping to black & white for the rest of the story is a smart way of separating the fantasy from reality that I really appreciated. Getting a few extra pages of gorgeous, full-color Homunculus was also an appreciated bonus.
Most of the stories in the Bashful Break collection are kept to a single chapter, but there’s one two-parter in the volume called Home Mate. In the first chapter, we meet Akai Nao, a jobless and homeless young man who was forced to drop out of school when his dad skipped town and left him with nothing. Nao returns to his hometown, and with nothing to lose, runs into his old crush Fujisawa and confesses to her out of nowhere. Her response is to ask him to come to live with her, to his massive shock. Even more shocking is that they’re also living with another girl, a shy woman named Kanae who is the owner of the house. Fujisawa and Kanae are very close, but Nao doesn’t think too much of it. At first. On his first night at the home, though, he walks past a room with an open door and sees the two girls engaged in some incredibly naughty action. Fujisawa notices Nao-kun, and drags him into the room to join the action.
It’s a pretty unique premise, but none of it ever comes off as incredibly rushed or unrealistic. Fujisawa has a wild and impulsive air to here that makes her totally seem like the type to do things like this. Kanae, meanwhile, is incredibly shy and cautious of Nao. She reluctantly participates in the three-some, but afterward, she completely ignores Nao out of embarrassment. It’s a fun and steamy story that doesn’t get too complicated and doesn’t need to.
But then the 2nd part happens, and it hit me like a truck at an intersection. In part two, the three have been living together for months now, and Nao is used to sharing the house with them. There hasn’t been another wild threesome since that first night, and there won’t ever be one, because Fujisawa suddenly moves out of the house. Kanae reveals that Fujisawa made a promise to her family to return home on her birthday, but even though Kanae knew their life together couldn’t last forever, she’s still devastated. She doesn’t say a word to Nao for days, until one afternoon when he walks in on her crying in the bath. That night, she comes to his room just to sleep in the corner, but he can tell she needs to be comforted. As she starts crying again, the two embraces in a caring hug, but once the two realize just how they feel about each other, that hug evolves into passionate sex. With a sudden but not-too-surprising ending that wraps the entire story up, this 2nd chapter was an interesting way to add a serious touch and give the characters some nice development, but it didn’t really feel incredibly necessary.
Overall, Bashful Break is a solid book that knows what it wants to do. Homunculus has incredibly beautiful art that made every page a joy to read, with soft and supple bodies as well as beautifully illustrated anatomy. Admittedly, his character designs can get pretty repetitive. The body type and face of each girl in the anthology are almost identical, and half of the women in the book sport a similarly long and black hairstyle, making them all blend together. While the stories and scenarios of each chapter are unique, I wish that the designs of the characters had a touch more variety to them. Bashful Break by Homunculus is available at our shop here, along with many other great hentai manga series.
