Kizu herself had gained recognition for her doujinshis, or erotic fan works. “I wanted it to have a suitable realistic feel,” writer and illustrator Kizu told Pash! in 2019.
Confessions aren’t always explosive or volatile sometimes, they’re quiet realizations and clumsy kisses. It’s a slow burn, yes, but it’s also simple in a way that BL, or “Boys’ Love,” isn’t often depicted. Kizu creates a world that feels lived in, and her characters seem real.
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Mafuyu doesn’t talk much, which makes him a natural foil to hot-headed Ritsuka, who teaches him how to play the instrument, albeit reluctantly, and invites him to join the band he started with bassist Haruki and drummer Akihiko, two college students who are dancing around their own sexual tension. Given is partially the story of Mafuyu finding his voice - both literally, as the band’s frontman and main lyricist, and figuratively, as a young man who shut himself off from everyone following the death of his boyfriend Yuki, whose guitar he carries with him every day. And in the context of its genre, Given becomes practically radical. The story is a chaste entry into the Boys’ Love canon, but one that is part of the genre’s modern evolution. In Given, the queerness of male leads is never questioned or fetishized. But that doesn’t make it any less intimate. The movie, like the manga and anime that came before it, puts romance second to its characters. The manga was adapted into a 11-episode anime of the same name in 2019, and a sequel film, aptly titled Given The Movie, recently premiered on Crunchyroll.
That, in essence, is the plot of Natsuki Kizu’s Given, the story of four young men in an amateur band who learn to love and be loved over the course of six volumes (so far). Rather, it was a gradual fall, just a couple of boys fumbling with their feelings while plucking their guitar strings and humming unfinished melodies. Ritsuka Uenoyama and Mafuyu Sato fell in love in an unlikely place: a high school stairwell.