"It's okay. Boys your age get a hard-on just from dropping their chopsticks."

In my review of the first volume of Voice or Noise, I noted two facts: firstly, that the manga was disappointingly bland and didn't do nearly as much as could have been done with its very intriguing premise; and secondly, that it started to improve towards the end. In fact, it improved enough that I decided to buy the second volume, and that wasn't a bad decision.

Don't get me wrong: the plot still moves at a glacially slow pace, and Enjin still isn't doing nearly as much with the concept of people who can talk to animals as she could do, but since volume 1 dispensed with the setup, the slowness doesn't grate quite as much, and a lot of the story deals with the most interesting character in the series -- that is, Acht, Narusawa's cat. Of course, the relationship between Narusawa and Shinichiro is at the centre of the story, and by this point enough has happened and we've learned enough about the two of them to make their relationship a lot more interesting than it was in volume 1. Narusawa's taciturn broodiness is less like a typical Seme Smoulder(TM) and more like an actual character trait, while Shinichiro's naivety and youth are explicitly dealt with in a tasteful way.

That said, as tasteful as the scenes dealing with the age difference are (the nature of the situation makes them teeter on the edge of creepiness, but they never quite fall in), it's in exactly those scenes that the shakiness of Enjin's plotting is most obvious. The appearances of Shinichiro's mother raise more questions than they answer -- mostly the question "why on earth is she so blasé about her 15-year-old son being friends with a college professor nearly twice his age?" And the lead-up to the time-skip at the end is a return to the choppy, stop-and-start plotting that annoyed me so much in the first volume.

All the same, I'm not giving up on Voice or Noise. Volume 2 sees Shinichiro and Narusawa's relationship heating up and moving past the "platonic cuddling" stage, and the love scenes are particularly effective, which bodes well for volume 3. This is Yamimaru Enjin's first series, and while it's not all that impressive a debut, it does show promise, and it's hooked me firmly enough that I want to see how it all works out.

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