愛がしたたる一皿を review

a delicately grotesque, sizzlingly erotic BL novel about sex, food, and cannibalism

「君の中には性欲と食欲しかないのか？」

I picked this novel up from Kindle Unlimited on a total whim: I recognised the cover artist from 美しい彼 so I perused the description, and the blurb was so utterly insane I knew I had to read it immediately. I hadn't heard of the author before: she is currently known as 一滴しぃ, after changing her penname from Si in 2023.

Our protagonist Mizuki's mother was murdered when he was only a teenager. She was an acclaimed chef, who doted on him, and had taught him cooking techniques since he was a tiny child. Due to a ghoulish, pushy reporter plying him with particulars, after her death, Mizuki learnt more chilling facts, including the detail that the killer cooked and ate his mother's body, and described it as "especially delicious". Mizuki is 30 now, but ever since, has never been able to get emotionally or physically close to anyone, and finds skin-to-skin touch unbearably repulsive. He's also haunted by unsettling recurring dreams of being a tiny featherless pigeon in his mother's tender hands, and his mother slaughtering him, but strangely feeling no fear.

Despite his neuroses, Mizuki has blossomed into a talented chef, and is successfully running his mother's French restaurant. One evening, while preparing a sauce, he cuts himself and spills a tiny amount of his own blood into the saucepan. Distracted, he accidentally serves the contaminated sauce to a table including a visiting food writer. While reeling from realising his grave mistake, close to fainting from panic, the food writer Kirya rushes into the kitchen to catch him and grabs Mizuki's hands close, heaping gushing praise upon him, telling him that the meal was the best he'd ever had. The hand holding makes Mizuki feel things he's never felt before... a heady mixture of disgust, and...? Well, he's not sure yet. Kirya is so taken with the meal that he wants to write a feature on Mizuki's restaurant for a magazine, and he won't take no for an answer.

What follows is a heady, erotic whirlwind, as Mizuki awakens to long-dormant feelings. In modern parlance, I think it would be fair to say that Kirya and Mizuki "match each other's freak", but as the story goes on, a darkness swells inside Mizuki to a point where it becomes unignorable, and there's one line Kirya just won't cross.

The author balances the grotesque with the tender in an eerie interplay, a deep rich romance with a streak of suspenseful crime fiction. Food metaphors are laced throughout the story, the bloody viscera of meat contrasted with the fluids of sensuality. As a vegetarian, the imagery was particularly shocking, but I think that 一滴しぃ 先生 wanted us to feel this revulsion at confronting our own cognitive dissonance in the case that the reader was a meat-eater: that the flesh of a flayed animal has only a paper-thin difference to that of a human.

I loved this novel so much! I'm so glad I picked it up, because it is truly exactly my type of thing. It was delightfully, refreshingly different from other horror BLs I've read, because instead of an outside enemy or even a paranormal force being the main antagonist, the madness emerges slowly from within Mizuki himself as the story progresses, with every gut-wrenching development hitting the reader with a sickening inevitability. While I think it is a horror, it also has a strange gentleness to it, which is hard to describe. There are moments of domesticity portrayed which are really quite beautiful.

When I started reading the book, I thought "I have Mizuki sussed out. He's like Shirotani from Ten Count", but by the end I felt like a better comparison (although still inadequate) would be to Slow Damage's Towa... or perhaps to one of Towa's Euphoria clients? Really he's a new kind of creature entirely. If you've read a BL with a protagonist like this, I want to know about it.

It was also really, really sexy, probably the most erotic book I've ever read. The author plays so delicately with her choice of language, and portrays Mizuki's desires in such a vivid, reverberating way. This is complemented with the elegant gracefulness of Kasai Rikako's illustrations.

Finishing this meant I also got to fill in a square in my BL Bingo! I designed this on a whim last month with all my favourite tropes. I'm doing novels for mine, but if you want to join me and use the board for manga, or even VNs, please feel free! Here's a blank.

All the prompts are from (or loosely adapted from) chil-chil tags, so that’s a good place to look for inspiration. If you do happen to use the bingo board, tag me or tell me about it!! I'd love to know what you're reading!