Loveless, Volume 1 by Yun Kouga

Ritsuka is still a child, still bears his cat ears and tail, but he's been torn in two by losing part of his memory to amnesia or multiple personalities. He can only remember the last two years of his life, and his mother therefore thinks he is not her son. She wants to get her son back, and she feels Ritsuka isn't him.

Ritsuka, though, had an older brother named Seimei, and one of the memories of him that Ritsuka has is of his older brother telling him his real, secret name: Beloved. He told Ritsuka to remember that name, and Ritsuka did. But now, he finds that Seimei was murdered, and Seimei's beloved shows up to claim Ritsuka as his.

Soubi is a strange person. A robot? An artificially concieved lifeform? He attends college, but he shows up to see Ritsuka after a day at his new school, and Ritsuka, when he realizes that Soubi was Seimei's friend, asks to take a picture with him. He calls it "Making memories", as if he loses his memory again, the pictures will be all he has to remember Soubi by.

But in the park, they are attacked by another pair of boys, and the strangest thing is they attack with words, and Soubi defends himself and Ritsuka, also with just words. But the words have power, and Soubi, through the power of his words, is able to banish the two boys, sending them far away, back to where they came from. During the attack, though, Ritsuka realizes that Seimei and Soubi had the same kind of relationship and fought with words.

This leaves Ritsuka feeling worthless, as Soubi has been claiming to love him, but Ritsuka feels that this love for him was commanded by his brother, and not brought about by something in himself. And the pairing of he and Soubi is called Loveless. What else could make him feel any more lacking in worth?

But Soubi can entrance with words as well as fight, and every time he turns up, Ritsuka ends up in Soubi's arms, being hugged and kissed. How can he fight against someone who is so good with words? But when he realizes that the other pairs of word-fighting people had something to do with Seimei's death, nothing can keep Ritsuke from fighting and learning the truth.

Loveless was very strange to read. People in this world have Cat ears and tails in childhood (in addition to their normal ears) and when they are teens, but lose them and become adults when they first have sex. Apparently, anyway, if I am reading the book correctly. It's only referred to in an indirect way, so I can't be sure.

Neither is what Soubi is discussed. Is he a normal human? Is he an android, or something constructed to have human form? It's impossible to tell from the information given in the book. who and whatever he is, he has incredible powers of language, to entice, attack and defend both himself and Ritsuka. But why he needs to form a fighting pair and what they are fighting over, are big questions that never really get answered.

It's an intriguing opening chapter to a story, enticing us with an interesting story and promising us that our questions might get answered, eventually. I'm of two minds as to whether I would spend any of my own money to find out, because in the end, I didn't really care about the answers to the questions. This raised only an "Eh" rating for me.