Netsuzou Trap volume 1: the friendly face of NTR?

NTR or netorare media — that which explores the idea of cheating or unfaithfulness — is simultaneously one of the most controversial and popular tropes in Japanese media, particularly that which errs on the erotic side of things. And while it’s a term primarily associated with hentai, there are more mainstream stories that explore this concept, too, such as yuri manga NTR: Netsuzou Trap.

And yes, I know it’s a few years old at this point, but we’ve never covered it on the site before, I was in the mood for some girls kissing, and this manga kept coming up in my recommendations after some of the previous yuri manga I’ve explored, such as Our Teachers are Dating! and I Can’t Believe I Slept With You!

Plus author Naoko Kodama has subsequently been responsible for a number of other well-regarded works, including the one-shot I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up, the series Days of Love at Seagull Villa and contributions to Syrup: A Yuri Anthology, so I thought it would be interesting to explore her first serialised work.

I’ll preface the following by saying that I personally find the concept of NTR simultaneously interesting as the basis of a dramatic story, and gut-wrenchingly uncomfortable to contemplate.

A fair proportion of hentai NTR tends to focus on the latter aspect by placing attractive, likable female characters with often less-than-desirable gentlemen — though this is by no means the only means through which the concept is explored. And that’s the aspect I find hard to deal with, though; hell, I can’t even listen to Mr Brightside without an ugly feeling in the pit of my stomach.

But Netsuzou Trap is a little different. The concept is that the two main female characters Yuma and Hotaru have been friends since childhood, and as we join them in the manga, they are just starting to experiment sexually with one another. All well and good, aside from the fact that they both have boyfriends; Yuma is dating her fellow basketball team member Takeda as her first boyfriend, while Hotaru is dating Takeda’s friend Fujiwara as the latest in a string of partners she’s had since middle school.

Hotaru, who is very much the “aggressor” in the relationship between the two girls in Netsuzou Trap, positions her advances as a “dress rehearsal” for what Yuma will eventually end up doing with Takeda. But Yuma is uneasy and unconvinced; not only does she find herself giving in to Hotaru a little easier than she would perhaps like, she is also clearly very much uncomfortable with the prospect of doing anything vaguely intimate with Takeda.

This primarily stems from her own confused feelings towards Hotaru and Takeda. It’s abundantly clear from very early on in Netsuzou Trap that Yuma is attracted to Hotaru, despite her being unwilling or unable to admit it, but it runs deeper than that. She genuinely likes Takeda as a person — though she’s not sure if she likes him “like that” — but she also has a longstanding relationship with Hotaru that stretched back to their shared childhood. And the situation she’s in now is a curious inversion of what they experienced as children.

As kids, Yuma and Hotaru were close. After seeing Hotaru having trouble making friends and getting bullied by boys, she stepped in to play the role of “protector”, developing a warm feeling inside from Hotaru coming to rely on her. Now, though, she feels like “that cute and angelic Hotaru that I used to protect has grown up and gone from being a little angel to a little demon”.

The dynamic between Yuma and Hotaru in Netsuzou Trap is quite interesting to see because it bucks the trends of a lot of other yuri manga, in which the central female characters are often quite hesitant and cautious about starting a relationship together, particularly with regard to how others might perceive them. Here, the feeling of Hotaru being dominant and aggressive towards Yuma — to the degree that we’re pushing up against non-consensual territory at times — feels more like something you’d tend to see in yaoi manga.

It works as an element of Netsuzou Trap’s story, though; it creates an immediate feeling of tension between the characters for numerous reasons. There’s the question over whether or not Yuma wants this to happen or if she’s just going along with Hotaru because she doesn’t feel strong enough to resist; there’s the question of Yuma’s feelings towards Takeda — and Hotaru’s towards Fujiwara, for that matter, though we’ll come back to that; and there’s the fact the reader will almost certainly feel torn between the pleasure of seeing two attractive girls doing sexy things together and the pain of knowing that they’re cheating.

Because they are cheating, and Hotaru knows this. Yuma doesn’t immediately accept this, however — and indeed, this is explored further in the next volume of Netsuzou Trap — and one suspects that her feelings of “giving in” to Hotaru rather than actively pursuing their encounters is a means of her trying to distance herself from the situation and believe she’s not doing anything wrong.

Yuma clearly has some unresolved feelings towards Hotaru that are only being confused by Hotaru’s ongoing teasing. She admits that when Hotaru first got a boyfriend in middle school, she felt like she had been “abandoned”, even though she had lots of other female friends. Hotaru was different, though; Yuma knew that she was Hotaru’s only female friend, and that put her in a special category. Yuma couldn’t — or wouldn’t — admit that this was because she felt anything more than friendship towards Hotaru, but it’s pretty obvious.

At the same time, though, she’s still confused. She obviously feels guilt for stringing Takeda along, but also clearly feels overly pressured into doing intimate things. And this is made all the more tough to watch by the fact that Takeda is clearly a thoroughly lovely young man who likes Yuma a great deal and doesn’t want to do anything to make her uncomfortable. Yuma appreciates this, and indeed we see her willingly showing affection towards Takeda after the pair have a heart-to-heart on a trip to an amusement park.

We also start to get early indications that Hotaru’s partner Fujiwara isn’t anywhere near as nice of a person, however. On the same trip, we see Fujiwara attempting to force himself on Hotaru despite an emphatic “no” from her — his response is simply “don’t go acting all high and mighty now”, which is the first indication that he might know something. (Spoiler: he does.)

A major event in the first volume of Netsuzou Trap is when Yuma, Hotaru, Takeda and Fujiwara all take a trip away together for winter vacation. Here we see some interesting shifts in the core dynamic once again; Yuma takes to the ski slopes like an absolute natural, while Hotaru continually falls on her arse. This places Yuma in a rare position of power, providing her the opportunity to “escape” from Hotaru’s influence for a certain amount of time and help get her thoughts in order — but it doesn’t help all that much.

When the time comes for the couples to go to bed — a situation where everyone has been assuming sex between the heterosexual partners would be happening — Yuma ends up chickening out and taking Hotaru back to their room, unable to face the prospect of being physically intimate with Takeda on the grounds that she’s “not ready”. And things are further confused by her not only having an erotic dream about Hotaru, but also Hotaru being a little overly amorous in the morning while the boys are still asleep — a risky move, since they ended up coming back to the girls’ room to play games and eat snacks until late, then passing out there.

Notably, this marks a point in Netsuzou Trap where Yuma starts to take some responsibility for her actions, admitting that she’s “cheating on him even in my dreams” — and yet, despite some obvious guilt, she still doesn’t seem willing to do anything about it. And, moreover, Hotaru begins to take advantage of the skewed power dynamic on the trip; she uses her position of weakness on the ski slopes to secure some time alone with Yuma, which she takes full advantage of. Yuma displays her first signs of resistance, though.

“Yuma-chan, you play sports and are bigger and stronger than me,” Hotaru says in response to Yuma attempting to rebuff her advances. “If you wanted to stop me, you could have. But never mind, we’ll just leave it at that. You keep believing whatever you like.”

On the one hand, she makes a fair point; on the other, she’s clearly being exceedingly manipulative here. But her frustration with Yuma’s indecisiveness is also understandable — as is her heading back to the hotel early with the implications that she had sex with Fujiwara while Yuma and Takeda were continuing to enjoy the slopes. One gets the distinct impression that Hotaru doesn’t really find any meaning in her relationship with Fujiwara — and perhaps with boys in general — and it’s just something to distract her from her feelings for Yuma.

Trouble is, Fujiwara states outright that he recognises what is going on — and he doesn’t seem to particularly care, either. He believes that Yuma and Takeda will have sex for the first time on their trip, implying that this will mark a hard cutoff point for her willingness to fool around with Hotaru. It seems that he, too, has little respect for Hotaru, despite being physically intimate with her — but he knows at heart that both Takeda and Yuma are much nicer people than both he and Hotaru are.

It’s an intriguing start to the overall narrative of Netsuzou Trap, to be sure. Things seem to move pretty quickly in this first volume, but there’s the implication that things had been brewing behind the scenes prior to the start of the story that we get to witness, and as such we’re joining things as they’re coming to a head.

It’s hard not to feel emotionally engaged in the situation — and this is all the more effective from the conflicting emotions the reader will likely be feeling. On the one hand, it makes sense to root for Yuma and Hotaru as the lead characters, but it’s also hard not to feel bad for Takeda in particular. And Fujiwara… well, as we’ll see in the next volume, he very much has his own role to play in the whole scenario, too, which only adds to the drama.

All in all, volume 1 of Netsuzou Trap was enjoyably uncomfortable. While there’s an obvious emphasis on the sexy side of things, there’s depth and nuance to these characters, too — and that’s clearly only going to get more interesting in the subsequent volumes as these various relationships develop.

Netsuzou Trap volume 1 is available now in Kindle and paperback form from Amazon. Further details and alternative retailers can be found on publisher Seven Seas’ website.

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