The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese Review — A Salaryman Who Cheats on His Wife Is Caught by the Investigator She Hired

I have a friend who is in his late thirties, married, and has been having affairs for years. He has never said this out loud. I have not asked. We have had dinner together many times. I know because I know him. The specific evasion of the unhappily-married friend is recognizable once you have seen it.

I read The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese after I had spent enough time with him to wonder what was actually going on inside the version of him I was being given. The manga did not tell me what to think about my friend. It did make me think about him differently.

Quick Take

• Setona Mizushiro's single-volume adult BL drama about a salaryman's infidelity and what follows when his wife's private investigator turns out to be an old classmate who has loved him for years
• A sequel volume (The Carp on the Chopping Block Jumps Twice, 俎上の鯉は二度跳ねる) continues the story
• 2020 live-action film by Isao Yukisada starring Tadayoshi Okura covers both volumes
• Age rating: M (Mature) — 18+ — explicit sexual content, coercive premise, sustained moral complexity

What Is The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese About?

Kyouichi Otomo (大伴 恭一) is a thirty-two-year-old salaryman at a Tokyo advertising agency. He is conventionally attractive in an unaggressive way. He has been married for several years to a wife he met in college. He is also, has been for some time, cheating on her. The affairs are with multiple women. They are not particularly emotional for him; they are something he does because he is bad at saying no when a woman is interested.

His wife has finally noticed. She has hired a private investigator to gather evidence for a possible divorce.

The investigator is Imagase Wataru (今ヶ瀬 渉) — a college junior of Kyouichi's, two years younger, who has been quietly in love with Kyouichi since their university days. Imagase recognized Kyouichi the moment he received the case. He has gathered the evidence. He could deliver it to Kyouichi's wife at any time.

Imagase comes to Kyouichi instead. He explains the situation. He makes an offer: he will withhold the evidence in exchange for Kyouichi spending time with him. Kyouichi, who is in a corner and not particularly committed to any of his options, agrees.

The arrangement is coercive — the manga is clear about this — but it is also where Kyouichi finds himself confronted with a version of intimacy he has never permitted himself to consider. The next chapters follow:

• The arrangement deepening into something neither man fully expected
• Kyouichi's psychological reckoning with what his pattern of affairs has actually been about
• Imagase's awareness that he has used coercion as the entry point to a connection he has wanted for years and what that means for the connection's foundation
• Kyouichi's marriage — which is a real marriage to a real person who the manga does not erase from the narrative

The single volume ends at a specific decision point. The sequel — The Carp on the Chopping Block Jumps Twice (俎上の鯉は二度跳ねる, Sojou no Koi wa Nido Haneru) — continues from there. Together the two volumes form a complete story.

The 2020 live-action film by acclaimed Japanese director Isao Yukisada (行定 勲) covers both volumes. Tadayoshi Okura (of the boy band Kanjani8) plays Kyouichi; Ryo Narita plays Imagase. The film is well-regarded.

Who Is This Manga For?

• Adult BL readers who want morally complicated material
• Setona Mizushiro fans — her psychological writing is the manga's signature
• Literary fiction readers who can engage with BL as a serious adult genre
• Film fans of the 2020 Yukisada adaptation who want the source
• Not for: readers seeking healthy romantic dynamics; younger readers; readers who cannot read past coercive premise

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) — 18+ Content Warnings: Explicit sexual content; infidelity as central premise (Kyouichi has affairs with women; the manga does not absolve him); coercive premise (Imagase uses blackmail-adjacent leverage to begin the relationship); sustained moral complexity throughout; brief depictions of self-harm in the sequel

The M rating is the floor. The content is psychologically intense rather than visually graphic, though the sexual content is explicit.

Characters

Kyouichi Otomo — One of the most carefully written morally ambiguous protagonists in BL. He is not a villain. He is not redeemable in the easy sense. He is a specific kind of man: someone who has spent his life going along with what people wanted from him because saying no felt harder than yielding, and who has discovered too late that yielding does not, in fact, make him a passive bystander in his own life. His affairs are choices. His marriage is a choice. His response to Imagase is a choice. The manga does not let him off the hook for any of them.

What Mizushiro accomplishes with Kyouichi is rare: a protagonist whose specific cowardice the reader can both recognize and sit with. Kyouichi is not heroic. He is also not contemptible. He is human in a way that makes the manga's moral architecture work.

Imagase Wataru — Two years younger than Kyouichi. Worked as a private investigator. Has been in love with Kyouichi since university — a love Kyouichi never noticed because Kyouichi has spent his life not noticing how people feel about him. Imagase's specific moral position is the manga's most complicated: he is using coercion to access someone he loves, he knows this, and he is not pretending otherwise. The manga refuses to either condemn or absolve him.

Kyouichi's wife — Present in the manga as a character with her own dignity. Mizushiro does not erase her or make her a plot mechanism. She is a person in a marriage that is failing partly because her husband has not been honest with her. Her perspective and her decisions are part of the story.

Art Style

Setona Mizushiro's art is psychologically precise. Character faces carry the specific weight of what the writing requires — Kyouichi's evasions, Imagase's controlled feeling, the moments when masks slip. The sexual content is rendered explicitly but with care for the emotional content of each encounter; the sex is doing character work, not just providing fan service.

The settings (Tokyo offices, apartments, hotels) are rendered with realistic detail. The visual register is closer to literary fiction than to most BL.

Cultural Context

Setona Mizushiro is a major Japanese josei/BL manga creator. Her other works include After School Nightmare (10 volumes, psychological), The Conditions of Paradise (a Cornered Mouse short companion), and various josei and BL one-shots. Mizushiro's reputation is for psychological complexity in romance manga.

The manga was originally serialized in Erotics F — a Shodensha magazine that specializes in adult-oriented manga with literary ambitions. Cornered Mouse is one of the magazine's defining works.

The 2020 Isao Yukisada film brought significant mainstream Japanese attention to the manga. Yukisada is one of Japan's most respected film directors (Go, Crying Out Love in the Center of the World, Closed Ward). His decision to adapt the manga signaled the work's literary status. Tadayoshi Okura's performance as Kyouichi was widely praised and broadened the manga's audience beyond traditional BL readership.

What I Love About It

The conversation where Kyouichi tries to explain his affairs.

I won't say which chapter exactly. Somewhere in the volume, after the arrangement with Imagase has been going for some time, Imagase asks Kyouichi why. Why the affairs. Why the wife. Why any of it. The question is delivered without accusation; Imagase wants to know.

Kyouichi tries to answer. The conversation is short — maybe four pages. Kyouichi is not a person who explains himself; he has never had to. What Mizushiro draws is Kyouichi trying to articulate something he has not articulated even to himself: that he was not particularly choosing the affairs, he was not particularly choosing the marriage, he was not particularly choosing anything — he was responding to what each situation seemed to want from him.

Imagase listens. He does not absolve Kyouichi. He does not condemn him. He hears the answer and the answer is incomplete and Kyouichi knows it is incomplete and so does Imagase.

What I love about the scene is what it costs Kyouichi to attempt. He has spent his life avoiding this exact conversation — with himself, with his wife, with anyone. Imagase has cornered him into having it not by force but by being the first person who genuinely asked. The manga's title — "The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese" — refers to a Japanese proverb about an animal that, when cornered, will fight back even against a stronger opponent. The Cornered Mouse the manga is interested in is Kyouichi. The cheese he is dreaming of is not Imagase exactly. It is a version of himself that he might be able to recognize if he stopped evading.

That scene is the manga's whole project. People do not generally examine themselves until they are forced to. Mizushiro forces Kyouichi to examine himself. The examination is not redemption. It is just truth-telling. The truth is harder than the lie. Kyouichi has to decide whether he can live with it.

I think about my friend the unhappy married man when I think about this scene. I do not know what he tells himself. I do know that he has not been asked the question Imagase asks Kyouichi. I am not the person to ask it. But I understand, after reading this manga, what is at stake if the question is ever asked of him.

What English-Speaking Fans Say

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese has been one of the most praised adult BL manga in English-language critical discussion. Reader response across BL communities, literary manga discussion forums, and mainstream review sites consistently rates the manga as one of the genre's most psychologically sophisticated works.

The 2020 film brought additional mainstream attention. International film festival audiences encountered the source manga through the adaptation; new readers reported being surprised by the manga's literary register.

Most common comment: this is not "typical BL." Whether that is read as compliment or warning depends on the reader.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Light Spoiler

The end of the single volume.

Without spoiling specifics: the volume ends at a specific narrative pivot point. Kyouichi has had to make a decision. The decision is not the romantic resolution readers might expect. It is also not a cynical refusal. It is something more specific to Kyouichi's character — a choice that reflects who he actually is rather than who readers might want him to be.

The final pages are drawn with Mizushiro's signature restraint. Kyouichi is alone in a panel. His expression is small. The reader, by this point in the volume, can read the expression. The volume ends.

The sequel volume picks up from this decision and follows its consequences. Some readers prefer the single volume's ending and stop there. Others want the sequel's continuation. Both choices are defensible; Mizushiro structured the single volume so that it could stand alone.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Cornered Mouse Differs
Conditions of Paradise (Mizushiro)	Same author; BL short story	Similar psychological care; Cornered Mouse is longer-form
Ten Count	BL with serious psychological premise	Ten Count is therapist-patient; Cornered Mouse is married-man-and-lover
Finder Series	Adult BL with moral complexity	Finder is action-yakuza; Cornered Mouse is domestic-psychological
What Did You Eat Yesterday?	Adult male relationship treated with literary care	Different register; same craft of treating gay characters as full adults

Reading Order / Where to Start

Single volume — read straight through. Then the sequel (The Carp on the Chopping Block Jumps Twice) if you want continuation.

For film viewers: the 2020 Yukisada film is a faithful and emotionally precise adaptation. The film and the manga reward each other.

Official English Translation Status

SuBLime (Viz Media imprint) published the English single volume. The series is complete in English at one volume; the sequel volume has been licensed but the SuBLime release status is currently ambiguous — check the SuBLime catalog for current status.

The 2020 film has limited English availability; some streaming services carry it with subtitles depending on region.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• One of the most psychologically sophisticated BL manga in English
• Kyouichi is a rare morally ambiguous protagonist treated with care
• Mizushiro's craft is at its peak here
• Single volume; minimal commitment for the quality delivered
• 2020 film adds significant supplementary material

Cons

• Coercive premise will disqualify some readers regardless of treatment
• Infidelity content depicted seriously throughout
• Explicit sexual content
• The literary-BL register is an acquired taste. It won't land for everyone, especially readers seeking conventional romance.

Is The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese Worth Reading?

For adult BL readers who can engage with morally complicated content: yes, unconditionally. One of the great single-volume BL works of its era.

For readers seeking healthy romance: skip without guilt.

Format Comparison

Format	Notes
Physical (SuBLime)	Single volume available in English
Digital	Available via SuBLime digital, Kindle
Sequel	The Carp on the Chopping Block Jumps Twice (1 volume Japanese; English status check SuBLime)
Film (2020, Yukisada)	Available with English subtitles in some regions

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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