Ai no kusabi 2

A small-town girl dreams of something more than her high-school boyfriend, gets a job in the big city, but is unsure if her boss's sexual attention threatens her freedom or is her only possibility of discovering real autonomy. Within the severe constraints of the generic form, this adaptation tries hard to lead the viewer beyond clichés and oppositions and towards a far more subtle, anguished understanding of the pathways of love, desire, dependence and independence in a mostly cold universe.

The character designs are a little better but the animation looks cheaper. Tons of montages substituted for story here which lessened my already meager enjoyment of the anime.

One of the best BL animes. Tries hard to capture a non-oppositional distinction that's extremely hard to recognize in a relationship: between power, the attempt to keep somebody on a finite level, and control, the attempt to orient towards some infinite by truly asking and trying to understand who each other and ourselves are. Riki's situation and struggle is largely that of a girl, but some descriptions in the novel about him seem to show some curious intuition of the author about men's desire.