There seems to be some confusion about the title of this book. My review copy is labeled Wolf and Red, with the English on the cover reading Wolf and Little BL Red Hood. That's a bit odd, but then the copyright page once again relabels the story: The Wolf and Mr. Little Red Riding Hood. All of them work and get the point across that this is a collection of BL gender-swapped fairy tales, but it does feel like someone, at some point, ought to have made a clear choice on the matter.

Fortunately, that's the only real translation issue with this volume, and in fact creator Kotaro Kobayashi does an excellent job lampooning the fairy tales they use by virtue of some real familiarity with the subject matter. The gems of the collection on this front are the versions of Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale The Snow Queen and the Japanese folktale Kachi-Kachi Mountain. The latter definitely feels like the cleverest of the retellings. If you're not familiar with it, Kachi-Kachi Mountain tells the tale of a tanuki who terrorizes an old man, culminating in him killing and cooking the man's wife and feeding him a soup made of her flesh, à la Juniper Tree. The old man enlists the aid of a rabbit, who takes care of the tanuki, eventually drowning him after setting him on the water in a boat of dried mud. (And helping to ensure his death by judicious application of his oar to the tanuki's head.) In Kobayashi's version, the tanuki isn't evil but instead hapless, and he befriends the old woman, who he finds in her bath. She asks him to make her soup, and he hits on the brilliant idea to use her bathwater as the base for it, hence a very different form of “old woman soup.” The old man doesn't get the joke, and the rabbit comes in, only instead of killing the tanuki, he makes him his in a rather different way. This is easily the raunchiest of the stories, but it's also the best parody, right down to a reference to the original punishment and the dried mud boat.

Similarly, The Snow Queen chapter follows very closely to Andersen's original, with the notable exception that Gerda is an overeager suitor for Kai's…let's say hand. When a gender-flipped Snow Queen implants his ice in Kai's eye and heart, Gerda sets out to reclaim him, along the way having his way with the Robber Boy (originally the Robber Girl) and the Spring Prince(ss). The Robber Boy scene leads to Gerda's acquisition of animals to help him to The Snow Queen, and the way Kobayashi plays with the details is both over-the-top and very funny if you've read the original.

The major fly in the ointment is that pretty much none of the sex is consensual. The closest we get is in The Little Matchboy, which is otherwise a very fun parody of Andersen's original tear-jerker. The Matchboy, rather than freezing to death on a street corner thanks to his deadbeat dad, uses his matches and wiles to lure men into hotels, get them to take a shower, and then run off with their wallets. He meets his match in the final customer, who takes what he thinks the Matchboy is offering very seriously. Kai and Gerda's sex scene is also a bit murky; Kai is possessed by the shards of mirror glass in his body so Gerda takes it upon himself to save him with sex, but the title story is undoubtedly the least consensual in the volume, with Red tying up the wolf and then the Huntsman taking advantage of the situation. It's not without its moments – “Granny, why do you have a dick?” is a pretty good addition to Red's usual litany of questions – but even if you're a fan of fractured fairy tales, this may not work for you if noncon isn't your preferred romance trope.

The art is decent and the sex not hugely explicit – we only get one penis in silhouette, and if the witch and The Snow Queen look very similar, their roles in their respective stories are pretty much the same. (Let's just say that the witch doesn't want to ingest Hansel.) The main sexual focus is on nipples, and that's also where Kobayashi devotes most of their artistic attention; there's seriously a lot of detail there in each story. Pages are generally easy to read and the translation is smoother than some of Kobunsha/Media Do's BL offerings, which is always a plus.

Whatever you call it, this volume of fractured BL fairy tales is pretty fun. It's emphatically not perfect and its main kink is most definitely not consent, but if that doesn't bother you in your fiction, it's an entertaining time.