Yuuri Eda is a Japanese Light Novel writer. The genre of her works is Boys Love (BL). Her debut novel is「夏の塩」(2000). Yuuri Eda was one of the disciples of Azusa Nakajima ( 中島 梓, pen name of Kaoru Kurimoto / 栗本 薫. She uses the pen name 榎田ユウリ for her general audience (not BL) works. ※Her two names in Romanization are the same.
This is actually a sequel, but as the conflict in the first book is that the main character's boyfriend cheats on him all the time, I'm not really interested in reading it. (I would kind of like to read more about Haru, but...knowing he's just going to spend the whole book in love with his dumb friend doesn't appeal to me either.) At any rate, The main characters of this book are Shuu, a half-American, half-Japanese grad student temporarily teaching English in Japan, and Haruhiko, who's teaching tea ceremony at the same school. (We will ignore Shuu's mysterious genes that give him blond hair and blue eyes. I had brief hopes when Haru pointed out that these are recessive traits, but the explanation was that it was rare, but "my grandmother's hair was this color." Oooookay.) Shuu starts out as kind of a jerk who hates Japan, but he grows up and gets better during the course of the book. I like that the book doesn't follow the BL convention that the characters can't get together until the end of the book...they actually get together in the middle, and the rest of the book mostly deals with other problems. I mean, there are some relationship problems, too, but the book is so short they don't drag on and on like they sometimes do. Also, bonus, the English doesn't totally suck. It's obvious it was written by a Japanese person, but it's not wrong exactly. (And I would like to print out the part about how desire to communicate is more important than grammatical correctness and give it to every Japanese person studying English.)