In and Out

ran059

Art from Weiss Kreutz

 
This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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I didn’t get the point of slash, initially. Why the hell would anybody want to spend their creative energy writing explicit sex scenes with someone else’s characters, and why would anybody want to read it?

So I was surprised to find out that huge quantities of the stuff were available on the internet for almost any anime, manga, TV show or movie you could think of. A friend told me about it — her fandom was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — and despite my misgivings, I trusted her taste. She is smart and highly literate and wouldn’t recommend anything that completely sucked (as it were), no matter how much she was into the porn. So the possibility rolled around in the back of my head for years before I finally took her suggestion and Googled “fan fiction.”

My kink is beautiful young men having hot, explicit sex in the context of some kind of emotional relationship. Something meaningful — love, angst, hatred, ideally all three at once. I like porn, but what I wanted wasn’t really available in the mainstream. You can find heterosexual porn with plot, but I didn’t want heterosexual porn. And you can find gay porn with beautiful young men, but I didn’t necessarily want that much sex. (Anyone see “Butt Boys From Outer Space: Blasting Out From Uranus”?)

I had grave misgivings about quality but got lucky and found Scribblemoose right off. The porn sealed the deal, but she is a good writer: well-developed characterizations, compelling plots, and so on. I wasn’t familiar with any of the anime or manga characters she wrote about, but I’d heard of Weiss Kreuz, so I chose one of her WK stories at random, and nothing’s ever been the same.

I picked Weiss Kreuz because it sounded angsty, but also completely ridiculous. The premise of this ’80s anime — which is plagued with some of the worst animation ever perpetrated, along with one-dimensional characters and plot-holes that will occasionally make you throw an axle — is that four beautiful (if peculiarly styled) young men, who have all been scarred by some absolute tragedy, have become avenging assassins with kitty-cat code names who work under cover by day in a flower shop called (get ready for it) “Where the kitten sleeps.”

It seemed like a good place to start.

The first story I read was called “Moving On” (co-written, actually, by Scribblemoose and Gwendolyn Flight). It opens with an espionage scene, and I do love espionage. Two men, Yohji and Aya, are trying to get illicit information out of a computer. Yohji muses crankily about this not being his thing and then spits, “Damnit. It wants a password.” Aya says, “Eggplant.” “What?” “Eggplant. The password’s eggplant,” Aya says, muttering, “Did you actually read the mission pack?” “Of course I fucking did,” Yohji answers.

Soon after, Aya makes a mistake (at the end we find out that a trainee had left different pages out of each man’s information packs), leading to the pair being pursued and hiding in, of course, a crowded gay club. And to blend in, they are obviously forced to dance in extremely tight proximity and kiss in a wonderfully heated fashion. There are passages like: “…Yohji could glimpse shifting muscle and smooth flesh. Tantalizing. He tasted the word on his tongue, rolled it about and smiled on a sudden curling heat.” The men thus discover their hither-to unexplored passion for each other, stagger home and have hot kitchen-counter sex, followed by a complication, then hot bed-sex, and a relationship ensues. It’s funny and sexy and absurd, but there’s an internal logic that holds everything together. (There’s a picture, too, by the lovely and talented P.L. Nunn.)

Years later, Weiss Kreuz is still about the only slash I read, but even in this tiny universe, I’ve come across many talented writers just having a lot of fun with what they do. So many, in fact, I’ve occasionally regretted my inability to become obsessed with other fan fiction universes. I’d enjoy reading them even without the sex.

But, oh, the sex. I’ve had the same basic kink since I was first conscious of sexuality, and for most of my life, there was almost no way to express it. It is inextricably tied up with the other major facet of my sexuality, which is that I’m bi. Both things were equally painful when I was growing up. My family was poor-ish and lived in a fairly small, firmly blue-collar town, and everything I was, sexually, was so wrong it couldn’t even be admitted to exist. For years I had a nebulous, awkward and, most important, closeted relationship with a young woman of similar background. We couldn’t even admit to each other what we were doing. My social life was extremely restricted because nobody could be allowed to find out I was gay — or something, I didn’t exactly know — and nobody around me was out, so I had no idea how to go about finding a more suitable partner or even friends I could trust with my secret.

I spent a lot of time prowling a decrepit and usually completely deserted used bookstore (but wonderful, in its way, and miraculous that it was there at all). And one thrilling day when I was thirteen, I ran across Faggots by Larry Kramer and discovered the broader concept of homosexuality. People like me did exist — somewhere else, obviously, than in my home town, but still. In retrospect, it amuses me that this nasty little book would have been what gave me hope. It’s very far from the kind of porn I seek out, and it didn’t really work for me as porn at the time, but, holy shit! There was a whole world out there, and even if my life felt like a too-tight shoe at the time, there were gay people, and when I grew up I could set forth and find them.

And I did grow up, more or less, and I did find people who were gay, lesbian, bi and trans-gendered, and it was a huge fucking relief. But there was still the other part. I still couldn’t find the kind of porn I needed, or any community where those interests were openly acknowledged, so in a way I still felt like I was in the closet. I broached the subject with some gay men and was considered a fag hag (a phrase I’ve always detested). I was afraid to even mention it to my lesbian friends, who often seemed deeply suspicious of my bisexual orientation (and who did in fact drop me when I started dating a man). It was sort of like high school all over again — there were certainly people out there who shared my porn inclinations, but where the hell were they? So discovering slash, and the slash communities on the internet, felt a bit like discovering the gay utopia. I could finally be out in every way.

There are problems, obviously. It is a virtual community where people interact virtually, using pseudonyms and keeping many details of their real lives private, in part to avoid intruding overly on the fantasy, probably, but mostly to keep themselves safe, since the real world still isn’t open to bi (or straight) women who fantasize about gay men. There is finally yaoi manga to be found at Borders, but this remains a preference you probably don’t want your coworkers to know about.

The virtual community of which I speak lives on LiveJournal, although there are many on LJ and other sites. I often think my life would have been different if this stuff had been around when I was a teenager (in the wee, early ‘80s) or a young adult. To have something so fundamental about myself validated by a community of people who felt similarly — what would that have been like? I have no idea, but I wish every manporn-obsessed teenager in the world could find out.

That opinion would seem to put me in the minority. There’s been so much wailing and gnashing of teeth and crying of “The children! The children!” that it’s almost impossible to say teenagers should perhaps have access to porn. Yes, I am aware that sexual predators make use of the internet. And no, I am not in favor of child abuse. At the same time, I think there is some middle ground on which to perch.

Teenagers are sexual. If someone is thinking about sex, saying “No, you’re not” isn’t going to stuff the genie back into the lamp. This concept of innocence that must be maintained until the age of eighteen, and damn the civil rights torpedoes, is not a universal truth. An awful lot of teenagers have sex. It was even the norm in the US not so long ago. My grandmother — admittedly poor and rural — was married at fourteen, and that was not unusual.

LiveJournal is currently trying to convince its users to save the children by self-censoring. Users are never, ever to post anything that might possibly contain any remotely sexual content involving anyone younger than eighteen — because if you ever posted anything like that, you’d obviously be a disgusting pedophile, and also, the terrorists would win. And the newest innovation is inviting users to flag all adult content in a way that precludes younger users (those who registered their accounts with a birth date indicating they are not yet eighteen years old) from being able to access the material. Other people can flag your content, too. Because the only way to keep teens from being sexually assaulted by pervy old creeps is to deny them access to any kind of sexual content whatsoever.

From the outside, I guess the closet looks like a safe place to store kids. It didn’t feel that way when I was in it, though.

Dangerous Boys

This post first ran on comixology.
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Over the last decade, imported Japanese comics, or manga, have gained a huge following among young girls in America. One of the most successful, and most startling, genres has been shonen–ai or its more explicit sister yaoi — romance comics made by women, for women, about romantic trysts between gay men. The marketing logic here is obvious; one hot boy good, two hot boys better.

However, many commentators seem uncomfortable with the straight (ahem) prurient motive, and have instead come up with a pseudo-sociological explanation. The argument goes that girls like yaoi because, as children’s book marketing manager J. Ho puts it, “reading a gay romance feels ‘safe’ to them.” Homosexual love, the argument goes, is, for girls, a step removed; by identifying with male characters, girls can enter the story without becoming too vulnerable.

If the point of shonen-ai is to provide the reader with a sense of emotional safety, nobody sent the memo to Korean creator Sooyeon Won. Her shonen-ai manhwa (Korean comics) series Let Dai — which concluded with volume 15 in December 2009 — features cheerful covers with frolicking puppies and pastel tones. The interior, however, is much, much less sunny. The art is, by shojo standards, unfrilly and grim, more likely to show an unflinching close-up of a bloody, beaten face than drifting flowers or pretty clothes. And as for the plot…well, the first volume includes the brutal gang-rape of a sweetly innocent 17-year-old girl named Eunhyung.

The violence here isn’t explicit or exciting; indeed, it’s barely shown. Instead Won simply, and with ruthless compassion, shows us how the tragedy poisons Eunhyung’s existence. Over time, you come not just to pity Eunhyung, but to admire and love her. She finds new friends, tenuously creates a new identity for herself, and seems at last to have regained in her life some sense of joy. (And skip the next paragraph if you don’t like spoilers. Last chance….)

The touch of hope for Euhnyung makes her fate all the more unbearable. Just as she seems to have sorted herself out, and with an entirely lovable and sweet new boyfriend named Naru on the horizon, a jealous “friend” starts telling people in school that Euhnyung was raped. Humiliated, Euhnyung then accidentally overhears a conversation which makes her think (erroneously) that Naru has been stringing her along.

So she runs away, growing increasingly hungry, lonely, desperate, and bitter, until finally she climbs to the top of a building and throws herself off. But she doesn’t die. So, broken bones and all, she drags herself back into the building, back up the stairs, and jumps off again, finally killing herself. This is all told from her point of view, incidentally; you’re in her head while she jumps. It’s an absolutely remorseless sequence; one of the most painful things I’ve read in a comic book. It made me cry like a baby.

At the center of the book’s brutality, both physical and emotional, is Dai, a high-school gang leader from a wealthy and powerful family. Dai is extremely intelligent, magnetically charismatic…and a sociopath, with neither compassion nor any moral restraint. In a passing moment of pique he allows his hangers-on to rape Eunhyung; he puts classmates and even teachers in the hospital on a whim. Almost as casually, it seems, he falls in love with Jaehee, a younger boy his thugs have been tormenting. In one of their first encounters, Dai has his gang beat Jaehee, then slashes open his own chest with a piece of broken bottle and forces Jaehee to lick up the blood.

From there, the two move into a classic abusive relationship, with Jaehee desperately clinging to every sign of approval and tenderness and Dai vacillating between romantic savior and jealous, paranoid monster. Dai does reform in the last volume, but it’s not especially believable. Woo is at least canny enough to separate him and Jaehee permanently. It’s one thing to grant your psychotic abuser grace; it’s another thing to live with him.

Yet, while he is never quite convincing as a good person, Dai remains a sympathetic character. In part this is because, like Jaehee, the reader wants to believe in the boy’s glimmers of humanity; in part it’s because Won’s drawings of him are so languidly lovely. Mostly, though, it’s because, while Dai is selfish, he is not, like his corrupt Senator father, a hypocrite. Dai ‘s cynicism is unapologetic and in many ways irrefutable. He’s right that trying to help others is as likely as not to make everyone miserable; he’s right that striving for justice rarely leads to good, or to catharsis, or to anything except more injustice. Dai is only as unfeeling as the world — except that he loves. That love is neither safe nor necessarily good. But it is beautiful.

Borders and Manga: Interviews with Shaenon Garrity, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and J.R. Brown

A few weeks back I published a story over at the Washington Times about the effect of the closing of Borders on the manga market. Several of the people I interviewed had such great thoughts that it seemed a shame to just use a quote or two. So I decided I’d reprint them all here. Thanks to Shaenon, Lillian, and J.R. for agreeing to let me do this!

I’ve edited down my comments in several places, since they’re the least illuminating parts of the dialogue.
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Email interview with J.R. Brown, BL expert and occasional HU contributor.

Noah: Hey JR. I’m writing because I’m currently working on a piece for the Washington Times about the effect of borders closing on manga. I was interested in the post you made on twitter about how this would have a big impact on the availability of BL titles. I wondered if I could ask you a couple more questions about that.

JR Brown: Hi Noah;

More than happy to talk, although I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, since I’m merely a reader with no inside info. The people at Digital Manga Publishing (the biggest standing BL publisher) seem to be quite responsive to academic/journalistic inquires; you could try giving dropping them a line.

My comments were based on 1) statements made by Digital Manga staff on their forum saying that availability of their BL titles in bookstores (as opposed to online / comic book shops / elsewhere) is a significant driver of sales, 2) remarks by DMP and other BL publishers indicating that Borders was a major component of their bookstore sales, and 3) in the Boston area, Barnes and Noble (our only other major chain) does not carry BL titles in its physical stores (the downtown location stocked the Junjo Romantica series briefly after it made the NYT bestseller list last year, but dropped it even before Tokyopop disintegrated). B&N in my area also just carries much less manga generally, with a more specific focus on the best-selling series and new releases biased towards the larger publishers. I have heard that B&N stores elsewhere in the country do carry BL, but even so it appears that they do so less consistently and to a lower extent than Borders did.

We do have a couple of very good local comic shops that carry BL, and of course you can get everything online, but I think the loss of Borders is going to make it less likely that the casual and especially the new reader will come across the books. And of course the same goes for other manga, especially less-popular series and the output of the smaller publishers.

I’ll be happy to take a stab at any questions you have.

Hey JR. That’s super helpful already, thanks.

Here are a couple more questions if you don’t mind…

—Do you know if Borders moved early on into BL sales? And did they help popularize that genre in the US, or at least make it available?

—Have there been any public censorship efforts aimed specifically at BL? My sense is that it’s mostly been self-censorship when the books have become unavailable, but I don’t know for sure….

—Do you think Amazon is unlikely to attract new readers to manga or BL?

JR: Oh wow. A full discussion of all this would be more than I can knock off tonight, but hitting the high points:

Borders was a major player in manga sales when the format was really taking off in the 2000s, thanks in large part to their graphic novel buyer at the time, Kurt Hassler, who was deeply gung-ho on manga and especially on the idea that girls would buy it. Borders went big and deep into manga in the mid-2000s, just around the time that publishers really started to tackle full-on BL. Several publishers had tested the water with hint-and-innuendo-only BL-esque series previously (and there had been two extremely obscure e-book releases of “real” BL by a tiny company), but around 2003 Tokyopop’s “Fake” and especially “Gravitation” series came out and did extremely well in stores (by manga standards). Borders was a major outlet for Tokyopop’s books (and continued to be so up until their joint demise), so they sold a lot of those series. I don’t know how much Borders supported the first sexually explicit books (from smaller BL publishers like CPM’s BeBeautiful, Media Blaster’s Kitty), but they did carry explicit material a few years later, including Tokyopop’s BLU line once they launched it around 2005. And as I mentioned Borders was apparently a large component of DMP’s BL sales. I don’t know of anything Borders did to popularize BL as such, beyond making the books available, but they definitely did that.

I’m not sure what you mean by “public censorship”. Many BL titles have been censored by the U.S. publisher, either because of legally/morally questionable content (particularly underage characters) or, frequently, to make the material tamer and more acceptable to bookstores. Usually it’s a question of a few panels being retouched, or dialog or character ages changed, but occasionally a page or two is left out entirely. DMP folks have talked on their forums about this, and apparently they regularly consult with bookstore buyers about permissible content for their less-explicit June imprint; it appears that said buyers prefer an absence of visible genitalia or body fluids, and the art is frequently retouched to obscure such content. Fans hate this, of course, especially in books that are 18+ anyway. Fortunately, it seems that this sort of adjustment is becoming less common, perhaps under the influence of certain very strong-selling explicit titles (Junjo Romantica, DMP’s Viewfinder re-release).

Also, this is only part of more general trends of censorship in manga; Japanese publishers have rather different ideas of how much nudity, sexual innuendo, etc is appropriate for different age levels, not to mention stuff like smoking and “hand gestures”, and quite a lot of manga gets “tweaked” for the American edition. An article that mentions some examples (mildly NSFW):

http://io9.com/5383540/dragon-ball-spice-and-wolf-and-low+class-filth-in-manga-nsfw

If you mean taking books off the shelves completely, I don’t know of any case where books were actually pulled by the publisher (more that they go out of print, or the entire publisher folds), but there have been several public flaps where specific books have been removed from certain sales channels. In 2007, Walmart.com pulled some BL after complaints about the series Yaoi Hentai (a made-in-America, explicitly pornographic OEL comic):

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/9968.html

And just recently, Amazon.com pulled a large number of Kindle titles including BL from several publishers as part of an apparent purge of Kindle porn, but also removed a few print BL books (no specific reasons were ever given, and some of the removed stuff was quite tame):

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/05/too-hot-for-kindle-amazon-pulls-yaoi-from-kindle-store/

In regards to Amazon bringing in new readers: online bookstores work great for people who already know of the material and are looking for it. For someone who hasn’t ever heard of BL, or is vaguely aware of it but hasn’t actually seen any, I don’t think it’s effective. Anecdotally, for people not already familiar with slash fanfiction and so forth, entrée into BL tends to come from one of three places: indoctrination by friends; exposure to a popular “almost-BL” series like Loveless or The Betrayal Knows My Name, followed by looking for “more like that”; or just tripping across the stuff at random. Amazon.com doesn’t really facilitate the latter, except via the Kindle books, and I don’t think the Kindle Store has the degree of market penetration Borders had.

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Email interview with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, a former senior editor at Tokyopop

Noah: I know Tokyopop had a close relationship with Borders initially when the manga boom started. Did that relationship continue over time? Did Tokyopop develop similarly close relationships with other stores, or did Borders always do better in carrying manga?

Did the problems at Borders (which I know has been struggling for years) contribute to Tokyopop’s struggles? Or were they mostly separate issues?

Have other companies taken up the slack left behind by Tokyopop’s disappearance? Or are there just less titles out there now and for the forseeable future?

Will places like B&N or Amazon or digital services fill the space left by Borders? Or will there just be less products available for manga fans?

With the end of Borders and Tokyopop, is this the end of the manga boom?

Lillian: 1. Credit where credit is due—a huge part of the influence that Borders had on the manga market was thanks to Kurt Hassler, who was the buyer for the section for quite some time. He was a great supporter of manga, and brought a lot of things into the section that might not have been there otherwise (boys love being the prime example, but there are others as well, including what we called original global manga, and a variety of merchandise). After he left to run Yen Press, there were still good connections with the buyers, but that was coincidentally the start of a long downward spiral in terms of how we worked with the chain. But we had great relationships with the other stores as well, even from the start. We did very solid business in the South, for instance, thanks to the Books a Million chain—and with a lot of the mature titles, too, which was the unexpected part. But B&N, for example, was generally a little more conservative in terms of what they would bring in. They were happy to take loads of Fruits Basket and the like, but took in fewer mature titles overall, and no mature-rated BL until last year when they tried Junjo Romantica as a test. That may be changing now, with the hole in the market (anecdotally, my local B&N has a nice, diverse line-up—but then, I live in Los Angeles), but I still see that initial risk-taking attitude on Borders’ part as a significant part of what helped grow the market back in the day, and that has never really been duplicated elsewhere.

2. Yup, Borders’ troubles most definitely affected us. Waldenbooks had always been a strong market of ours, so those stores closing down was a significant blow, and that was just the beginning. Over the last three years there were a variety of issues that we were dealing with, from how they were handling bill payment versus returns, to how aggressive they were with promoting new series, to how reliable their order numbers were. They still remained about 1/3 of our market up until the end, though, so the final impact of the bankruptcy troubles from the beginning of this year were significant (it directly led to me being laid off, for one). And every minute that your sales team is spending trying to work out problems with one distributor is a minute when they’re not thinking of new strategies to be competitive in an increasingly tight market. That’s certainly not to say that TP didn’t have its share of other problems (because it did), but that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

3. Speaking from experience, “rescuing” dropped titles is a tricky business, especially since manga is a very trend-driven market, so I wouldn’t expect to see many of TP’s old series out in print release from our former rivals, if that’s what you mean. (What the J-Manga consortium has up their sleeves in that regard is anyone’s guess, though.) There are a few that are probably worth the effort to obtain, but for the most part I think the remaining companies are going to stay the course, rather than try to usurp the corner we’d been clinging to. Or rather, I think they’re better off exploring new avenues and new business models, instead of trying to regain TP’s past glory.

But to put this in perspective, the big manga market adjustment really happened in 2008 and 2009, when we went from publishing 40-odd titles a month to 20, and then to 10-15. Borders or no Borders (and Borders was definitely a factor in that decision for us), and whether we’re talking supply or demand, the US market just doesn’t support two companies printing 40-plus volumes a month, with several smaller publishers adding another 20 or 30 to the pile. TP learned that lesson the hard way three years ago, and everyone else followed shortly thereafter in one way or another, and that’s not going to get un-learned any time soon. If TP’d gone under in 2008 there may have been more of a rush to fill the vacuum, but at this point, except on an individual title level, I don’t think our catalogue is going to be that sorely missed by the market overall (Our charming personalities and flamboyant marketing campaigns, maybe, but that’s another story!). VIZ’s shojo titles may get a little bump from the people who aren’t buying Maid-Sama and Gakuen Alice anymore, and Yen may see a little uptick from people with no more Trinity Blood or Deadman Wonderland to buy, it’s not the gaping void it might have been if we’d gone under sooner.

4. If you mean print sales through Amazon, that’s certainly not going to make up the difference (people are generally surprised to know what a small percentage of our revenue came from Amazon—but remember that the manga market is primarily teenagers, and even now most of them don’t have credit cards), and I think B&N is going to stay comfortably where they are for the time being. Digital opportunities are definitely there, though. And I think it’s a very legitimate question to ask whether people whose local store was a Borders will now go further afield to buy print manga (and in some cases, it may be significantly further afield), or if they’ll just turn to the internet to get their fix.

To combine this question with your final one, in my mind, the print manga boom hit a plateau with the rise of the aggregator scanlation sites, when a tremendous volume of content became easily available for free. Borders closing may have been the nail in the coffin for TP, but if a huge portion of your potential customer base is just as happy reading comics on their computer (which they are), that has to be addressed. I love print books, and I believe there will always be a market for them, but the serialized and addictive quality of manga means that this is a crowd with a thirst for getting new content as quickly and easily as possible, and for a variety of reasons the traditional publishing model makes it difficult to satisfy that demand. Providing a compelling alternative to the scan sites is a major challenge on every level from tech to marketing to licensing, but especially after San Diego Comicon, it’s obvious that publishers are painfully aware of this, and are actively trying to come up with that new model. If all goes well, there may be a new manga boom! I just don’t know if it’ll be in the chain bookstores anymore…
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Email interview with Shaenon Garrity, cartoonist, critic, and a freelance editor for Viz

Noah: How important was Borders to manga outside of Tokyopop? Was it a major venue for other companies as well, or were they already more focused in B&N or Amazon or other locations?

Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

Shaenon: I don’t know all that much about the business end of manga, but I can answer these questions:

> Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Publishers have been preparing for the Borders collapse for a while, so they’re already expanding into other venues. In the brick-and-mortar world, that includes Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores and small chains, and the comic-book direct market. There’s also a lot of interest in ebooks, especially Kindle and iPad editions, and in online comics in general, as evidenced by Viz’s big rollout of vizmanga.com at Comic-Con last week.

> Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

I’d say the bubble has burst, but the big manga titles are still popular and selling well; it’s just that publishers’ overall output is settling to a less artificially inflated level. Instead of scrambling to flood the market with every available license, publishers are cutting back and being cautious in picking up new titles. I hesitate to point to Tokyopop’s situation as proof of the boom times ending, since Tokyopop’s business problems had little to do with sales of its manga, and ultimately the company folded because the guy running it just had interests elsewhere. I’m more concerned about the precarious status of smaller publishers, but with Viz still huge, DMP on the rise, and Japanese publishers getting directly involved in the American market, the industry keeps marching on. I get the impression that last year was the toughest year.

> And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

For me, personally, the biggest problem with Borders closing is that Borders was very open to stocking yaoi/BL, and Barnes & Noble is not. I hope this situation changes, and that more bookstores get interested in BL. I’m saying this as a BL fan, of course, but also as someone who’s in the industry and believes that BL is going to be increasingly important as a steady seller to keep manga publishers profitable, just as romance novels keep print publishers profitable. Also, there are a bunch of awesome BL I want to see translated.

Ecce homo?

by Michael Arthur

Update 8/9/11:

A little while ago, Noah asked me to put a few words together on my perspective as a gay male reading yaoi. I didn’t have any particular thesis pulled together on the subject but I was thrilled to be given a soapbox. What ended up happening was that in an attempt to pull together my unsorted notions into a cogent article, I talked waaaaaaaay out of school. What’s more, the glib tone I picked ended up fruitlessly teasing people for no reason and for some reason felt it was necessary to define women’s experience with something that they had done a good enough job defining for themselves.

It isn’t that I’m merely embarrassed to have my name attached to the thing because it makes me look like an idiot, but that I genuinely repent of the impulse for writing it in the first place. I’m reading more yaoi. It still isn’t my thing, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s hardly for me to be miffed about an air of exploitation with all of the BBC period costume dramas I consume. I mean, seriously.

I’ve asked Noah to remove the article but left the ultimate decision up to him, since the discussion in the comments is well worth preserving. If the text remains below this, keep in mind to disregard it, as I’ve changed my opinion about pretty much every point I brought up. I’m listening and learning people. Thanks for calling me out, and next time I write for HU, it’ll be about something I damned well know a little more about.

Thanks for reading. Hugs and kisses. Comics are awesome.
Michael

One Thousand and One Nights with Melinda & Michelle

MELINDA: Hello, Utilitarians. I’m Melinda Beasi.

MICHELLE: And I’m Michelle Smith.

MELINDA: About a month ago, Noah asked if we’d be interested in having a conversation about comics here at The Hooded Utilitarian, similar to our weekly manga discussion column, Off the Shelf (at Manga Bookshelf), and our monthly art-talk feature, Let’s Get Visual (at Soliloquy in Blue). He suggested at the time that we might try discussing a mutually admired series (as we once did with Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss), and that the subject need not be manga.

With those thoughts in mind, we decided to take a stab at One Thousand and One Nights, a South Korean boys’ love series written by Jeon JinSeok and illustrated by Han SeungHee, published in English by Ice Kunion/Yen Press. While this may seem like an unusual choice for this audience, there are a couple of things that make this series especially interesting to us.

First, though the story has a BL romance at its core, it is a multi-volume epic (11 volumes in total) featuring a series of interwoven stories-within-the-story drawn from multiple periods and cultural settings. Secondly, it’s a BL romance written by a man, unusual in a genre mainly written by (and for) women.

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Endless Comfort: the sweetest yaoi ever

Endless Comfort, Sakuya Sakura, June Manga.

I admit it up front–I bought this manga for the plucky great danes on the cover.

Look at these faces!  (Note the dark grey nose at the far right, just peeking into the frame!)

The art isn’t bad, either, and I enjoy yaoi, but it’s the dogs that got me to buy this one. 

Yeah, yeah, dogs, mutters someone in the audience, so what?  And to this I say: Endless Comfort is a bit like Zoo Borns, except with porn, deftly handled relationships, and a well-written exploration of the healing of wounds from child sexual abuse.

Uh.  OK.  Maybe not the best ad-copy summary I’ve ever written.

And yet, I feel, fairly accurate.

Let’s try this again.  Endless Comfort is about Kuzumi, a wealthy man who returns to his mother’s manor house in the suburbs which she left to him after her death two years.  The manor house is where he spent his weekends as a child, and it houses the family servants (who helped to raise him), three great danes, and a new dog trainer named Yuu.
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1000 Years of Pretty Boys

A print of a beautiful boy, in the style of bijin-ga, “beautiful-woman pictures” (Suzuki Harunobu, A Wakashu Looking at a Painting of Mt Fuji, c. 1650)

If you’ve been exposed to any Japanese media, you’ve almost certainly come across the figure of the bishounen; beautiful, doe-eyed young men who smile radiantly from the covers of manga, anime, J-pop CDs, and popular movies. The credit (or blame) for the profusion of these prettyboys is usually laid at the feet of shoujo manga and the generations of fangirls raised on its sparkles-flowers-and-gaint-eyes esthetic. Although that certainly has something to do with the popularity of the modern bishounen, the ideal of the beautiful, desirable, androgynous boy has been circulating in Japan for hundreds of years. Forthwith, a not-so-brief history of the bishounen.

Warning: NSFW images after the cut.

“Ichi chigo ni sanno”: Acolytes first, the mountain god second

The oldest standardized image of the beautiful boy is the chigo (literally “child”, usually translated “acolyte”); boy-attendants at both Shinto and Buddhist monasteries who performed some peripheral religious duties, including assisting in ceremonies, filling out processions, and performing religious and secular songs and dances, as well as acting as personal servants to their monks. Boys were considered eligible for chigo-hood between age 7 and the coming-of-age ceremony (about 15 in the medieval era, late teens or early-20s in the Edo period)[1]; some were aristocrat or samurai-class boys sent to monasteries for an education, some were novitiates who hoped to become ordained, and some were merely servants, hired for wages or purchased outright by their “brother” monk. Unlike the older boys and men who had already taken holy orders, chigo were permitted (and often encouraged) to grow their hair long, wear silk robes, and use makeup (face powder and rouge, sometimes tooth-blackening paste). This reflected their two major roles: to provide beauty and color in both ceremonies and daily life, through music and dance performances as well as their own physical charms, and to serve as romantic and sexual partners to their brother monks. Aside from physical beauty, the ideal chigo possessed grace, nobility and cultured achievements, particularly in music and poetry; many of the chigo love stories cast the boy as a son of an aristocratic family, the eminence of his background providing a rationale for his abilities.

Traditionally, the origin of Japanese nanshoku (literally “male color”, with “color” having the implication of erotic appeal, and therefore generally translated “male love”) is ascribed to Chinese influence. By the 14th century there were a number of legends crediting Kukai (posthumously dubbed Kobo Daishi, or “great teacher transmitting the Dharma”), founder of the Shingon (“true word”) sect of esoteric Buddhism, with importing nanshoku along with religious doctrine upon his return from China in 806. Kukai himself is often depicted in religious iconography as a chigo, which seems appropriate.

Chigo Daishi - Anonymous 14th century wall scroll
The Chigo Daishi, or Kukai in his form of a beautiful child (Anonymous wall scroll, early 14th c., Art Institute of Chicago)

An anonymous 16th-century text, Kobo Daishi’s Book, offers hints on boy-management said to have been obtained (in a dream-visitation) from the man himself:

After an acolyte has spoken, observe him carefully. The acolyte who speaks quietly is sensitive to love. To such a boy, show your sincerity by being somewhat shy. Make your interest in him clear by leaning against his lap. When you remove his robes, calm him by explaining exactly what you will be doing. […] An acolyte may be very beautiful but insensitive to love. Such a boy must be dealt with aggressively. Stroke his penis, massage his chest, and then gradually move your had to the area of his ass. By then he’ll be ready for you to strip off his robe and seduce him without a word. [Trans. Schalow]

Other tips for seduction include flattery, pretending an interest in his hobbies, and regaling him with tales of warriors and other topics of interest to boys. The work concludes with a survey of positions and penetration techniques for anal sex, and a tip from the author himself, to add to Kukai’s wisdom: boys with tiny mouths have tight asses (this parallels a piece of folk wisdom regarding women’s attributes).

Kobo Daishi’s Book can be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek take on the storied monastic obsession with boy-buggery (the first section, on hand-signals, and the last on positions, mimic teachings on meditation), or as sincere advice on a topic dear to the clerical heart. Less prurient advice can be found in the 12th-century Shingon text Uki by Prince Shukaku (1150–1202), abbot of Ninnaji temple. Shukaku counsels that chigo should carry out their religious duties diligently, behave in a decorous manner, dress elegantly, and devote their time to the study of music, poetry, and literature. He points out that one’s status as chigo is temporary, only four or five years; boys should make the most of it.

Mentions of love affairs between monks and chigo occur from the 13th century at least; the collections Jikkinsho (1252) and Kokonchomonju (1254) both feature anecdotes of priests who fall in love with beautiful chigo dancers at temple cherry-blossom festivals. More extensive stories occur in the chigo monogatari (“chigo stories”), a group of about a dozen texts written between the 14th and 16th centuries. The oldest of these, an anonymous hand scroll dated 1321 and given the later title chigo no soshi (“chigo handbook”), has the distinction of possibly being Japan’s oldest preserved piece of pornography (the original is said to still be in the possession of the Daigo-ji temple). The chigo no soshi contains five scurrilous stories, with suitably filthy illustrations, all on the topic of chigo who take pity on men, not their masters, who desire them, and relieve their admirers’ suffering by letting themselves be screwed senseless. The first and longest story comes in two versions: the first, told through the main text, is of a devoted chigo of an elderly monk who undergoes elaborate precoital preparations to ensure that his enfeebled master can achieve penetration. The second, told through the illustrations and accompanying dialogue, has the boy fornicating wantonly with the manservant who is supposed to be preparing him for his master’s bed.

One of the boys from the chigo no soshi, pretending like we don’t know what’s going to happen next (Anonymous hand scroll, detail from a later reproduction of the 1321 original)

The remainder of the chigo monogatari are rather more respectable. The typical story is of a monk who falls in love with a beautiful chigo, only to have the boy die tragically some time later (of illness, murder or suicide), causing the monk to realize the transience of all things, renounce earthly desires, and thus achieve enlightenment. Some of the stories are primarily religious parables with the romance reduced to a plot point, others are primarily romances or tragedies with minimal religious import. One of the longest is Aki no yo no nagamonogatari ( “A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”, before 1377), the subject of a beautiful set of 14th century handscrolls. The monk Keikai of Mt Hiei has a dream of a beautiful boy, and the following day espies just such a boy in the grounds of the rival temple of Miidera:

[H]e saw a youth of about sixteen. He was wearing a gossamer robe embroidered with a design of waves and fishes over an undergarment of pale crimson, the skirts of which fell long and gracefully from his slender hips. Evidently unaware that he was being watched, the boy came out from behind the bamboo screen into the garden and broke a spray of blossoms from a branch which hung low as though heavily laden with snow. […] As he walked softly around the game court with the blossoms in his hand the ends of his long hair, swaying as gracefully as sea grasses, became entangled in the branches of a willow and held him bound. He turned around abstractedly, and the Master saw the very face, the same expression that, ever since his dream, had so captivated him that he had not known where he was. [Trans. Childs]

The monk and chigo (who turns out to be Lord Umewaka, son of the Hanazono Minister of the Left, in accordance with the above-mentioned fetishization of aristocratic boys) exchange poetic love-notes and start a happy love affair, but when the chigo goes missing (abducted by tengu) the monks of Miidera blame Mt Hiei and war ensues, in which Miidera is destroyed. When Umewaka returns and sees the carnage he commits suicide out of guilt, leaving Keikai, devastivated, to become a hermit and attain salvation. At the end of the story it is revealed that the boy was in fact a manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon, sent to bring Keikai to enlightenment.

The violence directed against chigo in the chigo monogatari may not be solely to provide dramatic tension or didactic effect. Surviving sources suggest that there were numerous rivalries between monks over favored chigo, sometimes leading to murder. These disruptions, as well as the fact that most sects agreed that monks should, ideally, be entirely chaste, led some monasteries to ban chigo, such as the edict of former emperor Go-Uda at Daikakuji in 1324. Most, however, continued to permit them; a 1355 edict from the Gakuenji temple in Izumo explains that chigo are not only needed to perform religious duties but also to “alleviate the coldness of lonely nights”.

At the end of a boy’s tenure as a chigo he would normally either become a monk (and might then take a chigo of his own) or return to his family to take up whatever position his station in life dictated. For those boys who were indentured servants, however, there was no such guarantee. We have the diary of one Jinson, the abbot of Daijoin temple, which contains the details of several of his chigo. In 1461, Jinson recruited a low-born 15-year-old named Aimitsu to be his chigo. Six years later, Jinson purchased the boy outright from his father. Aimitsu became a cleric at age 26, in 1472, still in Jinson’s service and without ever having formally become an adult. After a period of illness, he committed suicide at age 28. Several scholars have speculated that the (very late) loss of his chigo status caused Aimitsu to kill himself; of too low a social class to become a full-fledged monk and effectively Jinson’s property, Aimitsu may have felt he had no other recourse.

Shudo and Bushido

The noble and samurai classes were not blind to the attractions of beautiful boys; the equivalent of the monastic chigo was the wakashu (literally “young person”), a boy, like the chigo, in the stage between early childhood and the coming-of-age ceremony. Wakashu wore a distinctive hairstyle, with a small shaved portion on the crown of the head and long forelocks (maegami) in front; they were also permitted to wear long sleeves (furisode), bright colors, and flower prints on their kimono, all things which were suitable for women and children but not adult men. Boys of the samurai class were employed by noble households as page-boys; like chigo, the page’s duties included being decorative, entertaining their lord and his guests with dance and music, and accompanying their lord to bed if required, but unlike the chigo, a noble’s pages were part of his militia and expected to fight when necessary, despite their age. Samurai-class wakashu wore twin swords like their elders and were expected to willingly receive training in the martial arts.

Kitagawa Utamaro - Mashiba Hisayoshi and his favorite page - 1804
Mashiba Hisayoshi (a reference to the lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi) and a page-boy (identified as Ishida Mitsunari). One of a series of prints that got the artist in trouble for mocking the love-affairs of the powerful. (Kitagawa Utamaro, 1804, British Museum)

Page-boys were expected to be faithful to their lord (on pain of death), but boys outside such positions were fair game for other men. As with chigo in monasteries, wakashu could cause dissention among rivals, and regulations both formal and informal were set up to control such relationships. One form of control was the formalization of the pursuit of wakashu as a do, or way: the wakashudo (“way of wakashu”), generally shortened to shudo (the term first appears in the 15th century). The Hagakure (c. 1716), which sets out rules for the warrior’s life (from the perspective of the 18th century, after over a hundred years of peace), takes a particularly hard line on shudo: a boy should have only one lover during his youth, and he should only accept the man after several years of “steady amorous intentions”. Once a lover has been chosen, would-be buttinskis should be dealt with harshly; the boy should cut them down if they won’t leave him alone. The partners in shudo should abstain from women and should be prepared to give up their lives for each other, at least so long as the relationship pertains.

Other texts set out the terms of a shudo relationship. The most important trait in a wakashu, according to the Shin’yuki (1643) was nasake (“compassion”), like that demonstrated by the boys in the chigo no soshi; the sensitivity to an admirer’s suffering and the willingness to relieve that suffering through his sexual and romantic availability. A wakashu, in turn, should overlook his suitor’s status, wealth, and appearance, and even his own degree of attraction to the man, and value only the “sincerity” of the man’s affections, taking as nenja (“lover” or “admirer”) the first man who loved him deeply and faithfully. Shin’yuki aside, surviving texts suggest the boy’s appearance was usually the initial source of attraction. Valued characteristics were fair skin, long glossy black hair, red lips, flushed cheeks, and graceful movement. The suitor might also be taken with the boy’s musical ability on the flute or biwa (both male-specific instruments), and his skill at composing poetry, a widely-valued trait in both sexes.

A later edition of the Shin’yuki gives the ages at which a boy may be loved: they have childlike appeal between 12 and 14 (10-13 by modern count), are at the peak of beauty between 15 and 17 (13-16), and embody mature love between 18 and 20 (16-19). After 20 they are no longer suitable. The Wakashu no hara (17th century) gives roughly the same stages: a boy is a “blossoming flower” from 11 to 14, a “flourishing flower” from 15 to 18, and a “falling flower” from 19 to 22. Pursuing older youths, or those who had undergone the coming-of-age ceremony, was eccentric; pursuing boys not yet wakashu was in bad taste (not necessarily illegal or immoral, mind you, just tacky). For comparison, girls were considered to be at the peak of their beauty at 16, and among Edo’s licensed pleasure quarters, courtesans were considered not worth their keep after 20 or 22 unless exceptionally beautiful.

As indicated by the above, a wakashu’s status as erotic object lasted only so long as his status as wakashu. Saikaku Ihara’s short-story collection Nanshoku Okagami (“The great mirror of male love”, 1687) devotes its first 20 stories to love affairs of samurai-class boys. In two of these, a pageboy who has taken a lover not his lord, is spared from execution under pain of immediately shaving his forelocks and becoming an adult. By this means the merciful lord renounces his claims over the boy, but at the same time ends the boy’s (sexual) relationship with his lover.

During the course of a shudo relationship, the lover should teach the wakashu honor, duty, and the warrior code, and seek to provide a good role model through his own behavior; thus, shudo was promoted as having a mutually ennobling effect on the participants as well as assisting the youth in learning martial skills. A wakashu might wear face powder and furisode, but he was still seen as the embryonic stage of the fearsome warrior; in the Nanshoku Okagami, the narrator moves seamlessly from describing the youths fussing over their dress and hairstyles to recounting the fearless duels, vendettas, murders and ritual suicides they enacted. Between the inevitable onset of adulthood and the possibility of a violent end, the beauty of the wakashu was fleeting; they were often compared to the cherry blossom, Japan’s go-to icon of beauty, eroticism, and transience. Real people, like the historical warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune could be made over in the bishounen image to bring their appearance in line with the romantic appeal of a brave life and tragic end.

Performance, prostitution and commercialization

In 1374, the young shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu visited the Shinto temple of Imagumano to view the “monkey dances” performed by the temple boys, and returned home with the 11-year old (9 or 10, in modern count) dancer Zeami and his father Kan’ami in tow. Zeami was promptly installed as imperial favorite, and the dances and skits his father wrote for him, and those he wrote himself in later life, became the foundations of noh theatre. The shogun’s affair with Zeami occasioned considerable censure, not because of the underage boy-buggering but because the shogun had fixed upon a no-account commoner, of the lowest social class, upon which to lavish his affection. The courtier Nijo Yoshimoto, however, defended the shogun’s choice on the grounds that Zeami was uncommonly beautiful:

[When he dances he is] more beautiful than all the flowers of the seven autumn grasses soaked with the evening dew. […] I should compare him to a profusion of cherry or pear blossoms in the haze of a spring dawn; this is how he captivates, with the blossoming of his appearance. [Trans. Hare]

Both noh and traditional dance performances were associated with male prostitution, but the new theatrical form of kabuki was even more closely so. Born in the first years of the 1600s out of shows put on by brothels to advertise their goods, kabuki attracted considerable official interference because of its connection to prostitution, which the shogunal government wished to confine to the licensed pleasure quarters only. Early kabuki centered around song-and-dance routines and short skits depicting visits to the pleasure quarters and other suggestive situations, and the actresses would mingle with the audience between acts to provide such personal services as the patrons might desire. In a series of bans between 1629 and 1646 the shogunal government succeeded in driving women off the stage (not only in kabuki, but also noh, the more informal kyogen, and joruri puppet theatre as well), and tried to force more respectable subject matter by banning too-salacious material and requiring more developed storylines. All-male kabuki troupes had been in existence since at least 1612, so kabuki forged on, populated by attractive wakashu, some in female drag, and available to the audience as usual. In the next step of its never-ending and utterly futile attempt to break the link between kabuki and prostitution, the shogunal government first banned female impersonators (onna-gata, “woman-role”), and when that merely led to a rash of plays depicting nanshoku love affairs, in 1654 rescinded the ban but required all actors, regardless of role, to shave their foreheads in the adult male style. In the Nanshoku Okagami this is described as “like seeing unopened blossoms being torn from the branch.” Fortunately for all, the wakashu and onna-gata actors developed a fashion for little purple headscarves to cover their lack, which shortly became as much an object of erotic fixation as the wakashu’s forelocks.

Aside from the actors themselves, available after-hours for a suitable fee, there was a large contingent of “apprentices” who could also be engaged from tea-houses in the theatre district. Boys too young or too unskilled to act were dubbed iroko (literally “color children”, or, behind the metaphor, “love boys”), and although they were required to be in the employment of a registered theatre, many of them never set foot on stage.

Kabuki actors entertaining patrons in a teahouse; the bedroom is off to the left (Hishikawa Moronobu, detail of a hand-painted scroll, 1685, British Museum)

Wakashu actors (or wakashu-gata, those not truly wakashu anymore but merely assuming the role for stage purposes) were considered most appropriate not only for female roles, but also for roles as romantic heroes and refined young noblemen. Wakashu were attractive to both men and women, and male prostitutes were available to both (sometimes at the same time, if you believe some of the erotic prints), although women seem to have preferred their boys a little older.

Besides the theatre districts, temple areas were particularly associated with male prostitution. Having a chigo required some commitment on the part of the “brother” monk; besides the cost of outfitting and the time for educating their charges, monks might be required by particularly demanding chigo to sign oaths of fidelity or give other promises of good behavior. If a monk did not want to make the effort, or if his monastery banned chigo, he could turn to the boy-brothels that sprang up around the better-known temples to serve both the monks and any interested parties among the pilgrims and travelers that the temples attracted. Monks’ exploits with prostitutes both male and female are a favorite topic in ribald poetry and stories and in the shunga prints of the 17th and 18th century.

In Saikaku Ihara’s picaresque novel The Life of an Amorous Man (1682), the sexually precocious protagonist, who has undergone his coming-of-age ceremony at the tender age of 14, makes a pilgrimage to the Hase temple and, on the way back, buys himself a pretty male prostitute who turns out to be ten years older than himself (much to his dismay). The humor of this incident hinges on a key detail of nanshoku; the receptive partner was expected to be pre-adult, a boy rather than a man. In this case, the very young age of the client and the rather extended “boyhood” of the prostitute manage to invert the normal course of things.

At this time, in the mid-17th century, shudo became disseminated to the urban masses, partly via the new-found publishing industry, which served up story collections like the Nanshoku Okagami, etiquette manuals (covering every detail from the first approach to the breakup letter when passion inevitably cooled), poetry books, collections of dirty jokes, and vast numbers of ukiyo-e prints, clean and pornographic. In 1676, the scholar Kitamura Kigin compiled Iwatsutsuji (“Rock azaleas”, first print edition 1713), an anthology of shudo-themed poetry collected from classical and religious sources, aimed at presenting an ennobling, estheticized view of male love for the modern reader. (Kigin deliberately omitted all licentious and coarse material, but his discards were happily taken up by publishers of cheap illustrated books and collections of satirical poetry, which regaled the reader with scatological stories of lustful monks, mercenary boys, put-upon prostitutes and so forth.) Shudo texts presented the pursuit of boys as a cultured pastime, like flower arranging or composing poetry.

If shudo was something that one sought to do well, it was also something it was possible to do wrong. The most obvious failure of shudo etiquette was the pursuit of youths who were too old. One 17th-century chronicle of feudal lords mentions with some confusion a few who liked boys with hair on their legs, or even beards, and reports with relief that at least one had given up this “aberration” and returned to the appreciation of proper bishounen. An unjustly obscure 17th or 18th-century print shows three adult men getting frisky together; the print is obviously satirical, as the men are marked with every possible signifier of socially-undesirable hideousness: jowly faces, pug noses, thick lips, shaven heads, squat bodies, and the tattoos and clothing of lower-class thugs. In the corner of the print, a neglected female prostitute cowers in horror at the unlovely sight.

So totally not bishounen (unattributed late Tokugawa polychrome print)

“Plum and willow, wakashu or woman?”

The opposite of nanshoku is joshoku, “female colors” or “female love”. Both of these terms presuppose a male referent; that is, they designate a man’s interest in males or females, respectively. (Women’s inclinations apparently were not worth inventing terminology for.) Both literary and pornographic sources in late-medieval and premodern japan frequently assume an interest in both; shudo print sets often include one or two heterosexual pairings, and heterosexually-focused works might feature an occasional shudo scene, like Suzuki Harunobu’s c. 1770 Furyu enshoku Maneemon, in which the protagonist’s love-lives-of-the-world tour includes a visit to see an actor “entertaining” a patron (NSFW). In pornographic prints and raunchy stories, men pursue wakashu and women, women pursue wakashu, and wakashu pursue women and other, younger, wakashu. The kabuki play Saint Narukami and the God Fudo (1742) contains a salacious comic-relief scene in which the hero of the hour, Danjo, left to cool his heels in a nobleman’s waiting room, invents a transparent excuse to grope and dry-hump the lord’s pretty 13-year old son; after the boy fights him off (with cries of “pervert!”) he turns his persistent but unwanted attentions to a maidservant, whom he barrages with dirty double entendres. When she, too, gets away from him, he strikes a pose and quips, “That’s two cups of tea I’ve been denied!” (cue laughter).

A man relaxes in a brothel with a boy (composing a poem) and a female prostitute (Masanobu Okumura, New Years gathering within a brothel, c. 1739)
Spot the differences: artists often borrowed each other’s compositions (Suzuki Harunobu, untitled print, c. 1740)

Wakashu were also the standard depiction of handsome young lovers, and feature in idealized prints as well as romantic stories. Kabuki actors were held in particular regard; both the male-role actors and the female impersonators were ardently pursued by 17th- and 18th-century fangirls. One of the less shudo-oriented stories in the Nanshoku Okagami tells of a young noblewoman who has a female impersonator with whom she is enamored smuggled into her quarters, attired in his stage drag to bypass the guards; there is a humorous description of her handmaidens literally falling over each other to get a look at the young man, their faces “pale with desire”. Unfortunately, they have gotten no further than the traditional precoital cup of sake before her brother returns and claims the pretty visitor for himself, leaving the poor lady frustrated.

An older woman seduces a pretty young thing (Suzuki Harunobu, probably from an album of erotic prints, 1765-1770, British Museum)

For the swinging Tokugawa gentleman, this of course raised the thorny question: how to keep your boyfriend off of your girlfriend, and vice versa? (Suggestion from period advice manuals: never let them meet.) A number of erotic prints show a man who catches his favorite concubine in bed with a boy (or conversely), and asserts dominance over the situation by screwing them both. Other prints show surprising collections of persons of both sexes in happy engagement, sometimes stacked like turtles. At least in the imaginations of a few printmakers, anything went.

The Meiji era: bishounen in a new world

After the forcible opening of Japan to the West in 1868, Japanese views of nanshoku began to be influenced by Western psychomedical views of homosexuality. On the one hand, this led to the pathologization of both homosexual desire and (more slowly and erratically) of the bishounen himself, whom Western theory positioned as an abnormal, feminized figure who must be firmly redirected on the path of proper masculinity lest he become a permanently perverted “invert”. On the other hand, the Western location of homosexual desire within the weak, effeminate passive who fruitlessly attempts to seduce the masculine heterosexual male failed utterly to mesh with the Japanese image of the active, adult man who courts pretty passive youths. Shudo texts had generally supposed that the chigo or wakashu had no sexual desire for their lovers and did not enjoy being penetrated (although Edo-region prints often show the boy partner with an erection, and some show the nenja masturbating him), so during Japan’s brief criminalization of homosexual anal sex per se, authorities were confused as to what to do with cases of men who offered themselves to other men as “bottom” outside of prostitution, a turn of events that Japanese legal codes had never contemplated.

Aside from the newly-discovered specter of the “invert”, popular understanding of homosexuality became increasingly relegated to the realm of adolescence. In Ogai Mori’s semiautobiographical 1909 novel Vita Sexualis, the narrator separates the students at his boarding school into two types: the nanpa (“soft crowd”) like himself, who are interested in fashion and women, and the koha (“rough crowd”) who are sports fans, idolize military figures, and reject women as feminizing, instead pursuing pretty younger boys and terrorizing the other students in the process. Other Meiji writers describe similar phenomena under other names; the predatory gangs of older boys in the boarding-school dormitory, or the teenage juvenile delinquents who prowl the streets of Japan’s cities, seeking out bishounen, preferably from upper-class families, to abduct and rape. Late 19th- and early 20th-century scandal-rags reported nearly weekly on sensationalized stories of attempted kidnappings, gang fights over the affections of boys, and other crimes laid at the feet of adolescent nanshoku-enthusiasts, whipping up a decades-long moral panic in the process. The koha, significantly, were always depicted as in their teens or early 20s; once a man hit adulthood he would naturally turn his attentions to women, as the more refined nanpa already did. And in this conceptualization, of course, the bishounen remains the blameless, socially approved and passive object of desire, as he was in former eras.

The koha panics faded by the 1920s, replaced in the minds of the moral guardians by crossdressed male prostitutes lurking in Tokyo’s parks by night. The bishounen, at this point, is split: one part relegated to the “perverse press” and the red-light districts, one pure, virtuous and thoroughly disconnected from any taint of homosexuality.

As part of the effort to raise Japan’s young men to a life of loyal service and devotion to their emperor, and to make a little cash on the side, publishers began in the 1920s to put out boy’s magazines, full of morally uplifting stories of heroic young men who do good deeds and diligently care for their families. These stories were illustrated by correspondingly idealized pictures of beautiful boys, such as those by Takabatake Kasho (also a prolific illustrator of girls’ magazines). As boys’ magazines moved into less didactic pulp-action territory after WWII, however, the doe-eyed vision of boyish perfection lost ground, and eventually fell by the wayside.

Two illustrations for 1930s boys’ magazines (Takabatake Kasho, from Bishounen Zukan, “The pretty-boy picture book”, 2005)

On the other end of the spectrum, the influx of American servicemen and other transients created a market for services that no longer fit the he’s-a-kabuki-actor-we-swear teahouse model. The English term “gay” was borrowed into Japanese as gei, to describe effeminate, passive men, especially those who performed as singers, dancers or hosts in the newly-emergent gei ba (“gay bar”). By the 1950s, a distinction was drawn between gei boy, who affected an androgynous look influenced by French gamine actresses, and “ladyboys”, who were overtly crossdressed. (The true Japanese homo, of course, would be tremendously offended to be categorized as either.) The gei ba developed over time into flashy clubs with cabaret revues and shows that catered mainly to foreigners, men who liked foreigners, and, soon, sightseeing straights; Japanese men seeking other Japanese men came together in tiny, hole-in-the-wall homo ba. Like New York’s Harlem in the 1920s, Tokyo’s gay district in the 1950s and ‘60s became a fashionably decadent place for an adventurous night on the town, where men and women could admire the spectacle put on by teams of pretty boys.

A "gei boy" of the 1950s, from Tomita Eizo, Gei, 1958 (via Ishida and Murakami, The Process of Divergence between 'Men who Love Men' and 'Feminised Men' in Postwar Japanese Media, 2006)

A “gei boy” of the 1950s, from Tomita Eizo, Gei, 1958 (via Ishida and Murakami, The Process of Divergence between ‘Men who Love Men’ and ‘Feminised Men’ in Postwar Japanese Media, 2006)

 

And now for something completely different: the bishounen in female media

In 1961 and ’62, Mari Mori (daughter of the Ogai Mori whose Vita Sexualis is mentioned above) wrote her three tanbi (“aesthetic”) novellas; A lover’s forest, I don’t go on Sundays, and Bed of fallen leaves. All three follow the same plot: an impossibly beautiful teenage boy is taken in by a wealthy and sophisticated (and much older) man, who keeps him in decadent luxury until the relationship is broken up by jealousy and violent death (murder, suicide, or both). Mari was noted for her lush prose, and she pours it all over her boys: their pale, transparent skin; their glossy hair; their luminous eyes, which “seemed to emit pale lavender flames”; their full lips “like fruit ripened by kisses”; their languorous movements and flirtatious glances. Their infatuated lovers surround them with exotic Western extravagances: custom-tailored suits, French soap, German cologne, imported cigarettes (that they wastefully stub out half-smoked), caviar, martinis, Rolls Royces and nightclubs. The boys address their lovers in feminine speech (but not in public), and the lovers, in turn, compare them to geisha and “Parisian courtesan[s]”. Despite appearing beautiful and innocent “like a cherub in a Raphael painting”, Mari’s boys are not entirely sympathetic; they are indolent, extravagant, wasteful, spoiled, childish, passive, persistently unintellectual (all the boys are dropouts, whereas all their lovers are highly educated), and not particularly concerned with morality. The other characters (and, one feels, Mari herself) are willing to overlook all their faults on account of their spectacular beauty and sexual desirability.

So, basically, Mari Mori invented boy’s love (although she doesn’t seem to have been very happy with the connection). It’s amazing how many old-school BL tropes Mari’s novellas cover: she’s got the seme/uke stereotypes, the fetishization of Westerners and the West (two of her men are half-French and everyone else “doesn’t look Japanese”; French or European origin stands for everything luxurious and desirable), the highly idealized characters (impossibly beautiful, wealthy, educated, and sophisticated – Guylan of Bed of fallen leaves is not only half-French, but half French aristocrat), the casual bisexuality (most of the characters have concurrent or former female lovers), the lushly-implied-but-not-shown eroticism (the sexual content of the novellas is, by modern standards, very discreet, although Bed of fallen leaves wanders into sadomasochism and heroin addiction before ending in murder-suicide), the melodrama, the misogyny (jealous and manipulative women abound), and the brutal downer endings (rare in modern BL but standard for older works). What she doesn’t have is BL’s emphasis on overwhelming, undying love; most of the men are obsessed, but none of the boys seem all that attached to their lovers. A lover’s forest‘s Paulo finds Gidou’s freshly-murdered corpse (courtesy of his jealous ex-girlfriend) and seems to regret the loss of his posh lifestyle more than anything else (and, at the end of the book, is about to be picked up by another infatuated older man who has been waiting in the wings for just such a chance). Bed of fallen leaves‘s Leo seems on the point of leaving his lover Guylan for a kinky Italian who whips him and gives him drugs, prompting Guylan to kill Leo and later himself. I don’t go on Sundays‘s Hans seems to accept his breakup with Tatsukichi (prompted by Hans’ ex-fiancée’s public suicide) with as much composure as Tatsukichi does. (The amoral or evil bishounen would turn out to be an important character type in later media, although in a rather different context.) Although Mari wrote for a general literary audience, her most ardent fans were women, and her works, along with Western films such as Maurice and My beautiful laundrette, began to create a female audience for highly-estheticized stories of male-male romance.

In the latter part of the decade, the newly-emergent category of shoujo manga embraced the bishounen esthetic as a natural correlate of its emphasis on cuteness and prettiness, especially with the influx of female authors in the mid-1960s, who brought a new emphasis on older (teenage, as opposed to pre-teen) readers, male characters, and sexual, rather than merely chastely romantic, relationships.[2] The rock-and-roll melodrama Fire! by Mizuno Hideko (1969) was the first shoujo manga with a male protagonist, as well as one of the first to include a sex scene (although an extremely discreet one).

Pages from Fire!, Mizuno Hideko, 1969 and Swan, Kyoko Ariyoshi, 1976
Pages from the shoujo manga Fire! (© 1969 Mizuno Hideko) and Swan (© 1976 Kyoko Ariyoshi)

By the early 1970s, girl’s manga inevitably featured at least one luminous-eyed, tousle-haired young man with which the heroine could fall in love. Around that time, the new generation of female shoujo authors began to dispense with the heroine and have the boys fall in love with each other. Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko gave the world the first fully-fledged boys’ love manga, Takemiya in a number of schoolboy-in-love stories culminating in The poem of wind and trees (1976), Hagio in the faintly homoerotic The Poe clan (1972) and The heart of Thomas (1974) and eventually the much more explicit and brutal A cruel god reigns (1992).

Gilbert from Poem of wind and trees (© 1976 Takemiya Keiko), Ian and Jeremy from A cruel god reigns (© 1992 Hagio Moto)

A cruel god reigns’s leads represent two different ways of making a modern manga bishounen. Jeremy, a younger teenager (16, at the start of the story), is physically more child-like: smaller, softer, rounder, with larger eyes. Ian (19) is closer to an adult but more deliberately androgynous: leggy and elegant, he wears his hair long, has a habit of tying his school tie in a floppy half-bow, and lets his girlfriend paint his toenails. In other words, Jeremy’s bishounen-hood is a product of his youth and boyishness, which in the context of the story emphasizes his vulnerability at the hands of his sexually abusive stepfather and a string of later predators. Ian’s beauty, conversely, is reinforced by gender-nonconforming traits, which don’t prevent him from taking the more active narrative role as he seeks, at various points in the story, to rescue, redeem or possess Jeremy.

Strictly speaking, a guy is only a bishounen when he is a boy; once he is old enough to drink, if he is still pretty, he becomes a bidanshi, a beautiful man (biseinen is also understood but less common). Anglophone fans tend to loose this distinction, although they can dodge the issue with the contraction “bishie”. Which brings us to the third major way of making a manga prettyboy: the physically mature, more-or-less gender-conforming, but highly estheticized and idealized man, with glossier hair, softer skin, lusher lashes and more kissable lips than any botoxed-and-collagened Hollywood hopeful could hope for.

File under pandering, blatant (from Antique, directed by Min Gyu Dong, 2001)

 

The grown-up bishounen: Iwaki and Kato from Embracing Love (from the Kiss of Fire artbook, © 2004/2006 Nitta Youka)

 

Many commentators, both academic and amateur, have suggested that the appeal of the modern bishounen is that it makes it easier for the female audience to identify with the characters; that they are, in essence, women in drag. As Laura Miller has pointed out, those making this argument seem to have overlooked the popularity of real-life men who embody the bishounen esthetic. From Gackt to Johnny & Associates, pretty, pretty boys who are pretty make their handlers an awful lot of money from squeeing fangirls who probably aren’t thinking of them as their alternate self-image. In the late 1990s, the Korean movie industry woke up to the surprising fact that women buy movie tickets, and over the following decade reoriented their production from martial arts slugfests (with minimal dialog to facilitate international distribution) to luminous young men in soft-focus close-up, and did quite well by it.

The modern bishounen for men

From the 1940s until fairly recently, the bishounen and bidanshi have had a contested position in popular culture outside of that aimed at girls and women. One of the few places where he has been aceptable to the Y-chromosome-bearing masses is in the role of unspeakably evil villain. Osamu Tezuka’s MW (1976) was one of the first manga to feature this character type, in the form of a distractingly good-looking but utterly depraved protagonist-villain who rapes and murders his way through the contortions of the plot. Naoki Urasawa’s Monster (1994), possibly inspired by MW, has an even more beautiful but equally amoral young villain, who likewise uses his beauty to manipulate others in the service of his dastardly plans. The type makes good marketing sense: boys can hate him (’coz he’s evil!), and girls can slash him (’coz he’s hot!), and everybody’s happy.

The other historic bastion of bishounen-hood is ero-guro, the surrealism-meets-shock-porn genre of “erotic grotesque nonsense”. All the way back in Edogawa Ranpo’s Ogre of the secret island (1929), we have a remarkably beautiful man (described as “bishounen” in the text despite being in his 20’s) who alternates between master detective helping the protagonist solve the murder of his fiancée and other mysteries, and potential villain with dark secrets of his own, including his unrequited homosexual love for the protagonist. Later writers in the genre agree that nothing goes with ethereal beauty and sexual ambiguity like gratuitous bloodsplatter.

Pretty boys and gore, two great tastes that taste great together (From Divertimento for a martyr, © 2006 Takato Yamamoto)

The place where impossibly pretty manga boys are really welcomed with open arms by the guys, however, is the gentle figure of the trap. In Western media, a man in a dress is either a hideous buffoon or a nasty joke about to be played on some unsuspecting and innocently horny straight guy. In Japan, however, putting a skirt on a bishie instantly converts him into a sort of Universal Fanservice Adapter, fawned over by fangirls and fanboys alike.

At the end of the day, however, the bishie has become the default depiction of an attractive guy in any Japanese media that hopes for any degree of female audience. As the entire manga industry becomes pervaded with shoujo styles (from the twin pressures of moe and attracting those sweet fangirl yen), the bishie is fast becoming the default depiction of an attractive guy, period. (Takeshi Obata does not mind drawing himself some pretty silken-haired boys, nosiree.) A few grumbles are still heard from those who like their square-jawed manly men in the old-school style, but the voice of the market has spoken: pretty is where it’s at. Gunslinging action hero or cupcake-baking romantic lead, bishiness comes loaded standard.

There is more porn of these three guys than the entire rest of the mangasphere combined (Guilty Gear XX © 2002 Arc System Works, Maria†Holic © 2006 Minari Endo, Happiness! © 2005 Windmill)

Footnotes:

1. Or from 5 to 13-to-20ish by modern age reckoning. Ages from Japanese sources are given as in the original. Traditionally, a child was considered one year old at birth and gained a year each following New Year; thus the given age is at least a year and up to two years older than the age we would ascribe. Back.

2. Although heterosexual romance as the culmination of the story had been a theme of shoujo stories since the inception of girl’s magazines in the 1920s, the love interest was generally introduced near the end of the story, as a reward for the heroine’s self-sacrifice and patient suffering; depictions of on-going romantic relationships tended to involve two girls – although their love was, of course, purely spiritual and nonsexual and would fade with the coming of adulthood in the form of marriage and motherhood. Back.