To quote Wikipedia, ômagatoki (逢魔時 or "meet demons time") refers to the "moment at dusk when the sky grows dark." Toriyama Sekien describes it as "the time when the evil spirits of the mountains and rivers (魑魅魍魎) attempt to materialize in the world."

When I encountered the word while translating Maohden, my first inclination was to translate it as the "witching hour." Except that the witching hour usually refers to midnight (which never struck me as all that inherently spooky). So I defined it within a parenthetical:

The sepia light of early summer stained the falling dusk. Ômagatoki, it was called, the time when ghosts and demons prowled the earth.

Ômagatoki plays a big role in Serpent of Time, defining the powers of one of its main characters, the personification of a scheming Vedic yoga known as Kala Sarpa. This explanation I (made up but) attribute to the Heian Era diviner Abe no Seimei (Japan's Merlin):

During the uncertain hours of the dawn and dusk, when the stars cast a veil across human eyes and gods and ghosts walk unnoticed upon the earth, Kala Sarpa weaves in and among the worlds. But when the day fully conquers the night, when the waning light finally surrenders to the dark, all things must return to their proper time and place, to their natural homes.

Speaking of Toriyama Sekien, he was an eighteenth-century ukiyo-e artist and a collector of Japanese folk tales, a cross between Charles Addams and the Brothers Grimm.　A Google image search on his name returns a rich trove of his delightful sketches and prints.

Labels: dmp, history, japanese culture, pop culture, serpent notes, serpent of time, translations

My translation of Demon City Shinjuku is off to the publisher (scheduled for release in August). It's an inventive YA thriller with a teenage martial arts superhero and a distinct wuxia twist. It's definitely the most accessible novel I've done for Digital Manga.

Demon City Shinjuku is an omnibus volume. The second novel features as its villain: King Nebuchadnezzar II! And his awful wife, Semiramis (a prototype for Princess). Has anybody cast them in that role lately?

First published in 1982, Demon City Shinjuku was Hideyuki Kikuchi's debut novel. The bulk of his work since has been based in the Demon City Shinjuku universe. The massive Yashakiden series (I'm working on the final volume now) revises and extends the themes he introduces here.

Kikuchi writes near-future fantasy and urban horror (Yashakiden moves from YA into hard-core, Joe Konrath/Stephen King territory), always risky in the prediction department. He generally sticks to monsters and magic, but in a few places the anachronisms start to show up.

I still remember a passage in an Isaac Asimov novel I read as a kid that describes "miniaturized vacuum tubes," even though the field-effect transistor was first prototyped in the 1920s. The most informed science writers can fail to anticipate how some technologies will take off (and others won't).

On the other hand, I don't know if Kikuchi picked the year out of a hat, but there is this paragraph:

Since 2010, the entire world had been gripped in a dark curse. In the face of economic recession, growing regional conflicts, and rising crime rates, President Rama was as resolute in his actions as he was charitable in his words. And changed the world as a result.

To pick nits, crime rates have fallen in developed nations (if anything, the correlation between economic recession and crime seems consistently negative). Places like Mexico and the Middle East, though, are a very different story. And Kikuchi nailed the world recession business exactly.

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Labels: demon city, dmp, light novel, magic, translations, yashakiden

Only a tiny fraction of the almost $4 billion manga market in Japan is licensed and published in the U.S. every year (to say nothing of the backlist). As a result, websites that host "scanlated" (scanned and translated) manga have become a major source of supply to meet the growing demand by manga fans.

Acknowledging the considerable sweat equity contributed by these literary pirates, Hikaru Sasahara, CEO of Digital Manga Publishing, is offering a path to legitimacy by outsourcing the localization of manga to these same "scanlators." An opportunity to work on duly acquired properties for a share of the profits.

[Digital Manga Publishing] will work with the localizers and the publishers. [DMP will monitor] the quality of the finished product. We all agree to get paid via revenue shar[ing] when the books are read online, or sold as print editions. We all share in the revenue.

Sasahara has also proposed a new licensing model, stating that "tedious negotiations" with "very slow" companies and "prohibitively expensive" licensing fees, not piracy, are the biggest impediments to growing the U.S. market. Under the new model, publishers will also agree to take a percentage on the back end.

Sasahara explains this new publishing arrangement in an online video at the website hosting this new effort. [Disclosure: I freelance for DMP as a novel translator under the traditional work-for-hire model.]

UPDATE: Sasahara describes how the project is proceeding as of 12/7/10.

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Labels: business, dmp, manga, publishing, translations

Between Yashakiden volumes, I just finished translating I Want to Bite, a yaoi light novel for Digital Manga.

It's a vampire story with a "western" urban setting (meaning a mix and match of European names). The geographically nondescript city is sort of a kindlier, gentler version of Demon City Shinjuku, with the existence of vampires (and ghouls and werewolves) presumed as part of social fabric.

The protagonist, Isaac, works for the "Helsing Group" as a "hunter." His job is to track down misbehaving vamps. The uke is Tristan, a boyish-looking vampire with a bunch of ulterior motives. It's derivative, to be sure, but is sufficiently well plotted to qualify as "the same only different."

Of course, it takes place in that wacky yaoi universe where men think like women and a straight guy can turn gay if he meets a cute enough uke. Seriously, I'd recommend the last chapter as a guide to how girls think about sex (because no two actual guys would converse like this).

Alas, my usual reaction in this case (as to pretty much the entire genre) is to imagine how much better it'd be hetero (or for that matter, yuri). Also true of Better than a Dream, that I translated a while back.

Better than a Dream is such a well-structured romance that I had to take care to write "he" instead of "she." It'd be easy to convert it into one of those bittersweet Hallmark movies. You'd only have to switch the pronouns around and maybe finish it off with an "accidental" pregnancy.

Better than a Dream is also a near-perfect implementation of the McKee narrative structure (confirming that like Campbell, McKee is describing the most popular style of universal storytelling, not prescribing it).

With a bit of role reassignment, I Want to Bite would make a great Angel arc, except with Cordelia as the vampire. A touch of this creative role reversal can be found in the inventive (and somewhat controversial) new vampire series, Dance in the Vampire Bund.

Again, like Demon City Shinjuku, it stipulates vampires coming out of the casket (so to speak). In exchange for settling Japan's Greek-like national debt, vampire princess Mina (together with her loyal werewolf guard, Akira) creates a sovereign vampire city-state off the coast of Japan.

The cause of the hand wringing for its importers (anime: Funimation; manga: Seven Seas) is that Mina usually presents herself as prepubescent girl (for logical reasons, as it turns out), and at times runs around without much on. This understandably set off the lolicon alarms in some quarters.

Funimation balked a bit (and is still CYA prevaricating), but Seven Seas has pressed on, again illustrating the perverse formula that words are more "moral" than drawings, which are more "moral" than moving pictures. (A case in point: Treasure Box by Orson Scott Card.)

Labels: demon city, dmp, funimation, light novel, translations, yaoi

Digital Manga has announced a publication date for the first volume of Yashakiden: "The Demon Princess," by SF/horror maven Hideyuki Kikuchi.

Alas, it won't be out until December 2009. But if you're a fan of Kikuchi's other novels and anime adaptations, such as Vampire Hunter D, Wicked City and Demon City Shinjuku, or if your tastes slant towards epic-length supernatural actioners, then it will be well worth the wait.

Imagine Angel with an irredeemably nasty and perverse Darla.

Thanks to the fascinating world creation, creepily creative horror gore, and a couple of explicit sex scenes, I'm seriously enjoying translating it. Like other popular authors in the genre, Hideyuki Kikuchi possesses a natural sense of pacing that keeps the narrative zipping along and the cliff hangers hanging.

I'll be posting more updates as the publication date draws closer. In the meantime, you can read more about Yashakiden here, here and see a sneak preview here.

Labels: demon city, dmp, light novel, translations, yashakiden

A long interview with Hikaru Sasahara, CEO of Digital Manga, Inc. Parts of the interview remind me of the infamous William Shatner "get a life" appearance on SNL, in that Mayerson (the interviewer) approaches the subject narrowly as a fan while Sasahara approaches the subject broadly as a businessman, which leads to a few unintentionally hilarious moments. Clearly what energizes Sasahara is growing the business and expanding into new markets, not the particularities of a specific genre.

The interview is also a great look at the classic "American dream": college student comes to the U.S. from Japan in 1973, overstays his student visa, and starts several successful businesses. Though as he points out, this was back when getting a legit green card was a lot easier.

Some exerpts:

Ginger Mayerson: [The books published by Digital Manga] are extremely well done, well made, and because some of them are yaoi, the reader can really obsess on them and read them over and over and over and certain parts over and over and over and you can't break the spine, ever. You can't destroy these books. And they've got the dust jackets, so your grubby little hands, well, anyway, for those of us who have grubby little hands while we're reading our yaoi books, these are the books to read.

HS: I don't read them.

. . . .
GM: You should try to read one. Next time you're on a plane, just try to read Cold Sleep. You can read it in three or four hours.

HS: Nah.

. . . .
GM: And do you know why [yaoi] is so popular?

HS: I have no idea. I'm a guy.

. . . .
GM: Yeah, projecting, sort of a boomerang projection, but yeah. So, yaoi has sort of taken over your business, yes?

HS: I would say almost seventy percent of the revenue is coming from yaoi, I must say.

GM: Wow. [Me: Wow.]

. . . .
HS: No, licensing and overseeing it for the U.S. Here's a film I licensed to DreamWorks, it's called Millennium Actress. You can take it home and watch it. You'll enjoy it.

[Me: I agree. Great film. (Not yaoi.)]

. . . .
HS: No, just manga in Japan. The whole revenue in America is only a little over two hundred million, compared to four billion in Japan. So it could grow that big in the future, I think, so I'm very excited. People are telling me that the market is being saturated here, and I have to tell them that they don't understand.

. . . .
GM: So, you're commissioning a Japanese creation, translating it into English, publishing it here, and if it's successful enough, you sell it back to Japan in English?

HS: Yes. There're so many kids in Japan that read English, these manga can be a language learning tool and entertainment.

I think this is a great idea. Using translated manga as the "textbook" would certainly be a lot more interesting than what passes for the typical English class in Japan. The same things applies when teaching Japanese. You can find manga in every possible subject and at every language level.

Labels: business, dmp, japan, publishing, yaoi

Yaoi continues to dominate its niche in the manga and trade paperback markets. 70 percent of Digital Manga's sales come from yaoi products, and

[a]fter meeting with little enthusiasm for their non-yaoi titles, Media Blasters will drop its line of shonen manga and increase the number of yaoi titles on its list.

It's a trend I find quite baffling, my various attempts at analysis notwithstanding. At least I'm not alone. To the question of why yaoi is so popular, even Hikaru Sasahara, CEO of Digital Manga, confesses: "I have no idea. I'm a guy."

But I think yaoi manga-ka Toko Kawai supplies a compelling explanation:

Most yaoi readers are female, so if you write a woman into the story, there's the possibility of jealousy from the reader. With two guys, that doesn't happen.

Or as Paul Reiser explains on an episode of Mad about You to his wife's question about why men get off on lesbian porn: "Because we agree with both of them."

From a broader, market-aware perspective, the success of any popular literature genre targeting women is hardly surprising. Romance fiction still comprises over 50 percent of all mass market novels sold in North America.

What I find equally intriguing is yaoi's popularity not being accompanied by equally growing sales of the more explicit manga-ka like Kayono, whose plots closely mirror those found in "traditional" romance literature.

Or is it that yaoi readers already self-identify as a bit out there on the edge with a genre that is all their own, while traditional Harlequin readers wouldn't be caught dead with illustrated material that men would drool over as well?

Which gets us back to Kawai's theory above. While men readily identify both with larger-than-life action heroes and comic romantic leads like Owen Wilson, do women see themselves as in competition with female protagonists?

Or perhaps like yaoi, is explicit but non-hentai manga another unexplored market waiting to take off?

UPDATE: My sister Kate offers a great counter-argument.

Labels: deep thoughts, dmp, kate, social studies, yaoi

It might be helpful to start out describing what yaoi is not: it's not "gay" literature per se; that is, stories written by or for the gay community. It is not about gay culture, nor does it focus on the real-life concerns of recognizably "realistic" gay men in any meaningful manner.

Yaoi is a fantasy genre written largely by women for women--enough of them, in fact, to comprise a significant market presence in Japan. An acronym, it means Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, or "No climax (lit., "no mountain"), no point, no meaning."

But here, in the translation from Japan to the west, a confusion of terms enters the picture that needs to be clarified.

In Japan yaoi refers more specifically the genre created in the doujinshi, or amateur, manga market. In this respect, it is the closer analog to slash. Slash is a fan fiction genre that pairs up same-sex leads, mostly from television series, and places them in sexual relationships. The granddaddy of all slash pairings is, of course, Kirk/Spock. Others include Mulder/Krycek and Xena/Gabrielle. Hence, "slash."

Like yaoi, slash is a PWP (Plot, what plot?) literary style, which, along with the obvious copyright issues, confines it to the realm of fan fiction. Copyright law in Japan allows explicitly derivative doujinshi ("parody") a much freer rein. As long as parody doujinshi maintain their "amateur" status (like NCAA athletes), the copyright holders treat it as free publicity, and publishers regularly scout out doujinshi for emerging talent worth taking pro (again, like the NCAA).

(For breezy, funny, and informative forays into the nuts and bolts of the doujinshi and otaku subcultures I recommend the anime series Comic Party, which focuses on the travails of a doujinshi manga artist; Animation Runner Kuromi, which documents the workings of a small animation studio; and the very funny Genshiken, which depicts the lives of those hapless but lovable geeks who voraciously consume manga and anime.)

However, even in Japan, there is no way to commercialize derivative yaoi/slash without compromising the lucrative cross-media licensing business that drives the billion-dollar manga/anime industry. In fact, manga periodicals are often published at a loss, in the same way that Hollywood television series, especially sit-coms, are sold to the networks at a loss, with the expectation of recouping the investment in syndication.

So the emergence of a commercial "yaoi" market in the U.S. isn't really about yaoi at all, but what in Japan is called shounen-ai ("boy's love") or "BL," featuring bishounen (beautiful boy, or B-Boy) characters. Because no matter what the context, in English, "boy's love" sounds like kiddie porn, So yaoi became the default hypernym for the entire genre. In this context, though, I use it only to refer to BL, which usually features adult (or at least teenage) protagonists.

On this side of the Pacific, porn (hentai) is often analyzed as a counterpart to female romance literature of the Harlequin variety, and visa-versa. The comparison is useful here as well. Yaoi is the yin to hentai's yang. If hentai asks, along with Henry Higgins, why a woman can't be more like a man (sexually), yaoi makes the obviously contrary proposition: Why can't guys be really into relationships like girls? (But still into sex like guys?)

Sex is certainly not absent from Harlequin romances, and western observers who overplay the explicitness of (heterosexual) "Ladies Comics" (explicit manga aimed at women 18+) miss the point that if you illustrated the typical Harlequin Blaze title, that's exactly what you would get. But the cliche is correct: sex in romance novels primarily serves as the confirmation of the relationship, not as a goal of the relationship.

The formulation can be summarized that simply: take one of the aforementioned Harlequin titles, swap out the female protagonist, and there you go: yaoi. (Adjust sex accordingly: from "idealistically chaste" to "horny like rabbits.") Or rather, take a yaoi title, swap in a female protagonist (and adjust personalities accordingly, subtracting the requisite S&M elements), and you'd end up with a fairly ordinary romance novel.

In his review of Brokeback Mountain, Steve Sailer describes the plot as a "gay fantasy," that "somewhere out there is an ultra-masculine cowboy who will fall head over heels in love with [you] and pine away for [you] his whole life." One of Sailer's gay readers later added, "It's a gay man's fantasy that he can turn a masculine man gay and have him pine at him forever (and be monogamous of course!)."

Romance literature creates protagonists with the same magical powers, women whose feminine wiles will domesticate the rake, the pirate, the millionaire playboy, the rugged, lone Marlboro Man. Glenn Reynolds' fourteen-year-old niece perhaps summed it up the best: "[Brokeback Mountain] is a chick-flick with nothing but hot guys." Rebecca Copeland, professor of Japanese studies at Washington University, agrees, theorizing that

Japanese women are attracted to stories of male homosexuality because it's the only place in their society where they can see images of men in a loving, caring relationship where both partners are considered to be equals. It's the kind of relationship that Japanese women crave for themselves but rarely find within the confines of traditional Japanese society.

This still does not answer the question posed by Mark McLelland: "Why Are Japanese Girls' Comics full of Boys Bonking?" And rarely as true "equals," protagonists typically described as seme (aggressor) and uke (receiver). McLelland begins by arguing that the same thing works in reverse, pointing to the popularity of so-called "lesbian" sex in male porn, where, "women combine ultra-feminine bodies with implausibly guy-like appetites for casual sex" (even more true of hentai).

It all gets back to Henrietta Higgins wondering why a man can't be more like a woman. Well, the famous all-female Takarazuka theater troupe does it literally: all the male leads are (of course) played by women with cropped hair and (fairly forced) alto voices.

Watching a Takarazuka production, I'm reminded of a slick, professionally-produced junior high school drama club production, with the pubescent boys trying their best to look and sound like grown men--or rather, what they think grown men look and sound like. The unabashed, straight-faced sincerity of the effort constitutes much of the fun.

Aside from its sheer novelty, there is also a distinctively (hetero)sexually-unthreatening aura about a Takarazuka musical, knowing that the leading lady is in fact falling into the arms of . . . another woman. With a simple reversal of polarities, this is the same effect achieved by yaoi. Thus, no surprise that the willowy, porcelain-skinned Takarazuka "leading man" looks exactly like the typical manga or anime yaoi protagonist.

Compare this head-shot of Takarazuka actress Sumire Haruno to the completely unrelated yaoi cover art at the top of the page. (View the complete cast here.)

Just as hetero hentai features female characters with male sex drives, yaoi, too, is similarly founded upon extrapolations of idealized sexual (on one hand) or platonic (on the other) male relationships. Although slash is a "parody" genre, it points to a real truth about the "buddy picture" dynamic. From Star Trek to the Lethal Weapon movies, these are stories about strong, confident, unsentimental male relationships.

These borderline yaoi relationships show up in (often slashed) mainstream manga and anime aimed at pubescent boys such as Gundam Wing, Berserk, and Descendants of Darkness. The guys in these action series carry about big phallic weapons, and/or big Oedipal Complexes, and/or exhibit obvious alpha/beta (senpai/kouhai) pairings, and spend precious little time with, or exhibit much interest toward, members of the opposite sex

This may be also because much of the (male) target audience still thinks that girls have cooties, or is just plain scared to death of them. But there is no questioning the social safe harbor that boys seek and find with the neighborhood gang or best friend/buddy (as in Stand by Me).

As Norah Vincent observes in Self-Made Man, these are comfortable, nonjudgmental, inclusive relationships devoid of pretense, where "They took [you] at face value . . . [and] if you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right." In contrast to the "amount of rejection and hauteur that heterosexual men put up with" dating women.

Norah Vincent came to these conclusions after spending a year disguising her sexual identity and inserting herself into various facets of male society. She literally fulfilled Henry Higgins' wish. Yaoi does in fiction what Norah Vincent did in real life. It inserts the reader into heart of a feminized gloss of the male "buddy" relationship, sans the social burdens and elaborate rituals and Victorian restraints that accompany heterosexual matchmaking.

UPDATES: here, here, and here.

Labels: deep thoughts, dmp, social studies, yaoi