Yaoi manga is far more prevalent and "mainstream" in Japan than slash-fiction is here in the U.S. and yet (especially male) homosexuality--despite the lack of Victorian taboos--is far less accepted in Japan as a matter of accepted practice (in real life) and statutory law.

Japan is a "Don't ask, don't tell" kind of place. Or rather, you can tell all you want as long as don't expect people to spring into action. So actual social change takes place slowly, but "stuff that doesn't have to be taken seriously right away" gets a lot of latitude.

More latitude than even western liberals would be willing to grant. The opening scene in the anime Denki-Gai (about a manga bookstore) has a officious-looking lady browsing the stacks in the hentai section. It turns out she's from the town council, and is making sure that the NC-17 titles are properly sealed (can't be read in the store).

She's not there to ban anything, only to make sure the rules are being followed. As long as social disorder isn't in the offing, then the sky's practically the limit. Thus "gay marriage" becomes a topic tabloid TV shows in Japan love to discuss precisely because nobody is drawing lines in the sand.

As Justin Sevakis observes,

Modern Japanese society has a lot of red tape and is very slow to change, but people also aren't as in-your-face about their personal beliefs--so the end result is a place where there's simply no provision for anything like gay marriage. But there are also barely any hate crimes.

Japan's far left is about as ideologically threatening as Bernie Sanders, and its far right is basically a tossed salad of rabid historical reenactors hopelessly trying to resurrect the late Meiji period (when the Imperial Navy clobbered the Russians and annexed Korea), obnoxious but mostly harmless.

Alas, the downside is that well-established bureaucracies and social institutions (like those governing agricultural policy) that made sense fifty years ago are still barreling along on pure momentum and the only way to derail them now would be to tear up the tracks.

This makes the whole idea of "coming out" much more difficult, since there's often a lot of guilt involved in what's perceived to be to shirking your own responsibilities as a member of society and having a "normal" family.

But it also means that every blessed disagreement in life doesn't immediately get polarized and politicized in the public square. The First Amendment should include a clause defending the right to like (or dislike) something without turning it into, well, a federal case.

Labels: japanese culture, manga, politics, social studies, yaoi

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

Funny, fascinating article about a literary writer who moonlights writing porn. Great quote:

Books in which children are abused, women murdered and men brutalised crowd the shelves of WH Smith [and the plots of Law & Order]. Books in which consenting adults enjoy each other for the healthy entertainment of literate wankers do not.

Interestingly, what is true about yaoi in Japan--"a field dominated by women, who approach any and every kink with gusto"--appears also to be true of the same market in Great Britain.

Speaking of consenting adults enjoying each other for the entertainment of literate wankers, the small, independent film Man, Woman and the Wall is one of the more enjoyable erotic thrillers I've seen in a while. Though it ends up being more clever and comic--on purpose--than "thrilling."

Start with The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's post-Watergate cult classic about a bunch of spies (led by Gene Hackman) planting bugs on each other. And then imagine the script getting mixed up with Revenge of the Nerds. And this is pretty much what you'd end up with.

Though the underlying theme of imagination and perception colliding with reality may be asking too much of this particular vehicle. Give it points for trying, though.

"AV" idol Aoi Sora is the object of the spying, so we can expect to literally see a lot of her. But then there are the eavesdroppers eavesdropping on the eavesdroppers. The creepiest of them gets his comeuppance--because who's doing the spying matters. Some voyeurs are way more equal than others.

As Tracy Lamb puts it, "When I reread [Twilight] more analytically, I realized that a guy sneaking into a girl's room without her knowledge could seem a little stalker-like. But the first two times I read it, it just seemed flattering."

Aoi Sora also shows up in Siren. It's more conventional erotic thriller fare, about a bunch of thieves who pull off the score of their lives, and then knock each other off one by one after a mysterious woman injects herself into the gang and reveals the disloyal darkness in each of their larcenous hearts.

Sora has that creepy "black widow" smile down ("We'll have sex and then I'll bite your head off"), but in this case she doesn't bring much to the role besides nudity. Siren struck me as an interesting idea that never made it beyond the outline stage. It needed either more substance or more sex.

The artsy-fartsy shakey cam also makes it well-nigh unwatchable. Hey, all you too-cool, art-house movie directors, please memorize this one word: "TRIPOD." Or this one: "STEADICAM." Or these two: "IMAGE STABILIZATION."

But as I observe here, the revenge drama--in which a vigilante or supernatural grim reaper deals out justice and balances the cosmic scales--is quite popular in Japan. The anime series Hell Girl is representative. Alas, the genre gets awfully repetitive. After a couple of episodes, seen one, seen them all.

Many commenters on Netflix recommending skipping the first volume of Hell Girl for exactly this reason. Maybe I'll take that advice and give it another shot.

Labels: books, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, sex, social studies, yaoi

I usually save few minutes at the end of the day to read manga, dessert to cap off the main course. As I happen to be translating yaoi for a living these days, I've been reading a good deal of yuri of late. Some yin to balance out all that yangy yang. And, to be honest, I do find women to be infinitely more interesting creatures than men.

My first sale as a writer was an autobiographical story to Cricket Magazine. In the published version, the editor changed the main character to a girl. I've favored female protagonists ever since. The New Era managing editor Richard Romney once said that I wrote female characters better than Jack Weyland. I still consider that one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten.

Just to clarify, yaoi is a romance genre featuring guys falling for other guys. Yuri (meaning "lily") is a romance genre about girls falling for other girls. At first glance, the two would seem a complementary pair. Both are written (mostly) by women for (mostly) women. Just as yaoi is not seriously categorized as "gay" literature, yuri is not a synonym "lesbian" literature.

Furthermore, I've come to consider yaoi, if anything, as a rather strange "old school" extension of the Harlequin romance. Yaoi provides a curious solution to a knotty problem with the standard romance formula. Namely (and this is largely my sister's insight), that yaoi is a way of exploiting unequal power dynamics in romantic relationships while avoiding the taint of misogyny.

The "traditional" historical romance centers social and physical power in an alpha male--the pirate or prince or highwayman. The woman counters the total domination by the male with her sexuality and "feminine wiles." Following the customary evolutionary roles, the man ultimately "captures" the woman, and the woman in turn "tames" the man.

Translated to a contemporary context, though, this formula crashes into the wall of political correctness. The typical dodge is to give the alpha male a high-testosterone occupation or a much higher socioeconomic status than the woman (Michael Douglas in The American President, Tom Hanks as a corporate exec in You've Got Mail, Edward as, well, Edward in Twilight).

In a "chic lit" classic like Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget is involved in relationships way above her social and economic class. And making women as sexually promiscuous as men, as in the hopelessly dreary Sex and the City, ultimately plays right back into the predatory male game plan, the old formulas rather transparently repackaged.

But if the relationship involves only men (quoting Kate),

then nobody has to excuse the blatant use of power. So teenage girls, who may feel rather powerless (since they have just seen their male counterparts gain weight, muscle and height that they don't have), may be drawn to material where real issues of power are played out without excuse or without the pretense that power isn't real, there and in your face.

The exaggerated and often S/M power differentials in yaoi essentially mirror Rhett Butler sweeping Scarlett off her feet and hauling her up to the bedroom, her protestations notwithstanding. It's retro Harlequin that conforms to every Freudian stereotype in the book.

Yuri, in contrast, tends to favor stories in which conflict arises from character largely outside men-are-from-Mars, testosterone-driven power struggles, and thus oddly mirrors classic action flick "buddy" pairings. In any case, class and power can't be entirely expunged from the narrative. There must be an aggressive member in the dyad or nothing would happen.

But while yaoi and genre romances tend toward idealistic or artificial narrative constructs (not that there's anything wrong with that--the same goes for guy entertainment), yuri (which, to be sure, hits porn at one extreme and lesbian literature at the other) remains largely rooted in how real people--specifically women--actually relate to each other in the real world.

As Erica Friedman puts it, yuri features "intense emotional connections between women" that can't necessarily be classified as love, but involve a "seriously intense bond that could easily become something more." Hence, to generalize, "mainstream" yuri can be said to revolve mainly around the evolution and devolution of friendships.

Many of the bittersweet, superbly-written short stories in Kawaii Anata ("Adorable You") by Hiyori Otsu, to take one exemplary example, could have run in the The New Era with very little tweaking. (The one place the short story is alive and well and widely-read by teenagers is Japanese manga.)

Similar yuri elements can be found throughout the Y/A canon. The kind of relationship Anne and Diane enjoy in Anne of Green Gables is a mainstay of yuri fiction. In her short story collection, Kuchibiru, Tameiki, Sakura-iro ("Her Lips, a Sigh, and the Color Pink"), Milk Morinaga has a character introduce herself as "I'm Diane to your Anne."

The core material from Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of Windy Poplars fits squarely into the yuri genre. Interestingly, these are the three novels that Kevin Sullivan tapped for his two miniseries, leaving out most of the formulaic (hetero) romance material from Anne of the Island.

Other examples includes Harriet and Beth Ellen from Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret (which I've always considered the better book) by Louise Fitzhugh. And at the other end of the genre scale, Lynne Ewing's Buffyesque Daughters of the Moon series.

Evolutionary psychology provides a useful tool for analysis here. Unless placed in a competitive context or placed outside behavioral norms (the nerds in any John Hughes flick) or given special attributes (every sports and superhero fantasy from Star Wars to Harry Potter to Spider-Man), normal boys are not that interesting. Unformed clay.

This is apparent in the NHK kid's show Whiz Kids. Imagine if the old PBS series Electric Company was produced by the Dr. Who people. The anime series Kodocha is based on shows like this, a bunch of preternaturally smart kids doing what a bunch of preternaturally smart kids would do with a television studio at their disposal.

Aside from the handful of adults who help "anchor" the show, the age cutoff for the cast is around twelve or thirteen. And reflecting a phenomenon that every geeky teenage boy is painfully aware of, while many of the girls can be categorized as "young women," the boys are still Bart Simpson. Even the preternaturally smart ones are candles competing with tungsten arc lamps.

Manga publishers and anime producers have long known that they can exploit this painful differential with some gratuitous nudity or by dropping yuri-ish hints into otherwise "guy" material--the vicarious thrill of imagining girls getting hot and heavy with each other being preferable to watching the kind of girl you'll never have doing the same thing with the BMOC.

The necessity of this spark remains when the hinting and nudging is taken away. In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon is a blank slate until Haruhi bounds into his life. In Ah! My Goddess, Keiichi is immobility incarnate, even after Belldandy shows up. In Sing Yesterday by Kei Toume, Rikuo hasn't gotten to first base with Shinako or Haru after six volumes.

Alas, the brilliant Ranma 1/2 begins to grate when you realize that, male or female, he's never going to grow up.

To compare, Akiko Morishima's collection of yuri short stories, Rakuen no Joken ("Conditions of Paradise") isn't chock full o' plot either. But Morishima's wonderfully-drawn stories and realistically-aged characters do depict lives moving forward, which is enormously more satisfying.

The odd shounen exception proving the rule are manga like the Kimikisu series, based on dating sims. Because the whole point of a dating sim is to challenge the player to round the bases, the story has to go somewhere with a refreshing alacrity. Kimikisu boasts little else in terms of plot--getting to first base alone is a challenging-enough goal. But at least they get there!

Now, I do understand characters like Ranma, Rikuo, Kyon and Keiichi. The old evolutionary instincts grinding away in the background. It's hard for guys to move off the dime without the sense that they're accomplishing something concrete, conquering new lands, rising in a hierarchy. As in every Bond film, consummating the relationships celebrates the end of the quest. Game over.

Hence the constant keeping of things at arm's length. In contrast, shoujo and yuri protagonists are more likely to get up close and personal, pushing the story along romantically and physically. Because that's when things start getting interesting.

Nor, I find, am I alone in this assessment, as yuri manga-ka like Milk Morinaga and Takako Shimura write for magazines whose primary market is men.

To be even-handed, an equally deadly plot device on the shoujo side is the love triangle. Again, evolutionary psychology explains why geeky guys in particular loath the conceit: when two males compete for a female, somebody's going to get hurt, and probably the guy wearing glasses. For the Mary Sue, the duplication of attention is great for her self-esteem. Hell for everybody else's.

In Anne of the Island, L.M. Montgomery creates two interlocking love triangles, which means that everybody suffers. Kevin Sullivan's adaptation skips quickly through the love triangle business (using an either/or formula which denies the hedged bet), making the movie better than the book (though as I point out here, it slights Anne's educational accomplishments).

Granted, shounen manga and anime writers invented the male version of this, known as harem. And it's just as annoying, especially lacking any hope (in the non-porn genres) of consummation.

To be sure, Robert McKee argues that we shouldn't expect fiction to mirror real life, but for fiction to capture something that is like real life, a distinction that confuses too many artists. In the excruciatingly gorgeous 5 Centimeters Per Second, Makoto Shinkai vividly captures (in the very last frame) a very real moment of self-realization. Been there, done that. I can identify.

And that's the problem. Plot is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. We ultimate invest in the character of the characters. And at the end of 5 Centimeters Per Second, we realize we've invested an hour of our time in a character who doesn't have any. Real? Like, man, I'm grokking it totally. But entertaining? Not beyond the dazzling cinematography.

In Video Girl Ai, Youta spends the entire series summoning up the courage to admit that he loves, well, Ai or Moemi, he's not quite sure. But at least in the end he's willing to pay a literal ferryman and literally walk across broken glass to seal his decision. Just punishment for all the angsty dithering he's put us through.

If nothing much is going to happen--essentially the most real thing about real life for most of us--then character must become the summum bonum of the story, without placing the protagonist's travails infinitely beyond the grasp of the reader. For me, yuri's consistent ability to accomplish this makes it perhaps the most "realistic" of niches in the otherwise unreal romance genre.

Labels: anime, anne, criticism, japan, manga, nhk, publishing, shinkai, yaoi, yuri

Kaori Shoji informs us in the International Herald Tribune that "in Japan, it's the men who want to be skinny and cute."

Young males between the ages of 18 and 30 make up the slimmest segment of the population and the ideal fashion weight as decreed by the apparel industry is 57 kilograms, or about 125 pounds, for a height of 175 centimeters, or 5 feet 8 inches.

This strikes me as one of those deeply-researched MSM pieces based on a sample size of "me and my two best friends." The business about the girlfriends weighing more than their boyfriends is physically improbable. But in general I think she's onto something.

A recent episode of NHK's Cool Japan program polled Japanese women to create a composite of the "ideal man." He turned out to be the twin of popular enka crooner Kiyoshi Hikawa. According to his record label, Hikawa is 177 cm tall and weighs 62 kg (5'9.5" 136 lbs).

Those are my approximate dimensions, and I'm a beanpole. Before looking up the actual numbers, I'd assumed from watching his variety show that Hikawa was around six feet tall. But that's because his guests are usually so much shorter than he is. So we may be talking about tastes governed by situationally-relative dimensions.

To be sure, as an enka artist, Hikawa is most popular with the forty-plus crowd. Though the boy band idols on NHK's Pop Music Club (think American Bandstand) that have thousands of teenage girls screaming their lungs out every week look pretty much like teenage Hikawa clones.

Then consider yaoi and the Takarazuka theater troupe. In Takarazuka productions, all the male roles are played by women. The willowy, porcelain-skinned Takarazuka "leading man" looks exactly like the typical yaoi protagonist, and an awful lot like Kiyoshi Hikawa.

But the most annoying aspect of contemporary male fashion in Japan is long bangs. I can't abide my bangs getting into my line of sight (pragmatics, not aesthetics). Yet you see it even on suit-wearing businessmen and news anchors. It brings out the old geezer in me. I want to throw things at the screen and shout, "Cut yer darned hair!"

Labels: cool japan, eye-of-beholder, japan, nhk, romance, sex, yaoi

Ah, actual reportorial evidence of why yaoi is popular. From a feature article in New York Magazine, "The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School" (though I do have to wonder about the extent to which these kids were yanking this guy's chain):

Elle is watching, enthralled, as two boys lock lips across the hall. "Oh, my," she murmurs. "Homoerotica. There’s nothing more exciting than watching two men make out."

But then there's this:

When asked how many of her female friends have had same-sex experiences, Alair answers, "All of them." Then she stops to think about it. "All right, maybe 80 percent. At least 80 percent of them have experimented. And they still are."

Which suggests an emerging market for yuri (assuming that the aforementioned chain-yanking is not as severe as I suspect it is). There are plenty of examples to be found in anime, manga, and slash fan-fiction, but has it materialized yet in retail narrative fiction?

Labels: deep thoughts, social studies, yaoi

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

My sister Kate offers the following analysis, which I find the most compelling yet.

I think [the appeal of yaoi] is about power.

First, I don't think the competition argument will work [that the reader perceives herself to be in competition with the protagonist], since many generations of romance critics have argued that a romance must have a female protagonist so women readers will have a representative in the story. I don't credit that argument with any substantial merit (although romance guidelines are absolute in this regard). My point is rather that this argument is just the flip side of the argument against a female protagonist.

I think part of the yaoi fascination is an age thing--hence the American Idol "scandal" over the long-haired teen, Sanjaya. Of course, Howard Stern is trying to keep the kid on, but I really can't believe Stern explains all the kid's votes. I don't really get it myself.

However, when I was a teen, I did find Mercutio more interesting than Romeo, and the villain of Duchess of Malfi more interesting than . . . well, there aren't any heros in The Duchess. But I found the villain most interesting (and still do). The Crucible was my favorite play. I preferred Luke Skywalker to Han Solo, Modred to Launcelot (still do), and I actually loved Faustus (the play), which didn't last since Christopher Marlow is pretty unintelligible.

I think yaoi utilizes that dark angsty persona so attractive to teenagers (male and female); more importantly, yaoi develops the problems that surround the dark, angsty persona, problems like "Should I sell my soul?" or "Should I satisfy ambition by betraying everybody?" or "Should I murder my uncle?" In other words, issues of power. And I think the attraction is that when all you've got is men, you don't have to worry about them breaking role and moving on and getting self-reflective and deciding all this power stuff is nonsense, thank you very much.

In fact, I still enjoy stuff like Nero Wolfe and Horatio Hornblower and Law & Order where the relationships are primarily between men and they discuss issues of power, primarily hierarchical power, and nobody feels apologetic about it.

Now, most people don't want a power-wielding-angsty persona around in real life (wouldn't Hamlet be a drag?), but we do like to surround ourselves culturally with old-fashioned chivalric and power-oriented ideas regarding honor and justice, etc. And one of the sad truths is that men still have a corner on that stuff (media-wise)--Buffy excepted. And I think women (like me) really, really dig this stuff and get tired of having to say things like, "Well, yes, but of course, it is too, too chauvinistic" or "Well, yes, but we all know that that sort of power is just wrong, and that's not how things should work at all." (Which is why the end of Buffy stank--it got apologetic.)

Which brings us back to yaoi, because once women are involved, those kind of explanatory, so-sorry statements become necessary, not because they really are necessary, but because the writers seem to think they are. But if it is just men then nobody has to excuse the blatant use of power. So teenage girls, who may feel rather powerless (since they have just seen their male counterparts gain weight, muscle and height that they don't have), may be drawn to material where real issues of power are played out without excuse or without the pretense that power isn't real, there and in your face.

Also, to be all feminine about it, I imagine there is the added plus of being able to read about power with relationships thrown in. I don't want to watch or read stuff that's the equivalent of a Risk game. Ahhhh, snore. But I love watching Nero and Archie work out their intensely bizarre relationship episode after episode.

What Kate calls the "competition argument" is an extension of the rather silly (when you think about it) notion, especially in Y/A literature, that in order for the reader to identify with the protagonist, the protagonist must be just like the reader. The success of anime and yaoi make it clear that these similarities are far more subjective and existential than objective and categorical.

There's no doubt that boys who watch My Hime are going to identify with Mai and not her little brother. And they identify with her because she's the one with the power (and the cool robot) at the center of the conflict.

Hmm, can you empower women and exploit them at the same time? My Hime sure does. But seriously, perhaps because Japanese society has managed to become post-modern while remaining in many respects unapologetically anti-feminist (coming in dead last whenever the U.N. measures such things among the developed countries), the realities of power don't get papered over with political correctness.

So even if the initial thought is no deeper than, "Girls are interesting (especially girls with big breasts)," the ends justify the means. Whatever the reason, Japanese mass media paradoxically produces far more believable female SF&F action heroines than Hollywood does.

Kate continues:

One of the interesting changes in romance novels over the past fifty years is the addition of the male perspective. Now it is very nearly de jure, according to my experts, to add a chapter or occasional paragraphs detailing the male perspective. It could be argued that this gives the reader insight into male thinking except I don't think the reader cares much. Rather, I think the male perspective serves as a balancing mechanism for the reader.

For example, seeing things from the male perspective prevents romances from being blatantly chauvinistic. If the male seduces the female (a la Pamela), it feels a trifle exploitative (although Pamela is a great book). But if the male seduces the female, and the reader knows that he really, really loves her and really, really cares and really, really finds her enchanting and really, really didn't mean to scare her, the reader becomes complicit in the seduction--that is, the reader approves of the seduction.

It isn't a conspiracy or anything; novel writing is, well, novel writing, not real life. People do not necessarily approve of domineering men seducing innocent women in real life. But romance novels drag relationships out of the day-to-day business of having to actually ask people what they think into the fantasy world of everybody kind of knowing without anybody actually having to ask.

Some writer I read somewhere once mentioned that Victorians loved mystery stories (Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins) because they got into all that Anne Perry stripping-away-the-rooftop stuff and peering into people's private lives. I think perspective in novels does the same thing. It lets us peek without having to ask. So, readers are all secret voyeurs. But we already knew that.

In yaoi, power relationships are defined right in the terminology: seme (from the verb meaning "to aggress") and uke (from the verb meaning "to receive"). They are, as you might expect, highly analogous to "male" and "female," but in their most traditional readings, pushing the power relationship to the same extremes (implicit domination and explicit S&M themes) that so infuriate old-school feminists about the "faux Regency" Harlequin genre.

Though Steven Pinker might point out that what these genres represent is, if anything, a civilizing reaction to our true natures rather than a reinforcement of them:

Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence [and power] . . . if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey.

What has changed, Pinker argues, bringing about a remarkable diminution in violence and the abuse of power in modern civilization, is a growing unwillingness to act on these fantasies combined with the ability (and license) to virtualize them at a safe distance from the real world. Go Nagai, a pioneering manga-ka in the hentai genre gets right to the point about his latest work:

I'd like this comic to serve as a brake for all those university professors struggling to keep control over themselves so they can read it and be satisfied instead of taking matters into their own hands.

In other words, while we may not want to celebrate it too openly, it just may be our embrace of the low brow--murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas (Shakespeare was a lot lower brow than he's given credit for), Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey--that is keeping civilization itself from tumbling over the edge.

Labels: buffy, deep thoughts, kate, social studies, 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