English
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics
REBECCA SUTER*
The University of Sydney
Abstract: Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing “girl knight” characters and “Boys Love” stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the repre- sentation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shōjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture – namely, the Christian religion – in the genre of Boys Love manga.
Keywords: Japan, shōjo manga, gender, exoticism, Boys Love, Christianity
Introduction1
Gender bending and exoticism have been central features of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, since the 1970s. Both elements functioned in a similar way, to create a fantasy world that constituted an escape from reality and at the same time provided a space for critical reflection on gender and cultural norms. In recent years both the erot- icisation of the gay male Other and the exoticisation of the Western Other have been the object of a number of insightful studies (Aoyama, 2005; Ishida, 2008; Nagaike, 2009; Welker, 2010).
A particularly interesting and understudied example of this phenomenon is the comics’ use of Christian imagery and paraphernalia within the texts, which allows them to represent the Western Other as spiritual, superstitious and traditional in a way that is strikingly similar to how Europe had portrayed Asia in the previous centuries, draw- ing upon stereotypes of Orientalism. In this article, through an examination of the
*Correspondence Address: rebecca.suter@sydney.edu.au
� 2013 Asian Studies Association of Australia
Asian Studies Review, 2013 Vol. 37, No. 4, 546–558, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2013.832111
representation of the Christian religion in the Boys Love subgenre of shōjo manga, I aim to problematise our understanding of the relationship between eroticisation of gay men and exoticisation of European culture in Japanese girls’ comics.
The article is divided into two sections. First, I provide an overview of the intersec- tion of gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga, with specific focus on the subge- nre of Boys Love and its reliance on complex identification strategies and multiple positionings. In the second part, I consider the representation of Christianity in Boys Love manga, and look at the articulation of these dynamics in two classics of the genre, Hagio Moto’s Tōma no shinzō (Thoma’s heart, 1976) and Takemiya Keiko’s Kaze to ki no uta (A poem of wind and trees, 1976–84), and in two more recent works, Toba Shōko’s Akuma to odore (Dance with the devil, 1993–96) and her Makai tenshō: yume no ato (Demonic resurrection: The traces of dreams, 1997).
Boys Love and Occidentalism
Boys Love manga, also known as shōnen ai, BL and yaoi, are comics that focus on romantic and sexual relationships between teenage or young adult men, written by female authors for a predominantly female audience. They first appeared in the early 1970s and played an important role in the development of female-authored shōjo manga as an inde- pendent and widely read genre in contemporary Japan. As the genre of male-male romance manga evolved over the years, a number of other categories emerged. Most notable was the development within so-called dōjinshi (fan-produced, self-published comics distributed at comic conventions rather than through commercial channels) of the genre of yaoi. The term, an acronym for “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” – literally “no story, no development, no meaning” – described male-male erotic comics that paid relatively little attention to plot development and concentrated mainly on a graphic repre- sentation of sexual intercourse. At the same time, the term yaoi also indicated works that displayed a preference for surreal or absurd storylines, an approach reflecting broader contemporaneous aesthetic trends of amateur manga (Fujimoto, 2007, pp. 36–38).
In the 1990s a number of further subcategories developed, such as aniparo (anime parodies) and shotakon (shorthand for Shōtarō konpurekkusu, indicating comics that feature younger, generally prepubescent, characters), as well as cultural practices such as that of yaoi megane, the fan custom of “reading” male-male erotic subtext into mainstream texts, imagining pairings between supposedly heterosexual male characters (Ōtsuka, 2001, pp. 14–18; Fujimoto, 2007, pp. 43–44; Meyer, 2011, p. 234).
Although there is a degree of flexibility in the use of the terminology, within contem- porary manga studies the term shōnen ai is generally employed to describe Boys Love manga from the 1970s, while yaoi is used to refer to post-1980s works that originate in the dōjinshi tradition, even when they are distributed by commercial publishers. The English words Boys Love, transliterated as bōizu rabu or shortened as BL, have come to be used as a blanket term to refer more broadly to male-male romance manga. The expression is variously transliterated into English as Boy’s Love, Boys’ Love and Boys Love. In this article, I will refer to the genre broadly as Boys Love, unless citing schol- arship that uses different terminology.
The genre was born in the 1970s as part of the “revolution” operated in the world of Japanese comics by the so-called 24nengumi, or “Group 49”, a number of authors who were all born in or around year 24 of the Shōwa period (1949 in the Western
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 547
calendar). The group included some of the most productive and skilled manga authors of the time, such as Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, Ikeda Riyoko and Yamagishi Ryōko.2 They aimed to appropriate the male-dominated medium of manga for female authors and to transform it both in content and in graphic style. In order to do so, they wrote in traditionally “male” genres, such as adventure and science fiction, and also radically rethought the conventions of the main “female” genre of the time – romance – by subverting its gender norms.
The genre of Boys Love was arguably the most significant, and most controversial, innovation that emerged from the 24nengumi’s attempt to reform the world of Japanese girls’ comics. Tomoko Aoyama notes that the introduction of boy protagonists was in and of itself a significant departure from the conventions of shōjo manga, which until then had focused almost exclusively on girls and their experiences (Aoyama, 1988, p. 187). The “beautiful boys” portrayed by the 24nengumi authors were arguably highly feminised, and in their graphic representation were not very different from the stereo- typical girl characters of previous comics, with slender bodies, flowing hair and large starry eyes. Their male gender and their homosexual orientation did, however, introduce a higher degree of complexity into the strategies of identification and projection at play in the stories.
The first male protagonist to appear in shōjo manga is generally acknowledged to be Aaron Browning, in Mizuno Hideko’s Fire (1968–71), set in the rock music scene of 1960s Tokyo. The very idea of a male protagonist in a girls’ comic was quite revolutionary for the time: until then, protagonists had always been teenage women, and males appeared only as secondary, relatively flat characters such as fathers, brothers and mild love interests. Mizuno’s bold move opened the ground for new developments in the genre. Not long after the publication of Fire, Hagio Moto and Takemiya Keiko created works that featured not simply male protagonists, but an all-male environment.
The work that launched the genre was Takemiya Keiko’s Yuki to hoshi to tenshi to… (Snow and stars and angels and…, 1970; subsequently republished with the title Sanrūmu ni te, In the sunroom), followed by Hagio Moto’s Jūichigatsu no jimunajiumu (The gymnasium in November, 1971). Both featured tormented romances between young boys in European settings – the son of a French aristocrat, Étoile, and a young gypsy, Serge, in the former, and two students at a German boarding school, Eric and Thoma, in the latter – that in each case ended tragically with the death of one of the two lovers. These were followed by two single-volume stories by Takemiya, ‘Hohoemu shōnen’ (The smiling boy, 1972), and ‘Nijū no hiru to yoru’ (Twenty days and nights, 1973). The genre came to maturity with Hagio’s Tōma no shinzō (The heart of Thoma; serialised in Shūkan shōjo comics in 1974) and Takemiya’s Kaze to ki no uta (A poem of wind and trees; also serialised in Shūkan shōjo comics from 1976 to 1984). Both are much longer works than the previous comics (in the tankōbon volume versions, a 500-page volume for Tōma and a 10-volume series for Kaze), with a higher degree of psychological complexity and more explicit representations of sex, particularly in Takemiya’s text.
Critics have often read Boys Love’s representation of a closed world with no female characters as simply an escape from, or a rejection of, reality. For example, Midori Matsui examined the theme of boy-boy love from a psychoanalytical perspective and interpreted it as a reflection of girls’ inability to express their desire within the conven- tions of patriarchal society, which forced them to project it onto a male character.
548 Rebecca Suter
Matsui (1993, p. 184) sees this as an instance of Freudian penis envy and Lacanian “rejection of the feminine”, which results in a failed attempt to escape the phallogocen- tric order:
Lacan’s equation of the logos with the phallus articulates the predicament of the female subject in the male-defined universe of language: lacking the language to define her independence, the girl is either left on the margin of the speech culture or kept as a subaltern subject in the symbolic order of patriarchy.
Writing in the mid-1990s, Matsui notes that these mechanisms are typical of early Boys Love comics, yet she points out the appearance in the late 1980s of “writers who consciously exploited the function of homosexuality as a pleasure machine for girls” (Matsui, 1993, p. 188). In the late 1990s, however, feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko reiterated the view that the representation of boy-boy love should be interpreted as a pro- jection of repressed desire on the part of girl readers, “a safe way for girls to handle an otherwise dangerous sexuality at a remove from their own bodies” (Ueno, 1998, p. 130).
Ishida Minori (2008) has questioned this view, noting that the reality of reader reception is more complex. While she does not deny the validity of the “projection hypothesis”, Ishida also notes that on a more basic level, authors and readers sim- ply enjoy consuming images of pretty boys engaged in sexual acts. Similarly, Mark McLelland (2006, n.p.) has challenged the idea that the consumption of boy-boy love by girl readers is necessarily a sign of their rejection of femininity, noting that there is also an element of sheer pleasure at play:
When I casually mention that the most frequent representations of male homosex- uality in Japan (outside the pages of the gay press) appear in manga (comics) written by and for women, I am usually met with an incredulous “Why?” This always strikes me as odd, for few people react with surprise to the fact that male pornography is full of “lesbian” sex. If heterosexual men enjoy the idea of two women getting it on, why should heterosexual women not enjoy the idea of two men bonking?
McLelland references a famous essay by Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins, ‘Normal female interest in men bonking’,3 which discusses a phenomenon that shares many similarities with the genre of Boys Love – namely, slash fan fiction, stories that “posit a same-sex relationship, usually one imposed by the author and based on [a] perceived homoerotic subtext” (Hellekson and Busse, 2006, p. 10).4
Slash fan fiction has attracted significant scholarly attention within the field of fandom studies, and some of its interpretations touch upon similar issues to those aroused within the debates on Boys Love, which I examine here. Two elements are of particular relevance to my study. The first is the analysis of slash fiction by feminist scholars in the 1980s, who interpreted the genre of slash as an attempt by female authors to portray relationships between equal partners, and saw the representation of homosexual romances as a model for heterosexual ones that valued parity, compatibility and true love (Russ, 1985; Lamb and Veith, 1986).
This is in contrast to Japanese feminists’ interpretations of Boys Love as an expres- sion of frustration and futile attempts to escape the norms of patriarchal society, such
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 549
as Matsui’s and Ueno’s analyses, cited above.5 Relying partly on the scholarship on English-language slash fiction and partly on quantitative studies of Japanese fandom, scholars of Boys Love have questioned Japanese feminists’ interpretations of the genre, pointing out the empowering potential of the production and consumption of fictional male romances, not only in yaoi manga (Fujimoto, 2007) but also in its narrative prose counterpart, yaoi shōsetsu (Nagakubo, 2005).
The second element of relevance to Boys Love is Constance Penley’s analysis of slash in the 1990s in light of Henry Jenkins’ notion of “textual poaching”. Building on Jenkins’ analysis of fan fiction as a creative appropriation of the original text that blurs the distinction between producer and consumer, Penley focused on the multiple identifi- cations that the genre of slash invites, particularly for heterosexual female readers, who can identify with the male gay protagonists of the stories as subjects of action, yet also relate to them as objects of attraction (Penley, 1997, pp. 478–80).
We find similar dynamics at play in Boys Love manga. In her analysis of the genre, Kazumi Nagaike (2003, p. 88) emphasises the “multiple, shifting, and synchronic process of identification” experienced by female readers in the act of reading Boys Love comics, and points out that this cannot be reduced to either projection or distanc- ing. The beautiful boys of shōjo manga are portrayed and perceived as simultaneously self and Other, and are objects of consumption as well as of identification.
Similar dynamics are at play in the comics’ representation of the foreign “Other”. Particularly in their initial phase, Boys Love comics relied heavily on exoticisation of European culture. As James Welker (2006, p. 842) notes,
[e]arly boys’ love narratives are generally set beyond Japan, in the borrowed psychic space of a romanticised Europe of the past, thus visually and narratively transporting shōjo readers to a world they can only fantasise about inhabiting.
The choice of Western, generally European, settings was not exclusive to Boys Love. A significant proportion of the most popular and most renowned works by the 24nengumi were set in European countries. To cite just a few examples, Yamagishi Ryōko’s Arabesuku (Arabesque, 1971–75) takes place in the Soviet Union; her Shiroi heya no futari (The couple in the white room, 1971) in France, as does Ikeda Riyoko’s Berusayu no bara (The rose of Versailles, 1972–73); Ikeda’s Orufeusu no mado (Orpheus’ window, 1975–78) unfolds between Germany and Russia. Aoike Yasuko’s Ibu no musukotachi (The children of Eve, 1976–79) is set in England, and Morikawa Kumi’s Kimi yo shiru ya minami no kuni (Knowst thou the country of the south, 1977) in Italy. The list could continue.
Welker argues that the use of exoticism in girls’ manga was a narrative strategy that allowed authors and readers to construct their identity in a fantastical space removed from the social conventions of contemporary Japan, and particularly its gender norms. Welker explains this through Takahara Eiri’s notion of akogare, literally fascination, but a fascination that is usually accompanied by a desire to be with or to become another (Takahara, 2003, p. 19). Similarly, according to Welker, in shōjo manga “the space of the foreign was at once the object of an insatiable longing and a means of sending and receiving messages about sexual and gender alternatives unavailable elsewhere” (Welker, 2010, p. 162).
550 Rebecca Suter
Critic Yonezawa Yoshihiro described this phenomenon as a “romantic streak that built dreams out of the fascination for another world” (Yonezawa, 1991, p. 136). On one level, the reliance on exotic settings was part of a broader fascination with Europe within the girls’ culture of the 1970s. As Takemiya Keiko explained in an interview, her choice of a French boarding school for Kaze to ki no uta was related to this tendency:
At the time, the generalised fascination with foreign countries was still very strong. The age of Hollywood had ended, and we were looking for new models. There were an incredible number of magazines publishing special issues on Europe. In fact, the very idea of aesthetics [tanbi] came from Europe (Ishida, 2008, p. 283).
Aesthetics is a central concept here: Europe was idealised for its appreciation of beauty, and contrasted with the utilitarianism that prevailed in contemporary Japan as a result of modernisation. In this respect, the comics’ romanticisation of Europe bears striking similarities to Orientalism as conceptualised by Edward Said – i.e. the projection of a romanticised backward “Other” against which to construct the image of a modern self. For this reason, they present us with a precious opportunity to reflect on Japan’s com- plex relationship with Orientalist narratives and representations.
The Orientalism described by Said is concerned mainly with the “Orient” as the “Middle East” – i.e. with Islamic Southwest Asia. When the European colonial enter- prise extended to East Asia, Orientalism provided the template by which Europeans came to understand and know the non-Western Other in that part of the world as well. Japan was no exception. In his analysis of the early works of Western scholars on Japan – scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain, George B. Sansom and Edwin O. Reischauer – Richard Minear found many “Orientalist” features, particularly an aestheticisation of Japanese culture, that is to say, an emphasis on its traditional nature that by describing it as aesthetically pleasing ultimately reifies and essentialises it as exotic and backward, reducing it to an object of condescending fascination (Minear, 1980, pp. 507–12).6
It is my contention that Boys Love comics, and shōjo manga more broadly, often portrayed the European Other as aestheticised, feminised and sexualised in the same way that European and North American journalists and scholars had represented “Oriental” Japan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was an ambigu- ous move. On one level, romanticising the European past as a fantasy world meant reifying the Western Other as an object of consumption, reproducing Orientalist mecha- nisms and simply inverting the relative positions of “East” and “West”. At the same time, this “other” space also offered an opportunity to reflect critically on Japanese cultural norms. Thus Boys Love manga’s appropriation of European culture, by overturning Orientalist stereotypes, became a source of critical reflection on both Japanese and Western cultural norms. What Nagaike, McLelland and Fujimoto say of the consumption of boy-boy love on the part of shōjo readers can also be applied to their display of exoticist tropes. This is particularly evident in the case of the comics’ representation of Christianity.
Christianity and Male-Male Eroticism
Christianity was a prominent object of Boys Love’s exoticism in the 1970s. The first appearance of the Christian religion in Boys Love can be found in Hagio Moto’s Tōma
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 551
no shinzō. The comic opens with notice of the suicide of young Thoma, a student at a German boarding school, over his unrequited love for his older classmate Julismore, and the arrival in the school of another boy, Eric, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the deceased Thoma. The story centres on the sexual and psychological development of Julismore, and his struggle with his inability to return Thoma’s love. Julismore attributes his emotional coldness to having “lost his wings”, an enigmatic expression that is repeated several times, and reverberated on the visual level through a repeated display of non-diegetic images of angels and feathers. The meaning of the metaphor is partly disclosed in the final pages, when we discover that Julismore’s strug- gle is the result of the physical and psychological scars he bore after becoming involved with a group of older classmates who secretly performed Satanist rituals. While the use of Christian demonic ritual as a plot device in the comic seems some- what contrived, at the time of publication it arguably contributed to the development of a connection between the eroticisation of the European boarding school setting and the exoticisation of Christianity.
This element is more fully developed in Takemiya Keiko’s Kaze to ki no uta, which centres on another troubled romance between two students, Serge Batour and Gilbert Cocteau, at a boarding school in Southern France. Serge, the son of a French aristocrat and a gypsy woman, is discriminated against for his dark skin, but beloved because of his noble origins as well as his beauty. Gilbert is a more complex character, whose history of abandonment and sexual, physical and emotional abuse drives him to become a prostitute in the boarding school, having sexual intercourse with older class- mates in exchange for gifts and favours. The two share a double room in the school’s dormitory, and Serge finds himself struggling between Gilbert’s attempts at seduction, compounded by his own growing feelings of love for the boy, and his sense of moral righteousness and desire to redeem Gilbert from his “perversion”.
Christianity features conspicuously in the comic, on the visual as well as the thematic level. Crucifixes, bibles and churches appear constantly in the diegesis, while metaphoric images of angels and Madonnas appear in the non-narrative artwork inter- spersed through the volumes. The religion acquires greater thematic importance in volume three, when Gilbert, feverish and appearing to be in a state of extreme emotional distress, begs Serge to hold him, naked, all night long in his bed. When Serge recounts the event to the school’s confessor, the priest reacts very strongly, warning Serge that while the occasional kiss between boys is a common occurrence in the school, spending an entire night in bed together is unforgivable (Takemiya, 1976– 84, vol. 3, pp. 224–28).
While the incident is pardoned and the school management turns a blind eye to it, the episode has the effect of reinforcing Serge’s love for Gilbert, as well as his confu- sion and sense of guilt. The Christian religion is thus presented as one of many obstacles to the realisation of the love between the boys, a means to complicate the plot and prolong the titillation for the reader. At the same time, the comics’ creative appropriation of Western religion parallels and subverts a central aspect of Orientalism – namely, the romanticisation of Asia as inherently more spiritual than the West, and its simultaneous stigmatisation as superstitious and backward.
In much the same way, Hagio and Takemiya’s comics display fascination with Europe’s churches and angels, and a combination of excited horror and condescending
552 Rebecca Suter
curiosity for its quirky rituals and irrational beliefs. While in 1970s Boys Love comics such as these Christianity is presented as utterly “Other”, more recent works portray the foreign religion in a more nuanced way, within the framework of the same kind of multiple identifications that Penley and Nagaike identify as defining features of male- male erotica for girls.
As the genre developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and the settings expanded to include a great variety of times and places, from ancient Asia to contemporary America and Japan, exoticism became less dominant in Boys Love. In recent years, as Kazumi Naga- ike (2009, n.p.) points out, “the majority of the characters represented in BL manga are clearly Japanese and possess Japanese names and characteristics”, while only “a certain number of BL manga depict foreign characters”. The legacy of the 24nengumi is never- theless significant, and the combination of exoticism and gender bending it constructed remains an important influence on contemporary Boys Love. To clarify my point, I will examine two comics published in the 1990s, both authored by Toba Shōko.7
Akuma to odore (Dance with the devil, 1993–96) is an 11-volume series published in Kadokawa Shoten’s mainstream girl comic series Asuka Comics that centres on the relationship between a Catholic priest named Alec and a half devil named Sasha. Alec, an orphan, grew up in Rome as a member of a special section of the Catholic Church known as “Rosa d’oro”, which specialises in exorcisms. He was ostracised by the Church for his defence of homosexuality, and came to New York, where he put his demon-fighting skills into the service of the local community. Sasha, the son of a human and a devil, is captured by Alec and ends up living with him, reluctantly at first, and later of his own will.
Set partly in hell, which is represented as a sumptuous palace suspended in the air, partly in Rome, and partly in 1990s New York, the comic contrasts the mundane, mod- ern world of America with the fascinating and exotic world of Europe, epitomised by the Catholic religion and its demons. Both the Catholic religion and the demon world are romanticised according to the clichés of shōjo manga, with displays of baroque buildings and elegant clothes and accessories. Catholics and devils, while on opposite fronts, belong to the same fantasy world. This effect is reinforced by the contrast with the modern architecture and 1990s fashion of New York, which for the readers appears to be very similar to everyday Japan. In this respect, it bears striking similarities to the image of Europe as an alternative to Americanised modern Japan that Takemiya describes in the interview I cited in the first section of this article.
As in Kaze, the theme of religion intersects directly with that of male same-sex desire. While the story hints at a budding romance between the two male protagonists, this is made impossible by Alec’s religious devotion and the Catholic Church’s prohibi- tion on homosexuality. Thus, in a similar way to Takemiya’s text, the Christian religion is presented as an obstacle to the realisation of the main romance, and functions as a trigger for plot development that increases the feeling of suspense for the reader. The theme is reinforced in two subplots, which emphasise Alec’s ambivalence towards homosexuality. The first is Alec’s relationship with fellow “Rosa d’oro” member Chris, who has been secretly in love with Alec since their youth, and one night under the effect of a spell attempts to have sex with him. As with Gilbert in Kaze, Chris is ini- tially punished by the Church for this but later forgiven and reintegrated into the Rosa d’oro.
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 553
More significant is the second Boys Love romance of the series, between a half-human, half-vampire named Saint Germain and his servant Martin. Like Sasha, Saint Germain struggles to be accepted by society because of his nature as a half demon. Interestingly, in both cases, the narrative presents society as the ultimate villain, and the “half” as the ultimate hero. It thus portrays both heteronormativity and cultural essentialism as the ultimate sources of suffering for the characters, and celebrates hybridity as a more viable alternative.
Through the representation of transitional figures such as Sasha and Saint Germain, the comic blurs the distinction between human and demonic, celebrating hybridity instead. Thus although the series exoticises and objectifies Catholics and devils for the consumption of the girl readers, it also uses them as a basis for a critical reflection on social norms and conventional binaries.
This is even more evident in my final example, Makai tenshō: yume no ato (Demo- nic resurrection: The traces of dreams, 1997). The comic, two volumes in the tankōbon volume edition, also published in the Asuka Comics series, is a parody of Yamada Fūtarō’s popular novel Makai tenshō (Demonic resurrection, 1967). The protagonist of the novel, and of Toba’s comic, is the historical figure Amakusa Shirō, the teenage leader of the Shimabara rebellion of 1637, the last Christian revolt of Tokugawa Japan, brutally suppressed by the Shogunal army with a death toll estimated at 37,000. In the novel, after being killed in the revolt, Shirō is reborn as a demon thanks to a combina- tion of Christian magic and ninjutsu, and sets out to similarly resurrect a number of samurai of his time. The process of demonic resurrection imagined by Yamada reads as a parody of the birth of Jesus that both foregrounds and subverts its gender dynamics. While the Christian god uses a woman’s body to make his son come into this world and redeem humanity, in the makai tenshō ritual the dying samurai must have sexual intercourse with a woman, whose body then turns into a cocoon that allows him to come back to life as a powerful and bloodthirsty demon. This element takes interesting turns in Toba’s adaptation, as we will see.
Highly popular at the time of its publication, Yamada’s novel became the basis for a series of spin-offs in other media, including fiction, film, theatre, manga, anime and videogames. In Fukasaku Kinji’s movie adaptation from 1981, Shirō was played by actor/singer Sawada Kenji, famous for his gender-ambiguous performances (one of his stage names was Jurii, a tribute to actress Julie Andrews). Heavily made-up, dressed in a bright-coloured kimono with a big cross hanging from his neck, Sawada’s gender and sexual ambiguity were a significant component of Shirō’s evil charm in the movie. This contributed to the emergence of an image of Shirō as an emblem of the danger and seduction of gender bending and cultural hybridity in the Japanese collective imaginary. Building on this feature, Toba rewrites Makai tenshō as a Boys Love text, imagining a love affair between Shirō and the youngest of the resurrected samurai, Tamiya Bōtarō, in line with the tradition of parodying famous works of popular fiction by imagining a homosexual romance between two male characters represented by the genres of aniparo and the practice of yaoi megane.
One of the most significant deviations from the original in Toba’s comic pertains to the process of the resurrection, which loses its heterosexual component. In the comic, Shirō performs his magic directly on the body of the dying samurai, without any inter- course with women being involved. What replaces the gruesome parody of childbirth
554 Rebecca Suter
of the original novel is a romanticised alternative to the demonic resurrection ritual, reconceptualised through the aesthetics of Boys Love. In the first pages, we see Shirō resurrect Tamiya by dipping a hand into his chest and pulling his “new self” out of his own body. While the initial scene is not overtly sexual, as the story progresses the rela- tionship between Amakusa and Bōtarō develops as a typical Boys Love romance, with Shirō in the role of the seducer and Bōtarō in that of the reluctant victim.
This is consistent with a typical feature of Boys Love manga – namely, the pairing of an uke or “recipient”, and a seme or “attacker”. While the terms ostensibly refer to the acts of penetrating and being penetrated in the sexual act, they also indicate more broadly an active and passive role within the relationship. According to the representa- tional conventions of the genre, the seme is usually the older, taller and more masculine-looking of the pair, while the uke is more feminine in looks and behaviour, shorter, less muscular and younger (Fujimoto, 2007, p. 42).
In Toba’s comic, Shirō is the younger partner in the couple (he is 16 at the time of his death and resurrection, while Bōtarō is said to be 21), and is portrayed as the more feminine, with large starry eyes, long hair and flowing clothes with flowery patterns. He thus seems a likely candidate to be the uke in the relationship, while Bōtarō, taller, older, and with smaller eyes and stronger jaw and nose, appears to be the potential seme according to the representational conventions of the genre. Yet Shirō is the more aggressive partner and the one who holds more power within the relationship, to the point of telling Bōtarō that he is “no more than a doll in my hands” (Toba, 1997, vol. 1, p. 75). Thus the character of Shirō challenges not only social norms, but also the generic conventions of Boys Love manga.
A similar complexity is at play in the other main plot in the comic, which stages a conflict between the Christian demon Shirō, bent on avenging the Shimabara massacre by bringing destruction to Tokugawa Japan, and the traditional samurai Yagyū Jūbei, who resolutely opposes his plans. While the makai tenshō ritual itself does not require women, the comic introduces a female character, O-hina, that the demons want to use as a sacrificial victim in a Satanic ritual that will help their plan of destruction. Jūbei’s role in protecting O-hina against the demons further constructs him as a defender of justice and of social and gender norms. Thus the comic apparently contrasts Shirō, the gender ambiguous, culturally hybrid demonic seducer, and Jūbei, the traditionally Japa- nese, morally pure heterosexual samurai.
Unlike in Yamada’s novel and Fukasaku’s film, however, in Toba’s manga, Shirō is not presented simply as evil. The Christian imagery that surrounds him is a combina- tion of the demonic and the angelic, and this effect is reinforced by the moral ambiguity that characterises him in the diegesis. His desire for revenge is presented as being motivated by his sensitivity to the suffering of the victims of Shimabara; further- more, his demonic intentions are constantly undermined by his human feelings, and particularly by his attachment to O-rui, the daughter of the deceased Christian lord Konishi Yukinaga, whom Shirō takes under his wing and brings along on the demon gang’s journey around Japan. In the end, Shirō’s inability to let go of his human feel- ings causes him to lower his guard as he fights against Jūbei, and the comic ends with his death in the arms of Bōtarō, in another erotically charged scene.
The representation of ambiguous figures such as Sasha, Saint Germain and Shirō allows Toba to trigger the kind of complex, multiple identifications that Penley and
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 555
Nagaike describe in relation to readers of slash and BL respectively. As is the case for most Boys Love stories, in these manga, too, for the reader there is no single character in the story that is an obvious object of identification or “othering”, not only on the level of gender and sexuality, but also on that of cultural and social norms. Thus, to borrow Penley’s words, “the subject participates in and restages a scenario in which crucial questions about desire, knowledge, and identity can be posed, and in which the subject can hold a number of identificatory positions” (Penley, 1997, p. 480).
Such a narrative strategy encourages a more flexible reading, which leads us to see the characters as both self and Other, both an object of consumption and an object of identification. Both of Toba’s comics thus encourage readers to consume the Christian religion as a source of thrilling and threatening exotica, and at the same time to engage in the broad spectrum of multiple identifications and positionings typical of Boys Love to reflect critically on the gender and cultural norms of both Japanese and Western cultures.
In this respect, I read the texts as emblematic of Boys Love manga’s use of male- male eroticism and Occidentalism as a form of “complicitous critique” of Japanese heteronormativity and cultural essentialism. On one level, as Takemiya stated in her interview, the use of foreign characters and settings in Boys Love manga can be inter- preted as a sign of a broader fascination with European culture within shōjo culture from the 1970s onward, which reifies the West as a beautiful and traditional object of consumption.
Through this aestheticising approach, the comics reproduce and invert a mechanism characteristic of Orientalist narratives about Japan, which portrayed it as similarly aestheticised and objectified. The exoticism of Boys Love therefore is analogous to the eroticisation of the “beautiful boys”, which similarly replicates and reverses the conven- tional mechanism of the male gaze as examined by feminist film theory of the 1970s, such as the use of lesbian sex in male-oriented pornography discussed by McLelland.8
If the representation of male homoeroticism in girls’ manga mirrors and subverts the objectification of the female body for male consumption within fiction as well as within society, the exoticisation of Christianity constitutes a similar inversion of Orientalism.
Such reproduction and subversion of dominant narratives is at the roots of shōjo manga’s peculiar mixture of escapist and resistant strategies. It is neither simply the result of an inferiority complex towards Europe nor just a form of reverse racism that objectifies the West, but a complex strategy of multiple identification that includes an element of reification, yet appropriates it creatively to offer broader critical reflections on gender and cultural norms. I therefore interpret the genre in light of what Linda Hutcheon describes as a “complicitous critique” (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 11), a simulta- neous questioning from within and from without of both heteronormativity and cross-cultural influences. Precisely in such ambivalence, I argue, lies the subversive potential of the genre, which makes it a particularly powerful source of critical reflec- tion on gender and cultural norms.
Notes
1. A preliminary version of this article was presented as a conference paper at the first Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific Symposium, hosted by the Department of Gender and Cultural Stud- ies at The University of Sydney in December 2010. I am grateful to the organisers, Meaghan Morris
556 Rebecca Suter
and Catherine Driscoll, for the opportunity to present at the conference as well as for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I would also like to thank my two anonymous readers for their observations and criticisms, which helped me to refine my argument.
2. Hagio and Takemiya, whose work I discuss in greater detail in the next section, are best known as the creators of the genre of shōnen ai and for their work in the genre of science fiction, as seen in works such as Takemiya’s best-selling series Tera e… (Toward Terra, 1977–80). Ikeda is the cele- brated author of Berusayu no bara (The rose of Versailles, 1972–73), which instituted the trope of the cross-dressing girl as a staple of shōjo comics and of girls’ culture more broadly. Yamagishi is most renowned as the author of Hi izuru tokoro no tenshi (The Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun, 1980–84), a fictionalised biography of Prince Shōtoku, which contributed to establishing histor- ical fiction as a productive subgenre of girls’ manga.
3. The essay, published in 1998, was a debate between the three authors on the representation of male homosexuality in fan fiction by female authors, that included a large number of quotes from fan websites, in an attempt to do justice to the diversity of fan positions, and to acknowledge the high level of critical self-reflection among producers and consumers of fan fiction on issues such as misogyny and homophobia.
4. The term refers to parodies of famous works of popular culture, often television series, written by fans and circulated in magazines and more recently on the web.
5. It is also worthy of note that the male gay romantic and sexual relationships portrayed in the Boys Love of the 1970s were far from equal or respectful; they were in fact represented as troubled, hurt- ful, and generally based on power imbalance.
6. On Orientalism and representations of Japan see also Iriye (1975), Hammond (1997) and Miyake (2010).
7. Toba, who died prematurely in 2008 at the age of 41, is famous for illustrating the NHK manga ver- sion of the Heian classic The tale of Genji and as an author of soft-core Boys Love.
8. For a discussion of the notion of male gaze as a site of production and reproduction of heteropatriar- chal norms, see Mulvey (1975).
References
Aoyama, Tomoko (1988) Male homosexuality as treated by Japanese women writers, in Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds), The Japanese trajectory: Modernization and beyond, pp. 186–204 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press).
Aoyama, Tomoko (2005) Transgendering shōjo shōsetsu: Girls’ inter-text/sex-uality, in Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta (eds), Genders, transgenders and sexualities in Japan, pp. 49–64 (London and New York: Routledge).
Fujimoto Yukari (2007) Shōnen ai/yaoi/BL: 2007nen genzai no shiten kara. Yuriika 39(16), pp. 36–47. Hagio Moto (1976) Tōma no shinzō (Tokyo: Shōgakukan). Hammond, Phil, ed. (1997) Cultural difference, media memories: Anglo-American images of Japan (London
and Washington: Cassell). Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, eds. (2006) Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet
(Jefferson and London: McFarland). Hutcheon, Linda (1989) The politics of postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge). Iriye, Akira, ed. (1975) Mutual images: Essays in American-Japanese relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press). Ishida Minori (2008) Hisoyakana kyōiku: ‘yaoi/boizu rabu’ zenshi (Kyōto: Rakuhoku shuppan). Ishikawa Ken (1987) Makai tenshō (Tokyo: Yamato Comics). Lamb, Patricia Frazer and Diane Veith, eds. (1986) Romantic myth, transcendence, and Star Trek zines, in
Donald Palumbo (ed.), Erotic universe: Sexuality and fantastic literature, pp. 236–55 (Westport: Green- wood Press).
Matsui, Midori (1993) Little girls were little boys: Displaced femininity in the representation of homosexual- ity in Japanese girls’ comics, in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the politics of difference, pp. 177–96 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin).
McLelland, Mark (2006) Why are Japanese girls’ comics full of boys bonking? Refractory 10. Available at http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/, accessed 18 April 2012.
Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics 557
Meyer, Uli (2011) Hidden in straight sight: Trans⁄gressing gender and sexuality via BL, in Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry and Dru Pagliassotti (eds), Boys’ Love manga: Essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross- cultural fandom of the genre, pp. 232–56 (Jefferson and London: McFarland).
Minear, Richard (1980) Orientalism and the study of Japan. Journal of Asian Studies 39(3), pp. 507–17. Miyake, Toshio (2010) Occidentalismi: la narrativa storica giapponese (Venezia: Cafoscarina). Mulvey, Laura (1975) Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16(3), pp. 6–18. Nagaike, Kazumi (2003) Perverse sexualities, perverse desires: Representations of female fantasies and yaoi
manga as pornography directed at women. US-Japan Women’s Journal 25, pp. 76–103. Nagaike, Kazumi (2009) Elegant Caucasians, amorous Arabs, and invisible Others: Signs and images of for-
eigners in Japanese BL manga. Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20. Available at http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20/nagaike.htm, accessed 18 April 2012.
Nagakubo Yōko (2005) Yaoi shōsetsuron: josei no tame no erosuhyōgen (Tokyo: Senshū daigaku shuppank- yoku).
Ōtsuka Eiji (2001) Teihon monogatari shōhiron (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten). Penley, Constance (1997) NASA/Trek: Popular science and sex in America (New York: Verso). Russ, Joanna (1985) Pornography by women, for women, with love, in Joanna Russ (ed.), Magic mommas,
trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: Feminist essays, pp. 79–99 (New York: The Crossing Press). Takahara Eiri (2003) Muku no chikara: Shōnen hyōshō bungakuron (Tokyo: Kōdansha). Takemiya Keiko (1976–84) Kaze to ki no uta (Tokyo: Hakusensha). Toba Shōko (1993–96) Akuma to odore (Tokyo: Asuka Comics). Toba Shōko (1997) Makai tenshō: yume no ato (Tokyo: Asuka Comics). Ueno Chizuko (1998) Hatsujo sōchi—erosu no shinario (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō). Welker, James (2006) Beautiful, borrowed, and bent: Boys’ love as girls’ love in shōjo manga. Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 31(3), pp. 841–70. Welker, James (2010) From The Cherry Orchard to Sakura no sono: Translation and the transfiguration of
gender and sexuality in shōjo manga, in Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (eds), Girl reading girl in Japan, pp. 160–73 (London and New York: Routledge).
Yonezawa Yoshihiro (1991) Koi kara hajimaru shōjo manga no bōken. Bessatsu taiyō—Kodomo no Shōwa- shi: Shōjo manga no sekai II (Tokyo: Heibonsha).
558 Rebecca Suter
Copyright of Asian Studies Review is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.