Last Words: Yoneda Kou, TADAYOEDO SHIZUMAZU, SAREDO NAKI MO SEZU

This week’s Last Words feature comes from a yaoi manga by Japanese manga artist, or mangaka, Yoneda Kou. The full manga (it’s a one-shot) can be read for free online here, scanlated (scanned + translated) by the fan group DP Scanlations.

While anime and manga are well known outside of Japan—titles like Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball and more recently, Naruto and BLEACH have been and continue to be internationally successful and influential—the yaoi subgenre maintains a niche reputation. Although, to be fair, despite this cult aura, the yaoi industry is also massively lucrative and boasts just as wide—and perhaps even more obsessive—a following.

Yaoi (or its more contemporary moniker, Boys’ Love, or BL) is the most commonly used general term for female-targeted manga featuring what Wikipedia aptly calls “idealized homosexual relationships.” Yaoi manga consists of both original work with major presses, as well as self-published amateur works (doujinshi), which are often based on characters from major mainstream anime and manga series, very similar to fanfiction. The latter are often just as popular as the former; the Naruto doujinshi world is pretty vast, for example. Many well-known mangaka with their own series began their careers drawing fan doujinshi; Yoneda Kou, for example, was first known for her (terrific) yaoi doujinshi on the children’s action series Katekyo Hitman Reborn!.

(There is also a subcategory called shounen ai, which can overlap with yaoi, and typically features homoerotic relationships without necessarily moving into explicit sexual, or sometimes even romantic, territory. For many fans, the marker of a shounen ai manga is if it does not contain a sex scene.)

Yaoi is also to be differentiated from bara, which, with its considerably different artistic style and even more graphic sexual content (although yaoi can also be very graphic), is typically considered to be gay manga for and by gay men—though any visit to a manga forum will show that bara attracts just as many enthusiastic fangirls.

Even mainstream anime or manga series will often feature a subtle, sometimes cheeky, nod to the possibility of homoerotic relationships between its characters, as a kind of “fan service,” knowing that many in the audience are carefully watching out for yaoi subtext.

To say that yaoi is problematic for anyone who cares about queer issues is an enormous understatement. The typical yaoi manga is extremely heteronormative, almost always featuring a clearly “masculine” top, or seme and “feminine” bottom, or uke; the seme nearly always physically taller, stronger, wealthier, tougher, colder, more forceful and the uke nearly always shorter, “prettier,” more delicate in both looks and temperament (he’s often reduced to tears). Even when these categories are played with by your more thoughtful mangaka—an awkward and clumsy seme, a mouthy and fierce uke—they are typically done so within the confines of already established variations, with their own terminology. A wanko-zeme, for example, is a seme character who’s like an adorably obedient and devoted dog [wanko, from wan-wan, which in Japanese is the sound a dog makes.] An osoi-uke is a kind of strong, overpowering uke; osoi, from osou, to attack. However, during sex and therefore in spirit, even the osoi-uke remains an uke; one website says that during sex, an osoi-uke character still functions as an uke, “because he is an uke.” Assumed sexual positions are tantamount to identity definitions: it’s extremely rare (I don’t think I’ve ever seen it) for a manga’s seme and uke to “switch.”

Nearly all transsexual or transgender characters in yaoi manga (in manga, full stop) serve as desexualized (or caricaturally oversexualized; comically lecherous, horny but with no takers) fodder for the main romance. The sassy but comforting cross-dressing “Mama” who tends the bar at the local gay club and dispenses tough love advice for hir clients is a particular mainstay.

As for the women in yaoi manga, they are often depicted with what is perhaps a surprising amount of venom, considering the fact that nearly the entire fanbase is female and most yaoi mangaka are women. Female characters in yaoi manga are often on the receiving end of a lot of queasy, Repulsive-Too-Embodied-Body resentment: derided by the male characters for being weak, clingy, obsessive, scary, stupid, materialistic and smelly (the perfume of women, the female stench, as opposed to the naturally sweet, fresh, clean, subtle smell of a boy, for example). It’s never a surprise to see a neglectful or boozy mom wandering around a yaoi manga—Tadayoedo even features one such example. (Her perfume is the only trace of her presence, it stinks up the room.)

That a genre that caters specifically to women’s romantic hungers—and in particular their hungers for more complex, urgent and sexually explicit romance narratives—would entirely exclude and indeed often revile female personhood and sexuality, I find both fascinating and alarming in equal measure. What to think, about this flight away from the feminine, with its cheesiness, shallowness, moist smelly bodies, disappointments. When smart girls want a bit more depth to their love stories, they have to take the girls out of it.

(To say more about that would require a whole fleet of other essays, I think.)

(The landscape of fan scanlations is pretty interesting to study as well, for anyone interested in publishing and readership. All of these translated and uploaded works are essentially pirated and illegal; made by fans, for fans, without profit. Many mangaka have come out as anti-scanlation. But that is also material for another essay.)

When I think about the way in which yaoi manga essentially ventriloquizes queer subjectivity to entertain a largely heterosexual female audience, I’m reminded of a blog post by Tim Jones-Yelvington at Big Other, about the misogyny of the Sex and the City 2 film, which pointed out the way in which the four main characters served as play dolls for their gay male creators, and the “long history in film and culture of gay men using women’s bodies to enact their own desires, then destroying or humiliating those same bodies.” I haven’t seen the SATC films (though I remember reading a review of the second film at the I Cite blog, making a persuasive and thoughtful rebuttal to some of the fierce sexist derision I seem to remember the film attracting). Tim’s criticism is equally useful here. While I think many, if not all, fans of yaoi manga would consider themselves gay- and queer-friendly (in an optimistic, depoliticized way, i.e., “Anyone should be allowed to love anyone!”), my abiding concern is for the problematic way in which the content of gay life is appropriated and idealized for heterosexual consumption and fantasy.

Occasionally in a fan forum someone will bring up how discomfiting these stereotypical portrayals are. The response is usually something along the lines of, “It’s just fantasy, you can’t take it seriously, it’s not meant to be real life,” etc. I don’t particularly care for that argument, as I rarely think anything is just anything, and least of all what produces fantasy. And it doesn’t stop female fans from self-deprecatingly (but still tellingly) considering themselves “perverts” for their tastes; the Japanese word for a female fan who enjoys yaoi or imagining non-canon homoerotic relationships between fictional characters, is fujoshi, or rotten woman (rotten as in fermented). It’s a pun on the more common usage of fujoshi, which means respectable woman; the pun changes the character, fu, woman, to another character, also pronounced fu, meaning rotten.

With all these criticisms, why read yaoi manga at all? Many fans claim to prefer yaoi manga to shoujo romance manga (also female-focused, sometimes containing elements of magic/fantasy, featuring heterosexual relationships), with its even more formulaic plots, its even stricter gender norms, and the frankly depressing dearth of smart, complex female protagonists. Yaoi manga, despite its many failures, tends to tackle more diverse and mature subject matter, sexually and emotionally, with more developed characters, than do its chaste shoujo counterparts. The best yaoi manga can be startlingly poignant, particularly on matters of unrequited longing and youthful obsession. And it fulfils a rare niche, as young adult literature that explicitly portrays alternate modes of sexuality (as well as “outlaw” desires), and how that sexuality plays out in its characters lives.

I’ve watched anime since I was a child, though I only got into reading manga after university, when I discovered free online manga; until then, I had enough books to buy obsessively, never mind starting in on manga. Nowadays I watch and read pretty diversely within the mainstream anime-manga world, from shounen, or male-oriented action shows and series (Code Geass, Naruto, BLEACH, Samurai Champloo, Neon Genesis Evangelion) to the slightly more bearable shoujo series (Ouran High School Host Club, Toradora!, Nodame Cantabile, Lucky Star, Honey and Clover, NANA, Hanazakari no Kimitachi e), but my clear preference is for yaoi manga and within that genre, the work of a few yaoi mangaka. My favourite yaoi mangas are as dear to me as any other work of literature; in them there are lines I wish I’d written, scenes I wish I’d thought up. Page 34 of 44 of Tadayoedo is one of my favorite things I’ve ever looked at.

I also quite like the idea of being a rotten woman.

Yoneda Kou is considered relatively unique within the yaoi fandom: for her style, which is mostly free of typical flowery-bubbly bishounen (“pretty boy”) art; for her unique take on exploring common genre fetishes (the schoolboy, the doctor, the yakuza, the cop, the hitman, the sexy uncle, the salaryman, the samurai); and especially for her lonely, defensive, funny-sad characters. Nearly everyone in her work is damaged in some way; damaged and suspicious and awkward and self-aware, for better or worse. She also has a refreshingly frank, complex approach to sex and the erotic; refreshing for a genre guilty of far too many a “sparkly penetrative sex bliss!!!” final panel serving as happy ending. In terms of last words/last panels, hers are some of my most cherished ones, in this manga and in her other work. Her strong and surprising sense of rhythm and pacing often makes for endings that are at once unresolved and totally crushing. She also has a practice (not used here), which I’ve never seen in any other manga, of blacking out or partially erasing the last words of a given manga, to mimic either a car horn drowning out the words, or a character who can’t quite remember something important, so that you both know and don’t know what happens; so things that are known and felt still remain unheard and unsaid, with both comic and bittersweet results.

The Mangafox description for Tadayoedo reads: “Yashiro has …issues (more like a whole damn subscription). He’s a masochist with slightly sadistic tendencies who gets off more with guys. Otherwise he’s your average high school student. Recently though, there’s been this annoying classmate Kageyama who seems to think it’s his duty to supply Yashiro with Band-Aids for the results of his sexual exploits; through various events they get closer and soon Yashiro develops more than normal feelings for Kageyama, but will he experience his springtime of love or remain drowning in unrequited affection? A yaoi love story with a twist (and a rope or 2).”

While I take issue with this misleadingly glib and titillating description (consumption, entertainment), it covers the manga’s basic plot. Also, there are lines like this:

And here he is again. The boy with the Band-Aids. “Your rope burns are showing.”

“After that, for the two weeks Kageyama was in charge of the infirmary, I let him touch my scabs every single day.”

“Just the thought of Kageyama bawling made me so excited I could barely stand it.”

Note: Remember, with Japanese manga you read right to left.

Also, if you do want to read the full manga, please be warned that it is “not safe for work.”

Yoneda Kou, Tadayoedo Shizumazu, Saredo Naki mo Sezu:

jtadayoedo_shizumazu_saredo_naki_mo_sezu_pg037

jtadayoedo_shizumazu_saredo_naki_mo_sezu_pg038

jtadayoedo_shizumazu_saredo_naki_mo_sezu_pg039