Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  H-anime movies based on horror invert the Hollywood formula by making horror the subtext of a sexually explicit story. Anime such as the Angel of Darkness (1995) series are heavy with the old conventions of the Gothic style: isolated houses—old or new—with subterranean lairs, nocturnal thunderstorms, and grotesque otherworldly beings. Of course, they’re also heavy with sex of various kinds.14 However, unlike Hollywood teens, anime characters are not always automatically doomed to be sliced-and-diced just because they have sex.

  The La Blue Girl (1992) series is perhaps the best example of this more charitable attitude toward sexuality and horror. The series revolves around two sisters, Miko and Miyu. Not only are they inheritors of the traditions of a clan of sexual ninja, their father was a demon. This relationship slightly complicates their sexuality; Miyu, for example, avoids becoming sexually aroused during a full moon (as revealed in the fourth OAV) because if she gets aroused but does not reach orgasm, she turns into a werewolf. Demonic or not, the viewer is meant to cheer the sisters on as they battle rival ninja clans, demons, extraterrestrials, and whatever hazards the scriptwriters put in their way. Sex for them is (usually) joyful, and does not bring down cosmic retribution from Freddy Kruger or Jason.

  Urotsukidoji is undoubtedly the most extreme example of the sex/horror approach, to say nothing of the extent to which a story will give rise to sequel after sequel. Between 1989 and 1995 no fewer than thirteen OAVs were made in this series, originally based on a manga by Toshio Maeda, leading Helen McCarthy to complain about “film-makers [who] milk a cash cow long after it’s dead on its feet.”15 What’s noteworthy about the Urotsukidoji films is not their capitalism but their conservatism. This may seem an odd word to use about a film that shows women (and men) being raped and then torn to bloody bits by phallic tentacles, but the choice is deliberate. We need to remember that popular culture, to be popular, must necessarily be based on the beliefs of the majority. No story was ever popular and avant garde at the same time. The Urotsukidoji series navigates this dilemma by showing all kinds of sexual activity, but punishing only those whose activities are too far out of the mainstream. If a high-school athlete cavorts with three girls at once, they are all doomed. The illicit affair of a servant and master actually triggers the great 1923 Tokyo earthquake in this anime. However, the naïve adolescent fumbling of two teenagers trying to understand sex is tolerated. This is understood as a necessary part of life, even a rite of passage, that does not deserve the death penalty.

  Variation Three: Sentimentality

  The early anime Etude isn’t humorous, isn’t horrific, isn’t even a fantasy; but neither can you call it pornographic in the traditional sense. There are two sex scenes that take up a small part of this forty-five-minute OAV about a brief love affair between a musician and a motorcyclist. And, more importantly, Etude represents a third style of H-storytelling: the sentimental. While Western pornography is usually “down and dirty,” some hentai are highly sentimental, even romantic. Some manga rapes have stopped dead in their tracks because the rapist has been moved by the victim’s tears. The most famous hentai anime OAV series of them all gained a significant fan following precisely because of its sentimental storytelling.

  Cream Lemon—The Ami Nonomura Story

  In 1984 the Fairy Dust and Soeishinsha companies began a series of sexually oriented OAVs that still resonate in the Japanese video market. The name Cream Lemon became synonymous with sexual matters handled with taste and talent.16 The identification was so complete that, just as Jell-O and Xerox became generic nouns for an entire class of products, sexually oriented fan-fiction is now called “lemon.” The first Cream Lemon releases told the tale of Ami Nonomura, and are regarded as classics of their kind. The following may read more like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel than a letter to Penthouse Forum, but it demonstrates how sexual storytelling can avoid redundancy and provide the character development valued by the anime audience.17 In the first installment of the series, “Be My Baby,” Ami Nonomura lives with her mother and older brother, Hiroshi. When Hiroshi and Ami were younger, they played “doctor.” Hiroshi is still attracted to his sister, and Ami also finds herself drawn to her brother, now that she too is older. In fact, she begins to have sexual fantasies about him, though she could never let anyone know this, incest being taboo. Nevertheless, her attraction for him grows so strong that, while their mother is gone one day, they wind up making love. Unfortunately, mother comes home early and knocks on Ami’s bedroom door at the worst possible moment.

  In “Ami Again!” Hiroshi has been forbidden by their mother from ever seeing Ami again. Ami’s friends Satomi and Kyoko take her to a disco to cheer her up. She has too much to drink and winds up dancing with the local “wolf,” the rich and good-looking Kono. He takes Ami home and makes love to her. However, she cries out “Brother! I love you!” during the act, mistaking him for Hiroshi in her drunken state.

  Ami doesn’t remember any of this the next day. Kono picks her up as she’s walking home from school and essentially blackmails her into going to a “love hotel” with him. (Kono’s ego can’t let him believe that Ami would prefer her brother, at least not when she is sober.) After they finish their tryst, Kono compares himself to her brother. She gets upset, slaps him and walks out. She tries to get home through the falling snow, but collapses in a phone booth in despair. Satomi and Kyoko comfort her, and tell her at least her first time was with her brother, whom she loves. The second episode ends with Ami walking alone to school. She meets a puppy on the way; the puppy licks Ami’s hand, making her feel less alone.

  In the third installment Ami has tried to forget her brother, but she just can’t. Everything changes when the phone rings. Hiroshi asks to meet her at a coffee shop. Ami is nearly breathless with excitement, but Hiroshi tells her that they cannot see each other, ever again, then runs away without an explanation.

  Ami goes to see Kono. She doesn’t like him, but it doesn’t matter anymore. He welcomes her, of course, and makes love to her in the bath. But Ami still can’t forget how she feels about Hiroshi.

  A sleazy manager/photographer starts taking pictures of Ami waiting for her train, then takes her to a bar and explains how big a star she could become. (Kono happens to be at the bar and witnesses what’s happening.) Ami becomes quite good at modeling and works very hard to learn how to dance and sing. The recording session goes well, and Ami is thrilled when her manager hands her a cassette of the session while driving her home in his car. Unfortunately, the manager takes her to a love hotel, rather than taking her home. When he tries to kiss her, she runs down the hall to the exit, out the doorway into the rain. There, in his sports car waiting at the curb, is Kono. He takes her back to his place, and tries to kiss her. Ami tries to slap him, just as she had done before, but this time he catches her hand . . . The next morning, he lets her out on the roadside, and drives off into the rising sun.18

  The final Ami OAV, Tabidachi—Ami Shusho (Departure—Ami Final Chapter) begins with Ami as a singer and model. Kyoko and Satomi want to take Ami to Hokkaido for her seventeenth birthday.

  Kono finds himself increasingly drawn to Ami, despite the seemingly endless stream of girls who clamor for his attention. Ami is the only girl he knows who doesn’t want to be with him. He actually starts to care for her.

  Ami is back home watching her video on TV. The girl on stage performing seems like someone else. Ami decides to quit. Her new manager encourages her to take some time off to think it over more carefully. Ami has also decided to quit seeing Kono. She knows that he only wants her for her body. She goes to him to tell him her decision, and he almost convinces her that he really does love her. However, another girl shows up, and Kono tells her that Ami’s just a flower delivery girl. Ami runs out of the room, crying.

  The next day, Ami finds a letter in the mailbox from her father in London, addressed only to her mother. Her mother isn’t home and, after staring at the letter, Ami opens it. Her father is suggesting that he and her moth
er get divorced. He’s suggesting that he take Ami, and that her mother take Hiroshi, just like before they were married! In a very convenient twist of fate, her “parents” were both single parents when they married; she and Hiroshi do not share a blood relationship at all, so it’s no longer a question of incest.

  The next morning Ami asks her mother (to whom she is also no longer related by blood, thus putting the animosity between them into a new context) if she could talk to her. Her mother refuses. Ami takes a cab to the station so that she won’t be late meeting Kyoko and Satomi. Halfway there, though, she suddenly comes to a decision: she tells the driver that she’s changed her mind, and would like to go to the airport. She buys a ticket to London with her mother’s credit card, and she flies off to meet Hiroshi. . . .

  The very first sex act in this series—Ami and her brother playing “doctor”—is discomfiting to watch, coming dangerously close to child pornography. Yet it sets up the rest of the series, establishing the relationship between Ami and Hiroshi. They apparently remain devoted to each other as they get older. We don’t know if Hiroshi behaved himself when he was away, but Ami fights off the advances of her manager and tries to fight off Kono when her mind isn’t clouded by either alcohol or despair.

  More important than what happens to Ami sexually is the fact that nothing happens to change our opinion of her. Even when she does things that would be considered dubious at best, such as going out drinking at age sixteen or sleeping with Kono to bolster her self-worth, she’s never shown as anything but a nice girl caught in a rotten situation. We want her life to get better, even if it means getting together with her stepbrother in a sort-of incestuous relationship.

  There are many sort-of relationships in anime that pose problems for some Western readers. The next chapter looks at one of the more problematic: the sort-of gay relationship.

  1. Mitsuhiko Yoshida, “Hajimete no Homonsha,” in Manga, Comic Strip Books from Japan, ed. Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Alfred Birnbaum (London: Saunders & Williams, 1991), 35-43.

  2. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 109.

  3. Here’s another case in which the East and the West don’t quite meet. In the first scene of Mamoru Oshii’s stunning feature Ghost in the Shell, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow, we overhear audio traffic being monitored in the electronically enhanced brain of Major Motoko Kusanagi, a secret government agent. At one point an assistant comments on the amount of static in the signal. In the English dub she blames “a loose wire.” In the original manga and anime, however, the Major says that she’s having her period. The change in the English version is completely pointless. The distributors who dubbed the sword-and-sorcery comedy Slayers into English didn’t feel that they had to change references to “that time of the month” when teenage terror Lina Inverse suddenly loses her magical powers.

  4. Despite the graphic subject matter, this particular Hokusai print was shown on cable television, on the series Mad Men. The print was mounted sideways on a wall but was recognizable to those familiar with it.

  5. According to the Chinese calendar, the lunar new year begins sometime between January 21 and February 21, with the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius. The ninth month would be roughly the month of October.

  6. Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 221–23.

  7. Do not steal, do not kill, do not lie, do not drink to excess, do not live an unchaste life.

  8. Uji is an old resort city between the two ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara.

  9. Tyler, Japanese Tales, 220–21.

  10. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 145.

  11. Quoted in Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 365.

  12. First came the thirteen OAV episodes in 1990 that inspired these parodies; then, in 1998, came the twenty-six-week series called Record of Lodoss War: Legend of the Heroic Knight.

  13. This tolerance is the sort of concept that doesn’t travel well across the Pacific and may be one of the hardest challenges to the moral order of a gaijin. I once asked a Japanese college student about the ronin hero of Joji Akiyama’s long-running manga, Haguregumo (Floating Clouds). This man, living near the end of the Tokugawa period, was married, with children, but persisted in chasing almost any female he saw. The student told me that he was still a good husband because afterward, he always came home to the family. Bornoff notes that “a comparatively marked degree of indifference to flings with prostitutes remains (to this day); they are too fleeting to endanger a relationship” (Bornoff, Pink Samurai, 461).

  14. The subgenre of sex in pop culture has its own sub-subgenre: sadomasochism and bondage. I consider bondage anime to be an offshoot of the Gothic Horror genre, since many of the trappings overlap (dungeon settings, torture devices, imprisonment, and the infliction of pain). Even the burning of a woman with hot wax from a melting candle—a technique seen a lot in such works in Japan—has a certain Gothic flavor to it.

  15. Helen McCarthy, The Anime Movie Guide (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1996),- 264.

  16. In fact, some of the major names in anime—both artists and voice actors—have dabbledin hentai at one time or another in their careers (naturally it seldom if ever shows up on their resumes). One artist who has crossed over is Hiroyuki Utatane. The creator of the Count Down manga and anime, featuring the ravenous transsexual Jun Nakamura, recently found mainstream success with the manga Seraphic Feather.

  17. The following synopsis is a condensed version of the Ami Nonomura Shrine webpage by Dave Endresak, currently off the web.

  18. The “music video special” titled Ami Image: White Shadow shows what happens after Ami is discovered and made into an idol. The special is actually a combination of clips from the first three parts of the story plus original animation, set to music from the series, as well as new vocals for the image video.

  “A Very Pure Thing”: Gay and Pseudo-Gay Themes in Anime

  Homosexuality is shown more prominently in Japanese pop culture than in the West. Yet sometimes a relationship that seems gay really isn’t, and what may be accepted in some stories is subtly discouraged in others.

  In an early episode of the manga Ghost Sweeper Mikami by Takashi Shiina, Mikami’s lecherous assistant Yokoshima is sent back in time, encountering his voluptuous exorcist boss-lady when she was still a high-school student. When he sees another student, Chiho, fawning and falling all over Mikami, he accuses Chiho of being a lesbian. Chiho’s response is blunt: “Lesbian? How rude! The love that Mikami and I have is a very pure thing.”

  That is the point of departure—and point of confusion—for Western fans of Japanese pop culture. There is conduct and language in anime and manga that would seem homoerotic, even though its practitioners maintain that it is not.

  Western pop culture recognizes homosexuality through a set of stereotypes, most of them negative. Homosexual chracters are often portrayed as either “butch” or “flaming queens,” displaying exaggerated, parodied traits of the opposite sex. Another stereotype—that of the homosexual afraid to admit to his or her preference—is often characterized by an extreme timidity and indecisiveness in other aspects of daily life. Then there is the myth of the gay predator, based on the assumption that a “normal” person would have to be seduced or forced into homosexuality. Randy Shilts gives this particular stereotype the B-movie title it deserves: “Lesbian Vampires of Bavaria.”1 Even in more sympathetic portrayals, though, gay characters are often presented as just that: gay first, then characters.

  Japanese pop culture takes a very different approach. Often a character will be introduced, placed into the context of the story; and only later (if ever) will the sexuality of the character become an issue (for example, the character of Chihaya the observing angel in Earthian). Sometimes the character is played for laughs and sometimes for tragedy,
but seldom are characters condemned for their sexuality. In fact, sometimes characters are presented with only a vague suggestion of homosexuality, never made explicit. This is where Westerners tend to lose track.

  Sometimes characters act gay but aren’t. In many old legends, for example, Buddhist monks were described as using boy acolytes for sex, but that did not necessarily make the monks homosexuals; they simply slept with whatever partners were available. (In one folk tale we’ve already encountered, the monk finds his acolyte is actually a girl dressed as a boy. He had approached the acolyte assuming he would be having sex with a boy, discovered the truth, and proceeded to get the acolyte pregnant.)2 Of course, if characters are unabashedly gay, the reader or viewer knows it, whether the comics and videos have hard or soft cores. Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and other well-known writers have contributed to the use of gay themes in higher-brow Japanese literature, but it’s the ambiguous relationships in Japan’s pop culture that bear observation here.

  Gay or Not? Not (Probably)

  There are three such relationships in Sailor Moon alone. Two of Queen Beryl’s minions, Zoicite and Kunzite, are males whom Western cartoon dubbers at the DIC Studio felt obliged to turn into a male and a female. Zoicite is, admittedly, a very effeminate-looking male, of the type known as bishonen (beautiful boy).3 Two of the Outer Senshi, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, have an odd relationship: Uranus is decidedly “butch,” affecting short hair and slacks (when not fighting evil in a short skirt and middy blouse) and mistaken for a male on several occasions, while Neptune is undeniably feminine. They are, if not a couple, certainly partners. And then there is the appearance late in the story of the pop group the Three Lites, a male trio who transform into a trio of female superheroes (of course their male selves were already fairly androgynous).4 In Shiriusu no Densetsu (The Legend of Sirius, a 1981 feature film released in English as The Sea Prince and the Fire Child), the princess of the Fire Kingdom, Malta, has a friend named Piyale who seems unusually friendly, spending practically all her time rubbing against Malta like a cat starved for affection. At first angered and upset by Malta’s falling in love with Prince Sirius of the Water Kingdom (after trying to kill him, we see Piyale go off alone to cry her eyes out), Piyale later tries to protect Malta at the cost of her own life.