Anime Explosion!

by Drazen, Patrick

  Rose of Versailles

  It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the manga Rose of Versailles by Ryoko Ikeda. Since its publication in 1972 as a serialized story in Margaret magazine it has enjoyed subsequent life as an animated series, in live film versions, and—of course—Takarazuka Opera productions. This descendant of Dr. Tezuka’s Princess Knight has deeply influenced the current generation of anime and manga artists, most obviously in stories of female swashbucklers, including The Sword of Paros and Utena (both discussed in detail elsewhere in this book).

  Unlike its successors, though, Rose of Versailles is based on (mostly) real people, although Ikeda does some creative things with them. The series is mostly about Marie Antoinette (1755–93), starting back in her girlhood days, when she was sister of Austrian Archduke Joseph. (If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, you may recall Joseph—played by Jeffrey Jones as a savvy twit—saying that his sister was worried about her own people. With good reason.) She may end up married to France’s Louis XVI, but in the manga she’s also close to Swedish diplomat Axel von Fersen (1755–1810) and to the dashing swords(wo)man Oscar de Jarjayes. (There really was a General de Jarjayes, whose wife was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, but he did not have a cross-dressing daughter.)

  In any case, Oscar’s swordsmanship places her in the category of beautiful-but-doomed warriors exemplified by Yoshitsune.

  Beyond that, Oscar is another protagonist who constantly has to choose between duty and desire (giri/ninjo), in her case times two. Her mother was a courtier, her father an aristocrat, and thus her loyalties clearly lie with the monarchy. Yet, in the manga, Oscar cannot ignore the misery of the common people. Nor can she ignore her own gender. Like any proper yasashii heroine, she longs for the love that her masquerade prevents (mostly). This combination of exotic history, complex characters, and thwarted passions helped makethe manga a major success.

  Rose of Versailles keeps reappearing in some surprising disguises in contemporary anime. The cast of Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2 includes Azusa, an obnoxious little rich girl who thinks that all she has to do is name something—anything—and it’s hers. When she takes a liking to Ranma’s father, Genma (in panda mode), she takes him home, calls him Oscar, and dresses him up as Oscar de Jarjayes. And there’s a hilarious sequence in the first season of Pokémon in which Team Rocket transform into Oscar and Marie Antoinette. (Of course, since Oscar is a girl who is pretending to be a boy, Musashi/Jessie puts on Oscar’s uniform, while her male companion has to wear the gown. . . .)

  To Ian Buruma, this is precisely the point. He quotes Hagakure, an eighteenth-century text on samurai ethics, saying that “love attains its highest and noblest form when one carries its secret into the grave.” Failing that, the idealized relationship presents two males finding happiness together; then, rather than growing old or confronting social disapproval, they look to death for a final fulfillment.14 This makes the fans of shonen ai sound at best like a bunch of morbid Gothics. However, the point is not to dwell on the relationship as doomed, but to celebrate it for what it is. Of the few commentators who have examined shonen ai, Sandra Buckley may have come closest to the mark. Buckley says that the focus of these manga and anime is “not the transformation or naturalization of difference but the valorization of the imagined potentialities of alternative differentiations.”15 The key words here are “imagined potentialities.” Shonen ai comics and animation build very elaborate structures of romance between their male protagonists that have hardly any resemblance to real life. These potential structures may exist only in the universe of the characters, but they serve the need of illustrating an ideal of emotion.

  Physically, bishonen—the “beautiful boys” of Japanese pop culture—may seem even more identical and interchangeable than their bishojo (beautiful girl) counterparts. For years, the pattern was set by Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to Ki no Uta (Song of Wind and Trees), in which the nineteenth-century French boarding-school boys were sometimes more effeminate-looking than the girls. Since then, however, the bishonen has taken on a more masculine look. The sleepy eyes, the tousled hair, the angular cut to the face: the image is as consistent and stylized as Kabuki makeup.16 Though there is theatrical convention in shonen ai comics and animation, there’s also history. Regardless of their personalities, nationalities, or the era in which their stories are set, these bishonen characters often embodysome of the qualities of two historical figures. Understanding the place of these figures in Japanese history will take us a long way toward understanding why Japanese pop culture makes room for homoeroticism, especially as a diversion for teenaged girls.

  Two Legendary Beautiful Boys

  First is Yoshitsune, boy wonder of the twelfth-century Minamoto clan. He was younger brother to Yoritomo; they and a third brother (Yoritomo was the oldest, age twelve at the time, while Yoshitsune was a newborn) were almost executed in 1159 when their father Yoshitomo was involved in an abortive coup attempt against the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa (who was, despite his nominal retirement, de facto ruler of Japan). The three boys—Yoshitomo’s sons by a concubine—were spared on the recommendation of a powerful courtier of the Taira clan named Kiyomori. There was a condition, of course; the boys’ mother had to become Kiyomori’s mistress. The boys were exiled rather than killed.

  Time passed; Kiyomori’s influence grew until he was the major power behind Go-Shirakawa. But he hadn’t reckoned on the three exiled brothers. By 1180, Yoritomo had married Masako of the Hojo clan; this gave him access to the manpower he needed to rebel against Kiyomori. Some of the Minamoto’s greatest successes in battle, however, were credited to Yoshitsune, who was already commanding an army at the age of twenty-four. Kiyomori died in 1181, but it took about five years for Yoritomo to seize and consolidate power. One way he consolidated that power was to have his brother Yoshitsune executed in 1189. Even though he was only thirty, and Yoritomo’s own brother, his military genius was already legendary, and Yoritomo perceived that as a potential threat.17 So much for the historical Yoshitsune. Rather like Robin Hood, legend quickly grew around the facts, and the distinction between the two started to blur. In spite of being, according to one account, a “small, pale youth with crooked teeth and bulging eyes,” the Yoshitsune of legend became a delicate youth whose effeminate exterior hid a prodigious swordfighter. Kabuki plays about Yoshitsune specified that he be played by an onnagata—a specialist in playing females in the all-male Kabuki world.18 The result is a real-life inversion of the gender confusion of the movie Victor Victoria: a man playing a woman playing a man. It’s also a complement to the girls-playing-boys of the Takarazuka operas.

  Another bishonen warrior—this time a Christian—showed up in the early Tokugawa period. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 started as a tax revolt against Matsukura, the daimyo (feudal lord) of Shimabara, who was installed in 1633 and proceeded to levy extreme taxes—as high as eighty percent of the harvest—and torturing those who could not pay by wrapping them in straw and setting the straw on fire. Shimabara, on the western coast of Kyushu, was one of the few Japanese regions where Christianity gained a strong foothold in the sixteenth century, and even though by the time of the uprising Christianity was officially banned by the Tokugawa shogunate, some adherents decided to keep the faith while also keeping a low profile.

  The initial target of the revolt was the daimyo of Shimabara, but raiding parties soon started moving from village to village in western Kyushu, shouting the names of Jesus, Mary, and Santiago during their raids. When the movement spread to the nearby island of Amakusa, the Christian rebels chose as their leader a sixteen-year-old boy named Shiro Amakusa.19 He could offer the rebels little practical military advice, but this was supplied by a number of ronin who joined the rebellion. His role was that of the charismatic leader. Eventually, the rebels were driven off the island of Amakusa by the Tokugawa forces and retreated to Shimabara. The rebel force, numbering about thirty-seven thousand, including women and children, were besieged in a cas
tle for three months. Before the rebels surrendered and were massacred, thirteen thousand of the hundred thousand warriors of the shogunate had died.20 Here again we have a good-looking young boy as a military leader: if you believe the legends, a gender-bender Joan of Arc, recognized for his piety. Unlike Yoshitsune, Shiro Amakusa was purely a figurehead, relying on sympathetic ronin for the real brains and muscle. However, in the end he had as much chance resisting the Tokugawa as Yoshitsune had of resisting his brother. Just as Yoshitsune killed his wife and child before killing himself, Shiro Amakusa did not survive the siege.

  I suggest that this history and its subsequent romanticization, rather than the historicity of medieval samurai having male lovers, underlies shonen ai stories in which the lovers are doomed. If gay love were plausible to its audience, it would lose much of its appeal. Remember that we’re dealing with “imagined potentialities.” The tendency of these loves to be doomed to failure, despite their potential for flowering beauty, is precisely what takes them out of the realm of reality and into that of romance and aesthetics. As the kamikaze pilot was glorified for knowingly flying to his death, the doomed boys of shonen ai become beautiful because of their doom.

  Unfortunately, most Japanese pop culture in this area is still commercially unavailable in the West. Whether it’s because of moral objection to the contents or uncertainty as to how to go about marketing this stuff, true Japanese boy-love material—original stories told with original characters—is hard to come by.21

  The Internet, however, is another story. Because websites are often produced by fans sharing a favorite work rather than commercial interests trying to sell a product, sites featuring true shonen ai can be found, although they’re in the minority. What we tend to find instead is a subset of the genre: fan art and fan fiction putting anime and manga characters in gay relationships (some hardcore, some more romantic) whether the original work warranted it or not. The five pilots of the TV series called Gundam Wing (1995) have female counterparts, yet a lot of fan sites are produced as if these girls never existed. In the case of Shinji’s encounter with Kaoru in Evangelion, there has been a lot of controversy as to whether homosexuality was involved or not, and the yaoi sites explore this one facet of the story in depth. (As will be seen in the chapter discussing that series, I believe that this was another pseudo-gay relationship.)

  Gateways to Gayness

  When the first edition of this book appeared, there was very little translated yaoi/yuri available in the West, and the few examples included were hardcore, thus limiting their availability. Yet, soon after, some anime appeared in both genres that served as gateways to the West. They found a broader than expected fan base, and made same-sex romances more acceptable to more fans. Interestingly, the two titles couldn’t be less alike: one was based on a manga, the other on a series of novels; one is set in the limited and exotic environment of a Catholic girls’ school, the other in the crazed and noisy world of rock music; one anime was originally broadcast on the TV Tokyo network, the other on the WOWOW cable channel. The only thing they have in common is that both were created by and for Japanese women.

  Boy Love: Gravitation

  Maki Murakami’s manga Gravitation started life as Help!, a dojinshi comic that laid the groundwork for what was to come. Gravitation was originally serialized from 1996 to 2002 in Genzo magazine, and the thirteen-episode anime series (along with two OAVs) appeared between 1999 and 2001.

  The story of Gravitation uses two traditional manga devices (a student [a] seeking advice from an older superior, with [b] the relationship escalating to First Love) and plays both out (with a large dose of humor) in the world of rock music. High school student Shuichi Shindo has started a band, Bad Luck. They haven’t broken through yet, however, and Shuichi thinks it’s because his songs need to be better. As luck or destiny would have it, Shuichi is working on a new song when the wind blows the paper into the park. When he catches up, he finds an older man reading the lyrics: he turns out to be Eiri Yuki, a successful writer of romance novels. He returns the song to Shuichi, but not before tearing the song to shreds. This classic “cute meet” is, of course, the beginning of a beautiful friendship; actually more Boy Crush than Boy Love.

  Eiri has his own problems; otherwise, his relationship with Shuichi would be one-sided and the plot couldn’t progress. Eiri may know how to grab a woman reader’s heartstrings, but Eiri in life is nothing like his novelist persona. Cold, bitter, and cynical, Yuki, meaning “snow,” is an apt pen name. Predictably, the very different personality of Shuichi, with his puppy-like affection, helps Eiri cope with the traumatic events in his past that have stifled his heart.

  Thematically predictable, perhaps, but stylistically the manga itself isn’t a conventional romance, and neither is the anime. In the first episode, when Shuichi is late to a band meeting in a coffee shop, at one point he suddenly morphs into a 500-year-old man—a joke comparing him to Urashima the fisherman (see the chapter on Windaria). At first hating Eiri for disrespecting his songs, Shuichi almost literally stumbles into love with his mentor. The story has Shuichi declaring his love for Eiri in loud, and occasionally bizarre, ways; when Eiri goes to New York, for example, Shuichi decides that the cheapest way to follow him is to get in a box and mail himself to America.

  The main point about this story is its return to same-sex love as “a very pure thing,” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. At one point, Eiri talks to Shuichi about his impulsive nature, telling him it is admirable that “you can fall in love with somebody and not worry about sexuality.”22 If Shuichi were gay, Eiri is saying, he would have first run Eiri through a “male/female” filter to see if Eiri was his “type.” In this case, the fact that they’re both males is irrelevant, or at least unimportant.

  Even after the manga series was finished, Murakami continued creating episodes that appeared online and were published in Genzo, under the name Gravitation EX. She also produced two dojinshi series: Remix (under the corporate name Crocodile Ave.) and MegaMix. These latter series are much more sexually explicit than the original.

  Yuri: Maria-sama ga Miteru

  When a short story appeared in a 1997 issue of Cobalt, a magazine aimed at a women audience, there was no indication that it would spawn a pop culture franchise that would last for decades and reach around the world. Oyuki Konno had written the first part of the series that would come to be known as Maria-sama ga Miteru (Maria Watches Over Us). The thirty-fifth novel in the series had appeared by the end of 2008, as did the most recent in a series of drama disks, and a live action film of the story was released in 2010.

  Maria Watches Over Us started as pure prose with illustration by Reine Hibiki; the first manga, with art by Satoru Nagasawa, didn’t appear until 2002. Between 2004 and 2009 four seasons of anime were also produced, as well as audio dramas on CD.

  If Gravitation was a rowdy blast of electric guitars, Maria Watches Over Us is a quiet, contemplative walk in a garden. Yet, perhaps because of the secluded atmosphere of the Lillian Girls’ Academy, a Catholic school in Tokyo in a nation where maybe one percent of the population is Christian, this location quietly gives rise to intense emotion. This is not merely a hothouse atmosphere as with Otori Academy (see the chapter on Revolutionary Girl Utena), but a world about which almost nothing is known and where, therefore, “anything goes” (almost) in literary terms.

  There’s one other element to this story, since even a locale about which the reader knows nothing needs some sense of order. For this, Konno created the sœur system. Named for the French word for “sister,” the conventions of the system would seem familiar to an audience accus. tomed to thinking of schoolmates as either sempai (senior class members) or kohai (junior class members). Invented by Konno for her books, the sœur system lets a second- or third-year student choose a kohai as a “sister.” The relationship is even symbolized by a piece of jewelry; in this case, a rosary. Since this is a shojo story, it’s also heavy with flower imagery: the school’s student
council is called the Yamayurikai (Mountain Lily Group), the principal officers are named for three breeds of roses, and the kohai are referred to as “buds” during their first year. At that time the “bud” is expected to clean the Rose Mansion (where the council meets), prepare tea and snacks, and otherwise serve the older “sisters.” The story then develops along predictable lines: the sempai/kohai relationship changes to friendship, and—in the case of some couples—into something more than friendship.

  The roughly two-dozen principal characters—major and minor—in this series revolve around one student: Yumi Fukuzawa. New to the school, quiet and bashful, she crosses paths with a sempai, Sachiko Ogasawara. She’s an altogether different personality: elegant, reclusive, emotional yet tending to keep her emotions buried. Engaged to her cousin Suguru, who is gay, she is also upset that her father and grandfather, although married, keep mistresses on the side. The relationship between these two students is the core of the series. It’s a series with sufficient variety and potential for shifting emotions and alliances. Very few of the relationships are explicitly yuri, but the intensity of the affection, the “very pure thing” mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, is always there.

  There is also the likelihood for parody, including futanari dojinshi (in which one or both girls are hermaphrodites) with names like Rosa Gigantea Special Milk23 and Maria-sama ga P-wo Miteru (Maria Watches Over the Penis).

  Kannazuki no Miko

  The title of this 2004 manga, animated that same year by Rondo Robe Studio and whose two creators share the pen name Kaishaku, means “Miko of the Godless Month.” The tenth month of the lunar calendar (roughly October 20 to November 20) is the “godless” month, perhaps because the gods are believed to assemble during that month at the Izumo Shrine in Shimane Prefecture.

  The events of the anime series, shown in English under the title Destiny of the Shrine Maiden, are supposed to take place in Mahoroba, a mythicland of pastoral peace mentioned in the Kojiki. The two miko Himeko and Chikane, both born on October 1 and representing the Sun and the Moon, respectively, must do battle against the eight-headed Yamata no Orochi of folklore. Chikane, the miko of the Moon, also practices kyudo (Shinto archery).