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HE LOVES HIM, SHE LOVES THEM ; JAPANESE COMICS ABOUT GAY MEN ARE INCREASINGLY POPULAR AMONG WOMEN;
High school student Toru loves fellow classmate Ryoji but thinks Ryoji reciprocates the attraction only for the sex. To discover Ryoji's true feelings, Toru turns to another student, Kashiwazaki, who agrees to engage in a pretend affair. It works. Ryoji becomes extremely jealous and wants Toru back. Only trouble is, Kashiwazaki loves Toru too.
The love triangle laid out in the Japanese comic "Desire" contains all the elements of a typical romance. The only difference? Ryoji, Toru, and Kashiwazaki are males. Love stories like this one form the core of the burgeoning manga genre that fans alternately call boys' love or yaoi (pronounced "ya-oy").
Now fans can find yaoi at their local bookstores or on Amazon.com, where reviews submitted by readers in Toronto, Moscow, and Worcester for "Desire," one of Amazon's most popular yaoi comics, show how widely the audience stretches beyond Japan. The comic style is so popular that Anime Boston, the annual convention for those who love Japanese animation, has offered two yaoi discussion panels since the event began two years ago. This year, the convention's all-ages yaoi panel takes place Saturday afternoon; the one for the over-18 crowd occurs Friday evening. Next month Japan Society in New York City will host a talk about this subculture with Akiko Mizoguchi, whose book on yaoi culture will be published in Japan later this year, and Kazuma Kodaka, the author of the celebrated yaoi series "Kizuna Bonds of Love."
Written by women for women readers, yaoi's often angst-ridden content ranges from the chaste to the sexually explicit. The lovers featured in the comics fall into two categories: "seme" the yaoi term for the aggressive or "masculine" half of the relationship or "uke," the word used to describe the pursued or "feminine" person. The genre's roots in Japan go back to the 1960s, but its popularity exploded beginning in the 1980s, Mizoguchi said. These days, Japanese publishers release about 90 new boys' love titles each month.
America's output is significantly less, which left early yaoi converts scouring the Internet or other sources for these works. By the early 2000s, growing demand (and a desire to appeal to the flourishing female manga readership) persuaded a few American manga publishers to begin tentatively releasing translations of yaoi.
Last year, Central Park Media entered the fray by launching its "Be Beautiful" line of sexually explicit work and Digital Manga Publishing (DMP) began regularly publishing tamer fare.
"We just knew it was one of those things that people really were requesting," says Isaac Lew, director of sales and new business development at DMP in Los Angeles. "We just knew it was one of those things that had been untapped."
What's the allure of the genre? Ask Cynthia Coons, 26, of Coventry, R.I., a yaoi fan since the late 1990s and the organizer of the Anime Boston 18-plus yaoi panel, and she replies, "I could get into a bunch of psychobabble, but it really just turns me on. . . . It's not everybody's thing but, surprisingly, more women than you would think really find it attractive."
"What woman wouldn't want to see a half-naked guy, huh?" asks Wareham resident Dawn Souza, 27. "For some reason in Japan, it's very acceptable."
But don't mistake the homosexual relationships portrayed in the yaoi genre for accurate depictions of homosexual life.
"It's a fantasy," says April Gutierrez, of Yaoi-Con, an annual West Coast convention for yaoi fans, whose attendance has risen from 500 to 1,000 since it began five years ago. "It's usually one step removed from reality. For starters, the characters take very little slack for their orientation. It just usually doesn't come up. On the whole, no one [is] in fear of losing their jobs or [getting] in trouble with friends and family. People take [their homosexuality] in stride, which is obviously not what it's like in the real world."
"If you talk to a boy about it," says Lisa Wu, 22, a senior at MIT who is organizing the all-ages Anime Boston yaoi panel, "they're like `Eewww, that's so disgusting.' Because they're straight guys, they feel that their masculinity is threatened by homosexuality. . . . A lot of the girls say, `Ah, this is really interesting.' They're at least willing to acknowledge that this is something they might possibly look into."
In the past, fans worked hard to find yaoi. Gutierrez talks of waiting for friends who visited Japan to come back with new comics. People would photocopy the manga, white-out the Japanese text, and translate it into English. A few years ago, "scanlations" uploaded scans of translated manga began appearing on the Web. Because of the limited choices in translated yaoi, Coons still prefers to order original comics such as "B-Boy Gold" from Japan, paying an extra $15 for shipping. She downloads translations and then reads both translation and purchased comic together.
Others troll the web searching for "doujinshi," sites where fans write stories about their favorite male characters in Japanese comics in sexual or other situations. MIT student Wu has her own site.
But Wu thinks it's important for this growing readership to also recognize the limits of yaoi's unconventionality. She says it "tends to . . . reinforce the power of the male over a smaller, weaker, more feminine figure. Says Wu, "I don't like the idea that yaoi, which is idealistically supposed to be a relationship between two men . . . reflect[s] a heterosexual hierarchy."
SIDEBAR:Yaoi basics
Yaoi fans speak in terms not even familiar to people within the manga universe. Here's a list of some of the words you need to know to understand the subculture.
Boys' Love: Known casually as "BL," this term in Japan refers to any work marketed to women that shows two men in a relationship.
Doujinshi: (pronounced dough-gin-she): Short stories or manga created by fans using characters from popular manga.
Yaoi: In Japan, yaoi originally referred to plotless doujinshi that put manga characters in sexual situations for no apparent reason. It has come to refer to sexually explicit scenes in boys'love manga or manga with explicit content. Calling BL manga "yaoi" could be considered offensive in Japan. But American manga publishers have informally decided to name any comic targeted to women that features homosexual couples "yaoi," says Isaac Lew of Digital Manga Publishing. The work includes not only comics, but novels, anime, video games, and doujinshi.
Scanlations: A melding of the words "scan" and "translation," these are uploaded translations of Japanese manga that are found on the Internet.
Seme (pronounced seh-may): From the Japanese verb "semeru," meaning to attack. The word describes the "masculine" person in a yaoi relationship.
Uke (pronounced oo-kay): From the Japanese verb "ukeru," meaning to receive. The word describes the "feminine" half of a yaoi couple.
VANESSA E. JONES |
. Beside it's manga in a newspaper, and the writer sure did her research.
