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  This description makes the story sound like a straightforward mythology, but this is not the case. Mahoroba seems to be a mix of the old and the new: both miko are high school students, Himeko is a photographer, and the eight Yamata no Orochi are personified as, among other things, a pop idol, a manga artist, and a Buddhist nun.

  The story is unapologetically yuri: the two miko are very much in love with each other, yet must prove this love through self-sacrificial acts—a common motif in same-sex anime/manga. However, to reward their love, they are reborn and meet each other time and time again.

  The student of such pop culture would have to search diligently to find genuine shonen ai manga such as Ludwig II by Yo Higuri, Boys Next Door by Yuki Kaori, and Kori no Mamono no Monogatari (Legend of the Ice Demon) by Shiho Sugiura, or anime such as Zetsuai (Desperate Love) or its sequel, Bronze, both by Minami Ozaki. If this genre has a magnum opus, in a story with homosexuality as a major force, the winner would be Ai no Kusabi (Ties of Love), which was turned into a two-part OAV.24

  Ai no Kusabi

  Ai no Kusabi (1992) based on a novel by Reiko Yoshihara serialized in the magazine June, is set in a dystopian future that resembles not only the stratified society of Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis but also its many anime counterparts, including the feature films Grey and Apple-seed. The future city of Tanagara, capital of the planet Amoi, is run by a giant computer named Jupiter. Jupiter controls all aspects of life, but one wonders about its blueprint for an orderly society. For one thing, females make up only about fifteen percent of the population, mostly in the lower class. Sex has become procreation for the poor and recreation for the rich males, who don’t do anything themselves but watch handsome young males have sex with other males. Since the elite are sterile, heterosexuality for them would be pointless.

  One more interesting detail: one’s social status is determined not by skin color, but by hair color. Black hair is at the bottom of the ladder, and at the top are (no surprise, really) the Blondies. Ai no Kusabi is the story of Jason Mink, a Blondie who goes slumming for a sexual “pet” and sets the wheels of tragedy in motion.

  The anime version begins with Riki, whose black hair marks him as a member of the lowest class, looking to steal a car. He’s set upon by vigilantes, but rescued by Jason, who tells him he is to be Jason’s “pet.” The relationship is sealed when Jason puts a ”collar” around the base of Riki’s penis.

  The scene jumps three years ahead. Riki is still with Jason, although pets are usually discarded after one year. But Riki’s old life intrudes when Riki meets with Guy, his former lover and the leader of the Bisons motorcycle gang. The Bisons sneak into a pet auction but Riki tells them to leave when Jason appears. Killie, a young member of the Bisons, approaches Jason with a business proposition. Killie turns into a major drug runner, but sets up the other Bisons to be arrested or shot. Riki is arrested as well, but is released because he’s listed as a pet.

  Jason has fallen in love with Riki. Guy, however, isn’t about to leave things as they are. He kidnaps Riki and removes the pet collar the only possible way: by castrating Riki. He then summons Jason to a deserted building. They fight, but Guy had wired the building with explosives and sets them off. Riki tries to rescue Jason and Guy from the fire caused by the explosion, but Jason’s legs get caught in an automatic door and are cut in half (a symbolic parallel to Riki’s castration). Jason is now doomed to die in the fire, so Riki goes back to him. They light up two “black moons” (poisoned cigarettes) and wait for the end. At the moment of Jason’s death, Jupiter the computer makes a sound: a moan that is almost human.

  Shojo Ai

  Anime and manga showing lesbian activity (referred to as yuri)25 are much more common than those showing shonen ai, if only because they are often done to pander to male tastes.

  One example is the 1990 historical anime released in English as Sword for Truth. In the middle of a story about a ronin rescuing a kidnapped princess, we see a totally unrelated lesbian sex scene. At least there’s a hint of context: the seduction is an attempt to recruit an assassin for an attack that comes later in this installment (apparently the first in an unfinished series). The lesbian sex also takes place under the influence of opium, which adds another layer of meaning to the act in a culture where recreational drug use is much more harshly denounced and penalized than in the U.S.

  Of course, nobody expects a context or a plot in H-anime, but sometimes one appears anyway. The Angel of Darkness series presents lesbians as both heroes and villains, and the larger story, and not just the fact of their sexuality, determines where the audience’s sympathies lie. In the first installment, the dark secret under the chapel is discovered by a pair of lesbian students, one of whom is possessed by the spirits of the forest to combat what they find. The third installment is less a cautionary tale against violating traditional gender roles than a Frankenstein-style warning “not to tamper in God’s domain” (a message that to an extent underlies the entire series). A coed at another academy, scorned and slighted by her classmates, abandons any attempts to befriend them and joins forces with the underground evil to torture and torment them; because this is an H-movie, the torture is usually sexual in nature. She even tries to control the evil herself, treating the monster as a servant carrying out her personal vendetta, but ultimately she runs up against the limit of her power and suffers the consequences. She isn’t punished for being a lesbian, but for being brutal.

  A true lesbian romance—with love underlying the activity—is much harder to come by, because it threatens both female and male traditional gender roles. The threat to the female role is in the socially transgressive nature of the relationship; the threat to the male is that the male gets marginalized for a change. No matter how many dragons he slays, he cannot claim the princess.

  St. Lobelia

  First of all, there was no Saint Lobelia; lobelia is an herb-bearing plant, with some 400 species. However, three other flowers are involved with three students at St. Lobelia’s Academy, a girls’ school that is sort of a competitor with the coed Ouran High School.

  Several anime set in schools (even coed schools) have lesbian romances among the student body. The Lilian Girls Academy in Maria Watches Over Us is a clear example, as is Otori Academy in Revolutionary Girl Utena. St. Lobelia, however, is yuri run comically amok.

  One major focus of life at that school is The Zuka Club. The name derives from the all-girl Takarazuka theater troupe, and, as in the real theater company, elaborate romantic musicals are staged, with girls dressed as boys to take all of the parts. The tension of two girls (one in male disguise) acting out a love scene provides at least a shadow of the forbidden relationship parodied by the Hitachiin twins.

  The president of the Zuka Club is Benio Amakusa, “The Lady of the Red Rose.” She has such a fan following at St. Lobelia’s that the Guardian Club was instituted for her protection. Like most things in the Ouran universe, the level of fan adulation is over the top, with club members performing crowd control just so Benio can get to her classes. She’s tall and thin, with short hair; she resembles a somewhat older Haruhi. And, despite her rose nickname, her scenes are always highlighted by lilies.

  When the trio from St. Lobelia—Benio, Chizuru Maihara, and Hinako Tsuwabuki—try to convince Haruhi to switch schools, Tamaki convinces the rest of the Host Club to fight to keep her, dressing them all in drag—formal ball gowns, elaborate wigs, and overdone makeup. Haruhi decides to stay; she laughs so hard at the Host Club maniacs that they all know she isn’t going anywhere.

  The Sword of Paros

  One interesting yuri treatment is the 1986 manga Paros no Ken (The Sword of Paros). This manga, with artwork by Yumiko Igarashi and a story by Kaoru Kurimoto, is one of the few to take the precedent of Dr. Tezuka’s Princess Knight to its logical conclusion, and yet is structured so as to preserve the status quo while still presenting a “happily ever after” ending.

  Paros, a vaguely European principality much lik
e Silverland, is ruled by the blond and beautiful princess Erminia, who dresses in male attire and can handle a sword as well as, if not better than, any knight in the kingdom.

  One day while riding, accompanied by Yurius, a skilled swordsman and Erminia’s faithful friend and bodyguard, Erminia saves a peasant girl named Fiona from a wild horse. It is love at first sight for Erminia.

  It could be the beginning of a romance for the two girls, yet Erminia is the king’s only child and thus heir to the throne of Paros, and as such her duty is to provide the kingdom with an heir to follow her. Her father has arranged a marriage but Erminia refuses to bow to his demands. As an alternative, Erminia is allowed to participate in a tournament; she will marry any swordsman who defeats her. Her heart, however, belongs to the peasant girl Fiona. In the tournament that is to decide her future, Erminia has to face a mysterious masked knight. The duel is fierce and at one point the masked knight manages to disarm the princess. A minister named Alfonso throws another sword to Erminia. It happens to be the mythical Sword of Paros. Just as Erminia is about to rally against her opponent, the King clutches his chest and dies. Alfonso stops the duel and announces that this is an omen that Erminia isn’t fit to inherit the throne since her father died the very moment she raised the Sword of Paros. However, the truth is that Alfonso poisoned the king’s wine. Alfonso announces that the duel is over and the mysterious knight has won by default: Erminia is to marry him. At that moment soldiers from the neighboring kingdom of Kauros invade the castle and take over control under orders of the mysterious knight (who is actually the prince of Kauros).

  Erminia, meanwhile, is a prisoner in her own castle. One night the prince of Kauros attempts to rape her but she manages to hold him at bay. The prince reminds her that soon they will be married and she will have no choice.

  Fiona cuts her hair and gets work as the princess’s personal page. The two are happy to see each other once more but time is running out. Fiona explains that the people are planning an uprising against the invaders, and in order to give Erminia the chance to lead it she trades place with her (using a blond wig). Erminia leaves, promising to come back for her the day of the scheduled wedding.

  On the day of the wedding, Erminia, Yurius, and their followers ambush the carriage carrying Fiona (disguised as Erminia) on her way to the chapel. Yurius bids Erminia goodbye and Erminia heads off with Fiona on horseback. The last scene shows the two riding off into the sunset. . . .

  I sometimes wonder if, after traveling the world, Erminia and Fiona settled down in a chateau in the south of France next to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. This is not to say that this manga set out to be a gender-bender allegory on the star-crossed romance of England’s Edward VIII, but the results were the same. Under the circumstances, Erminia could never have continued to hold power in Paros. Even if the people were open-minded enough to overlook the class difference in their queen having a commoner consort (of whatever gender), there remained one minorproblem: neither Erminia nor her consort could ever produce a legal successor to the throne.

  Shojo Love: Doomed to Conformity

  This message that Sword of Paros communicates to an audience of Japanese adolescent girls is far from revolutionary. It is a traditional reminder that their destiny is tied to their biology. Romance may be all well and good, but you have to pay the price. That price is usually power, and for centuries the power of Japanese women resided in their wombs.

  Director Mamoru Oshii has stated what he considers to be this crucial gender difference this way:

  [W]omen aren’t indecisive about themselves. Becoming a different type of person, or diving off a cliff. Not knowing what’s on the other side, but just doing it. I think men wouldn’t be able to do it. And I think that a woman would. Women would take such actions first. I think men would follow after. That’s because women give birth. A complete person comes out of their own bodies. That’s something that men cannot even imagine.”26

  It isn’t just a matter of the individual. In Japanese culture, the self has been less important than the ie, or clan, and as sociologist Joy Hendry reminds us, “. . . continuity is an essential feature of the ie. The individual members of a particular house, who need not necessarily always be resident, occupy the roles of the living members of that particular ie. The total membership includes all those who went before: the ancestors, now forgotten as individuals, the recently dead who are remembered; and the descendants as yet unborn.”27 This is exactly the pattern that appears, explicitly or implicitly, in the shonen ai (“boy love”) and shojo ai (“girl love”) genres, and romances of any kind: romance for its own sake is self-indulgent and necessarily doomed. It’s a theme that is sounded in soap operas and Kabuki as well as age-old folktales: satisfaction of personal desire without considering the consequences leads to trouble. There may be happiness in the short term, but at the very least one will come to the end of life without descendants. With no one to perform memorial rites, no one to inherit the ie, one risks not becoming an ancestor. Which also means that one’s own ancestors will have lived in vain. The message is clear: rather than upset a process that has lasted for dozens of generations over hundreds of years, personal gratification is best delayed, if not abandoned altogether, and replaced by a relationship consistent with one’s duties to the ie and to society.

  So Japan, in pop culture as in real life, is hardly a kingdom of cross-dressers or a haven for homosexuals. Far from it; many Japanese gays still stay very deep in the closet. The appeal of homosexual relationships in pop culture, especially as heavily romanticized in girls’ comics, is precisely because it is so exotic to its readers. But there’s also another reason.

  This chapter’s title speaks of pseudo-gay themes, and that’s exactly what appeals to so many female fans of these genres. There is a tolerance in the Japanese culture for intense same-sex attachments that do not threaten social roles, as long as they stop short of the romantic. Popular culture, which serves in part as a corrective measure, a guide to steer social conduct and attitude, takes depiction of same-sex romances in Japanese media (a) in the context of the overall story, which sometimes provides a rationale, and (b) with a grain of salt, knowing that a comic book or an animated film is artistic, idealized, and not reflective for the most part of reality. These portrayals are also permitted (c) because the truly gay couple in question usually does not live happily ever after, while the pseudo-gay couple does. Pop culture, you’ll recall, doesn’t get out ahead of the audience at large.

  This last point hardly needs to be stressed. Of course there is no accursed Chinese spring that will bring about gender (or species) changes. One junior high school student will never have to be responsible for saving the planet from invaders from another galaxy. The fantasy nature of the media themselves allows a certain distance to be kept. The Japanese would be the first to say that they can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. But this raises the question: why don’t we see more same-sex friendships in American pop culture? If we, like the Japanese, approach comic books and cartoons assuming the fantasy component, why don’t we see Betty and Veronica holding hands over a malted in the Archie comics?

  Because our culture feels more threatened by depiction of intense same-sex friendships than does Japanese culture. We seem too easily to jump to the conclusion that there can be no such thing as “just friends.” In art or in life, we expect—and sometimes seem to demand—that the involved parties “go all the way.” Ironically, given our Puritan ancestry, we seem to be more obsessed with sex than the Japanese; at least, if one were to go by the popular culture. The reason is that American pop culture often limits its options to “sex” and “not-sex.”28

  Japanese culture makes room for a much wider range of relationships, recognizing that one can incur duty (on) under a variety of circumstances, and the responsibility for honoring that obligation depends on one’s social standing relative to the other party. Even in this very personal realm—perhaps especially in this realm—one’s p
ersonal desires (ninjo) count for less in the long run than does group consensus. In spite of its higher visibility (if one counts phenomena such as nudity on late-night television and pornography sold in vending machines) in Japan, “sex is granted a much lower priority in the order of social activity than in the West. . . . Sex, belonging to the soft world of ninjo and part of the sphere of mere human feelings as it is, is not very important.”29

  In short, dividing up the world into “sex partners” and “not-sex partners” may work for some Americans, but most Japanese (and I daresay most Americans) would find it to be extremely unrealistic. In any event, one can never act solely on the basis of one’s feelings in Japan; the tightly woven social web traps one in a host of expectations and obligations. Japan may have entered the twenty-first century with America, but Japan still has the custom of omiai—engagement meetings in which marital prospects are interviewed and surveyed as if they were being recruited for a corporation—and for some Japanese, Western-style romance is still a luxury.

  1. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U. S. Military (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 411.

  2. See “The Boy Who Laid the Golden Stone” in Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 221.

  3. In the third season, Chibi-Usa, on a visit from the twenty-fifth century, meets a precocious young teamaster, a boy who is drawn so prettily that the Western dubbers decided to make him a girl. Presumably they did this because the young teamaster, to honor the heroics of the Sailor Senshi, trades in his kimono at the end for a short skirt and middie blouse. Not that they didn’t get the joke, but the Western crew seemed to forget that the word “travesty” (a parody or comic version) has the same roots as the word “transvestite.”