Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

LGBTQ

The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms

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“Whimsical tales of anthropomorphic beasts in love”—or so the dust jacket of The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms promises. The eight stories in this collection do feature a race of half-animal, half-human creatures who behave like boys at a British boarding school, forming intense friendships that sometimes cross the line into romance. I’m a little reluctant to call these stories “whimsical,” however, as that word implies a certain degree of playfulness that was lacking in most of the stories, some of which were intensely sincere, and some of which raised legitimate questions about boundaries and consent.

Wize Wize Beasts unfolds at a special academy “dedicated to the study of wizardry,” where demi-humans of every imaginable type peacefully co-exist as they learn the arts of potion-making, spell-casting, and alchemy. Each story centers on a pair of opposites: prey and predator, teacher and student, mammal and reptile, smart and average. Most of their relationships fall under the general heading of “unrequited love,” in which one demi-human pines for his opposite, but can’t muster the courage to say how he feels.

In the most enjoyable chapters—”Marley & Collette,” “Cromwell & Benjamin”—Nagabe explores the healthier side of attraction, showing how strong feelings of admiration and concern can bring out the best in friends, allowing for moments of tenderness, warmth, and emotional honesty even when the friendship remains platonic. My favorite, “Mauchly & Charles,” read like an irresistible mash-up of Winnie the Pooh and The Girl from the Other Side, focusing on a bear (Mauchly) and the human he rescued (Charles) from a dark, rainy forest. After Charles returns to his own world, he and Mauchly hold an annual reunion, using this ritual as an opportunity to reflect on what’s changed in the ensuing year. The emotional vulnerability and candor of their interactions is genuinely astonishing—not because men don’t have close friendships, but because the kind of physical intimacy and gentleness that defines Mauchly and Charles’ friendship is seldom depicted in popular culture.

The weakest stories in the collection, by contrast, often conflate possessive or coercive behavior with romantic attraction, justifying one character’s actions by suggesting his feelings were so intense that they compelled him to transgress social norms. In “Doug & Huey,” for example, a crow (Doug) carries a torch for his handsome friend Huey, who—natch—is a peacock. Though Huey spends most of his time chasing girls, Doug’s devotion to him is unwavering—so much so, in fact, that Doug sabotages Huey’s efforts to land a girlfriend so that Huey will “never be closer to someone else.” Huey, for his part, is so deeply narcissistic that he doesn’t recognize Doug’s controlling behavior, creating a deeply toxic bond between them that is presented as a simple case of unrequited love.

The issue of consent lingers over other chapters in Wize Wize Beasts as well. “Alan & Eddington,” for example, depicts the friendship between a brilliant Siamese (Alan) and a hardworking rabbit (Eddie) who’s dazzled by his classmate’s effortless mastery of complex subjects. Afraid that Alan will reject his advances, Eddie concocts and serves him a love potion. While under the influence of Alan’s spell, Eddie compels Alan to kiss him and profess his love for him—a scene that’s meant to be a little naughty, I think, but instead registers as squicky. Alan confronts Eddie about the incident, but then invites Eddie to “start over” without a magical aide, undercutting the power of his previous speech about Alan’s “cowardly” behavior.

If I was sometimes ambivalent about the content, I found Nagabe’s crisp illustrations thoroughly enchanting. His anthropomorphic character designs capture the essential animal natures of each character while retaining just enough human features for Nagabe to plausibly swathe them in flowing capes and tweedy trousers. Nagabe’s command of light, shadow, and line is superb, creating a strong sense of place without excessive reliance on screentone or tracing; his characters inhabit a well-defined world that has been vividly and imaginatively rendered on the page.

In the afterword to Wize Wize Beasts, Nagabe cheerfully jokes about “winning” readers over to his particular fandom. “I’d be deeply honored if this work exposes more people to non-human characters,” he notes. “And if you start to think, ‘Wow, non-human characters are awesome,’ go on. Get in there up to your neck.” I can’t say that Wize Wize Beasts made me a convert, but I did admire Nagabe’s creativity, sincerity, and honesty, as well as his willingness to take narrative risks that might not pay off with all readers. Your mileage may vary.

THE WIZE WIZE BEASTS OF WIZARDING WIZDOMS • STORY AND ART BY NAGABE • TRANSLATED BY ADRIENNE BECK • SEVEN SEAS • RATED TEEN • 228 pp.

After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

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After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness epitomize a small but growing trend in yuri manga licensing: both focus on women in their twenties exploring their sexuality, rather than depicting middle- or high-school aged girls crushing on each other.

After Hours is the more upbeat of the two, a sympathetic portrait of twenty-three-year-old Emi, a recent college graduate who’s just quit her job and is struggling to figure out what comes next. A chance encounter with Kei, a twenty-nine-year-old deejay, is a turning point in Emi’s young adult life: not only is she drawn to Kei’s confidence, she’s also intrigued by Kei’s passion for spinning records. As their connection deepens, Emi takes a more active role in supporting Kei’s career, joining Kei’s circle of friends and trying her hand at “veejaying,” selecting videos to complement Kei’s set lists.

One of the most striking aspects of After Hours is Yuhta Nishio’s sensitive depiction of Emi and Kei’s sexual encounters. He uses a handful of discrete signifiers — a pile of clothing on the floor, a tender embrace, a flirtatious post-coital chat — rather than explicit or provocative imagery. That’s a wise choice, I think, as it allows Nishio to portray Emi and Kei as grown women with healthy sexual urges without reducing them to sexualized objects. Nishio’s restrained approach also emphasizes the aspects of Emi and Kei’s bodily intimacy that foster a mutual sense of trust, familiarity, and affection — a dimension of sexual experience that’s often missing from straight romance manga.

Though the first chapters are largely uneventful, future volumes promise dramatic complications. Emi has yet to disclose her relationship to her friends or her not-quite-ex-boyfriend, with whom she’s still sharing an apartment. More interestingly, Emi hasn’t really thought about what it means to be in a relationship with another woman; she’s initially surprised by her attraction to Kei, but resists labeling those feelings as lesbian, bisexual, or queer, choosing instead to savor the sense of purpose and joy that being with Kei brings to her life. The ease with which Emi embraces her new love is a refreshing development, a quiet rebuttal of the idea that sexual orientation is absolute or easily defined.

By contrast, Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a more complex story, a confessional comic documenting the author’s sexual awakening in her late twenties. Nagata narrates her odyssey with candor, acknowledging the degree to which mental illness dictated her adult life. She describes the bodily ravages of disordered eating — she vacillated between anoxeria and bulimia — and the emotional toll of disordered thinking, noting the degree to which both depression and body dysmorphia prevented her from holding down a job, maintaining friendships, or thinking about herself as a sexual person. She also ruminates on her chilly relationship with her parents, and her profound sense of shame in disappointing them by not becoming a “real” adult with a conventional office job.

After hitting rock bottom, Nagata realizes the degree to which she’s suppressed her sexuality. In an effort to reassert control over her life, Nagata decides to hire a female escort for her first sexual experience. Nagata documents this encounter in an almost clinical fashion, contrasting her feverish anticipation with her stiff, detached response to being touched. For all of her progress towards mental health and self-acceptance, she realizes that she cannot yet surrender to the bodily sensations of desire — a tension that remains unresolved at the end of her narrative, even though Nagata’s final panels suggest her sense of relief and pride for taking such a bold step.

That Nagata’s journey is more inspiring than depressing is a testament to her writing skills (and, I might add, Jocelyne Allen’s artfully wry translation). Though Nagata never shies away from describing uncomfortable thoughts or self-destructive behavior, she finds moments of grace and humor in even the darkest situations, especially as she begins to contemplate what it means to be a sexual person. In three sharp, economical panels, for example, she explores her profound discomfort with binary gender labels, even as she begins to recognize her sexual attraction to women:

It feels churlish to criticize such a personal work, and yet I found myself wishing that Nagata’s art felt more essential to the story she was telling. Writing for The Comics Journal, critic Katie Skelly voiced similar concerns, arguing that Nagata’s tendency to mix big blocks of text with cute drawings keeps the reader at arm’s length when Nagata discloses intimate, sometimes disturbing, details of her eating disorders and self-mutilation. “Nagata can’t find a suitable bridge to mend the gap between the story of her experience and aesthetic,” Skelly notes. “[H]er style can read as generic and her tone never quite finds its mark.” I admit to feeling the same way about Nagata’s work: I admired her raw honesty, but felt that My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness could have been a book, a movie, or a Moth Radio Hour segment just as easily as a comic; nothing about the way Nagata related her experiences felt like it was uniquely suited to manga, as her drawings were more illustrative of what she felt than genuinely revelatory about why she felt such profound self-loathing.

For all the things that go unsaid in My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, however, there’s much wisdom in Nagata’s story, especially for people struggling with what it means to be healthy, whole, and sexual. Nagata’s recovery is a testament to the human capacity for resilience, and her willingness to share her most vulnerable moments with strangers an act of genuine courage. Here’s hoping that she continues to document her journey of self-discovery.

VIZ Media provided a complimentary review copy of After Hours.

AFTER HOURS • STORY AND ART BY YUHTA NISHIO • TRANSLATION BY ABBY LEHRKE • 160 pp. • RATED TEEN+ (for older teens)

MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS • STORY AND ART BY NAGATA KABI • TRANSLATED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • SEVEN SEAS • 152 pp. • RATED OT (for older teens)

Little Butterfly Omnibus

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As a feminist, yaoi puts me in a difficult position. On the one hand, I love the idea of women creating erotica for other women, of creating a safe and fun space where female readers can explore their sexual fantasies. (I don’t know about you, but Ron Jeremy has never factored into any of mine.) On the other hand, I’m often uncomfortable by the way in which rape is conflated with extreme romantic desire in yaoi; it’s disappointing to see the “you’re so irresistible, I couldn’t help myself!” defense trotted out as a justification for sexual violation. To be sure, the rape-as-love trope abounds in romance novels and mainstream pornography as well, but as a feminist, it makes me just as uncomfortable to encounter it in yaoi as it does to encounter it in an episode of General Hospital. Then, too, there’s the issue of the characters’ homosexuality, which is sometimes trivialized (i.e., they’re not gay, they’re just so good-looking they couldn’t help themselves!), ignored, or “explained” by a character’s tragic past, as if sexual orientation were a simple, situational decision.

Still, I’d be remiss in my manga critic duties if I ignored such an important publishing category. With a little encouragement from readers, therefore, I decided to take a chance on Hinako Takanaga’s Little Butterfly (DMP), a title I’ve heard praised by folks whose interest in yaoi fell everywhere on the spectrum between Can’t Get Enough to Not My Cup of Tea. And you know what? I liked it. So much, in fact, that I would recommend Little Butterfly to just about any manga fan as a first-rate character study about two teens exploring the boundary between friendship and love.

Those teens are Kojima, a popular, cheerful student, and Nakahara, brooding loner with a troubled home life. (Dad is abusive; mom is mentally ill.) Kojima finds Nakahara intriguing and makes a concerted effort to befriend him — overtures that Nakahara ignores or rebuffs until circumstances (namely, a class field trip) throw them together. To his great surprise, Nakahara discovers that Kojima is kind and sympathetic, while Kojima discovers that Nakahara is intelligent and mature for his years, qualities that Kojima greatly admires. (In a genuinely funny and revealing scene, Nakahara names an NHK newscaster as his “favorite celebrity.”) As the teens spend time together, Nakahara develops an intense, romantic attachment to Kojima that leaves Kojima bewitched, bothered, and bewildered: is he falling for Nakahara? Is he gay? And is he ready for a sexual relationship?

What makes Little Butterfly work is Hinako Takanaga’s ability to capture the ebb and flow of close, same-sex friendships; anyone who’s ever felt a strong attachment to a high school friend will recognize the dynamic between Kojima and Nakahara as it vacillates between intense candor and intense self-consciousness. As their friendship shades into romance, Takanga shows us, through her characters’ awkward body language and behavior, how uncertain both boys are about what to do next. In one chapter, for example, Kojima frets that his lack of sexual experience will be a turn-off for Nakahara (who, in reality, isn’t much more experienced than Kojima is), nearly derailing their relationship in the process. That realism carries over to their actual encounters, which are clumsy, start-and-stop affairs, characterized by miscommunication and fumbling as each boy tries to figure out what he feels comfortable doing. These scenes feel real enough, in fact, that they aren’t sexy; anyone reading this book out of prurient interest will be sorely disappointed.

Though Takanaga handles the boys’ friendship with great sensitivity, Little Butterfly has some dramatically unpersuasive moments. In one unintentionally comic scene, for example, Kojima throws his arms around a friend to gauge his interest in other men, concluding that he only has eyes for Nakahara. (Presumably he didn’t get the memo that being gay doesn’t mean you’re attracted to every member of the same sex.) Takanaga also lays it on thick with Nakahara’s home life; not only is Nakahara’s father violent and emotionally distant, he’s also willing to use his wife and son as a bargaining chip for a loan, while Nakahara’s mother is such a perfectionist that she suffered a psychotic break after Nakahara failed to gain admission to an elite elementary school. I suppose these things happen — undoubtedly, New York Magazine has published a trend piece about Upper East Side moms afflicted with the same condition — but these touches register as melodramatic excess, as if having an abusive father and a crazy mother wasn’t quite enough to explain why Nakahara sought an emotional and physical connection with Kojima.

Still, it’s impossible not to read Little Butterfly without growing attached to the characters; their sincerity and awkwardness are genuinely endearing. I can’t say that Little Butterfly worked for me as yaoi, but I certainly enjoyed it as a coming-of-age story (no pun intended) that captured the difficulties and joys of teenage relationships in an engaging, emotionally honest manner. Recommended.

LITTLE BUTTERFLY: OMNIBUS • BY HINAKO TAKANAGA • DMP • RATING: MATURE (18+) • 560 pp.

Gorgeous Carat, Vols. 1-4

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Gorgeous Carat caught my eye because it looked like a frothy costume drama. I’m a total sucker for that kind of thing, especially if it involves beautiful people fighting and falling in love in fancy surroundings. Alas, what I’d hoped would be a pleasant bit of escapism turned out to be so problematic in its presentation of gender, sexuality, and race that I never got swept up in its embrace.

The premise is ridiculous, but the first volume has a certain flair that carries Carat past its credulity-straining aspects. Our hero, Florian Rochefort, belongs to a French family with a noble name and and not-so-noble debt load. Rather than fence the family jewels, Florian’s mother does what all self-respecting French aristocrats do in yaoi manga: she sells Florian into slavery, delivering him to Ray Balzac Courtland, a distant relative who also happens to be, natch, young and handsome. Florian may be too dense to recognize his growing attraction to Ray, but it doesn’t take long for Florian to realize that Ray is, in fact, “Noir,” a cat burglar who’s the talk of fin-de-siecle Paris. When Florian is kidnapped by a rival gang of thieves, Ray sails for Morocco to enlist an old friend in tracking down his prized possession relative.

Elegant men in elegant costumes hopscotching across Europe and North Africa in pursuit of treasure: sounds good, no? Alas, You Higuri’s beautiful artwork can’t disguise the fact that her vision of North Africa is steeped in the same colonialist attitudes as Salammbo — not exactly an unimpeachable source of information about the Middle East. Take, for example, Laila, one of the key supporting characters in the Carat cast. Laila is Ray’s gal Friday, helping him track down information, cooking him meals, and keeping his car’s engine running whenever he sets out on a mission that might require a quick getaway. She might be a harmless character if it weren’t for Higuri’s decision to make Laila a dark-skinned Moroccan wearing a midriff baring costume.

Though we’re meant to see Laila as plucky, she has an ugly, Pygmalion-esque backstory (Courland rescued her from the streets when she was a girl and taught her to read) and is depicted as all-too-eager to do her master’s bidding. More disturbing is the way in which she competes with the fair-skinned Florian for her master’s attention. She throws temper tantrums, rages at Florian, tries seducing Ray, and, when none of that works, concedes that Florian has the superior claim on Ray’s heart. In fairness to Higuri, I think Laila is intended to be a surrogate for Carat’s female readers—a kind of wink-wink to readers wishing that Ray or Florian harbored romantic feelings for women. Instead, Laila comes across a tempestuous child-servant—a Steppin’ Fetchit for the Britney Spears era.

Equally troubling is the kidnapped-by-a-sexy-sheik subplot in the second volume. Florian becomes a pawn in an ugly contest between Ray and Azura, a mysterious Moroccan who—naturally—is impossibly and exotically beautiful himself. I got the same queasy feeling reading these pages as I did watching the implied rape scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Much is made of Florian’s fair, virginal beauty, just as Jose Ferrer fawns over Peter O’Toole’s blue eyes, pale skin, and sexual innocence. But while David Lean shows us the terrible ramifications of this encounter, Higuri includes these scenes in Carat for pure titillation. Yes, she hints that Azura may have “ruined” Florian, but given the series’ Harlequin romance plotting, it’s a safe bet that the lasting impact of Florian’s imprisonment will be bringing him closer to Ray, not sending him into, say, an irreversible tail spin of drug addiction and prostitution. (Though, of course, Higuri does inflict amnesia and temporary insanity on Florian for most of volume three.)

In Higuri’s defense, I doubt she knew much, if anything, about the imperialist discourse that shaped European attitudes towards the “Orient.” Yet she rehearses many of the stereotypes prevalent in nineteenth-century European art, literature, and scholarship about the Middle East, portraying Laila and Azura as irrational, childlike, and dangerously sensual — just as Flaubert portrays his Carthaginian princess. About the best I can say for Higuri is that she’s so committed to her story and characters that Gorgeous Carat almost works as a parody of Delacroix, Flaubert, and Massenet. Good thing Edward Said never picked up a copy.

GORGEOUS CARAT, VOLS. 1-4 • BY YOU HIGURI • BLU MANGA • RATING: MATURE (18+)