“Yowie!”: The Stateside appeal of boy-meets-boy YAOI comics

With The Moon and the Sandals, Yoshinaga explores the friendship between Ida, an openly gay high school teacher, and Kobayashi, a young student developing a youthful crush on his teacher. Forbidden student-teacher affairs are a popular theme in YAOI, but after suggesting a romance could happen between Ida and Kobayashi, Yoshinaga steers the story away from that cliché. Instead, the two develop an enduring friendship where each learns a little from each other about being a gay man.

When we meet Ida, he is in a serious relationship with Hashizume, a young chef with a promising future. They decide they are ready to move in together, but have a hard time finding a landlord who will rent an apartment to two men. The discrimination isn’t obvious, however. The landlords that turn them down don’t directly say that it’s because they’re gay. Instead they claim concerns about two, unrelated single men not taking care of the apartment as well as a household with a woman. To get past that hurdle, Ida adopts his partner (which, we’re told, is a legal workaround gays in Japan use to obtain some of the rights of marriage), which allows them to have the same last name legally and to claim to landlords that they are brothers.

Meanwhile, when Kobayashi’s study partner is hospitalized in a car accident, she arranges for her older brother, Narumi, to tutor him in her place. At first Kobayashi and Narumi clash, but their bickering slowly (and familiarly) turns into a mutual admiration and affection. Those feelings, however, bring up an internal conflict for Narumi who doesn’t associate himself with the effeminate manners he associates with homosexuality.

Being openly gay in the workplace is also explored in The Moon and the Sandals. Ida faces gossip from students and other teachers, despite his fairly boring life. Hashizume, meanwhile, is forced to come out to his boss when she tries to set him up for an arranged marriage with her daughter. When Hashizume opens his own restaurant, we see how he handles different choices about telling his employees and customers about his same-sex partner: he is quick to come out to the assistant chef he hires (who translates that into a workplace free of sexual harassment) but coyly avoids specifying Ida’s gender when talking about him with customers. When Narumi starts his first job at the Ministry of Finance, he finds himself trying to hide his personal life.

Overall, The Moon and the Sandals is a title that fully makes use of struggles gay male couples face in Japan as fuel for relationship conflicts. The title is escapist entertainment, so all those conflicts find a way of ending happily, but Yoshinaga uses the YAOI genre to illustrate the challenges gay men face in Japanese society.

Female and Gay Male YAOI Readers: Whose Genre Is It, Anyway?

Despite the above examples, the majority of YAOI titles do not feature characters that identify as gay, but are rather sexually attracted to a single male. The genre doesn’t generally seek to address gay issues, but rather to explore themes of dominance and submission in heterosexual relationships in an abstract and less threatening way. As the innate masculine/feminine dichotomy of heterosexual relationships is at the root, this introduces themes and ideas that many gay men find problematic.

One frustration is the seme/uke formula common to YAOI. Most YAOI stories divide their leading couple into seme and uke with the seme (attacker) being more masculine-appearing and behaving more aggressively than the uke (receiver), who is usually more feminine in appearance, more emotional and nurturing. When badly done, the formula suggests that in gay couples one partner is “the man” in the relationship while the other is “the woman. ”

This rather abstract and unrealistic view of same-sex romance that is at the core of much YAOI has led to friction between YAOI’s female writers and gay fans who feel the genre trivializes or oversimplifies sexuality.

One such clash occurred when comics retailer and blogger Christopher Butcher excerpted a Giant Robot interview with Kazuma Kodaka, who wrote and drew one of the most popular YAOI series, Kizuna. When asked about the connection between her work and gay culture, Kodaka responded, “My manga is YAOI, not homosexual, and there’s a subtle difference between the two … It’s about how the characters feel and how they struggle to obtain love until it’s finally achieved. The story is usually about the characters’ feelings of pain and longing for each other, which is a more feminine sensibility.”