Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

But just when I’d written Japan off as having nothing new and jaw-dropping to contribute to Gay World, what should I come upon while browsing around a manga café one day but a certain genre of Japanese comic books that deals very openly and-to my infinite delight-graphically with the subject of love between men. Even more shocking is the fact that these comics are not written by gay men for gay men. No, gaywad, they are written by women for a target audience of teenage girls.

Manga comics are to the Japanese public what sitcoms, police dramas, and Dateline are to the American public. Here, comics are not just for thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their mothers and blush when asked about having a girlfriend. Comics are for everyone. They are an essential piece of contemporary Japanese popular art, as important if not more important than movies and television. There are comics for teenage boys, which includes stories on subjects such as sports, delinquent high school students (who invariably hang out with doe-eyed schoolgirls who can’t think of a good reason to keep their clothes on for more than a few pages at a time), the occult, martial arts, and motorcycle gangs; comics for adult males that offer stories involving hired assassins, samurai, big-breasted stewardesses, hapless office workers, and war; comics for adult women with lots of romance and period pieces; and those for young girls featuring schoolkids solving mysteries, grappling with the supernatural, and flirting and falling in love. But curiously, a growing number of young girls, who range in age from preteen to late twenties, wish to read stories from a genre of comics called yaoi, tales filled to the brim with the high drama and star-crossed romance that is best portrayed and appreciated when presented in the form of a gay male love affair.

I never would have thought I could have so much in common with thirteen-year-old Japanese girls, but the world is a very strange place, and I guess it just goes to show that there are indeed some needs that span cultures, genders, and generations. One of those, apparently, is the need to see and read about wispy, beautiful men with impossible cheekbones falling in love and passionately screwing around with other wispy, beautiful men with impossible cheekbones.

This is not simply animated gay porn. It’s more like an animated, all-male The Young and the Restless . Characters are developed and emotional, and often fatal conflicts are introduced. And the men’s bone structure, hair color, and wardrobe are infinitely more important than their equipment below the belt. These men are beautiful, their physiques patently unattainable. Broad shoulders, tiny waists, faces so angular they’re in danger of cutting themselves every time they swish their hands upwards to move their golden/purple/silver/magenta locks out of their eyes, all to achieve the perfect pose of pensive angst.

And these guys like to mess around. It could be a tormented university student lying with his equally tortured history professor, or a profoundly unhappy young banker making it with his best friend’s brother, but no matter the pairing, the sex is going to be dramatic, ecstatic, and often. The drama inherent in storylines involving men expressing their long-repressed desire for each other is the attraction for the girls, it seems. These stories offer for their female audience the ultimate tales of forbidden love. It’s Romeo and Romeo. And Juliet gets to watch.

Needless to say, I have now developed a mild obsession with these comics. And I’m hell-bent on learning more, to the point where when a young female student says in class that she loves comics, I wonder if there’s an appropriate way to ask her if she enjoys stories involving two guys getting it on, and if so, what the turn-on is, which positions she really likes to see them in, and by the way, can she recommend some good titles because I have a friend who’s interested.

When I first discovered yaoi comics at a manga reading room in Shinjuku, I pulled a few dozen off the bookshelf, retreated to a remote corner of the café, and thumbed through them greedily. Of course, I couldn’t understand what I was reading, but the pictures did help fill in quite a few gaps, if you know what I mean. Here are two college friends sucking face and getting to third base in their university library. And here is a mob boss giving one of his young charges an offer he obviously can’t refuse. Oh, and here are two long-haired warriors taking a break from all the chaos on the battlefield to vanquish each other in a cave. And they just happened to bring along their leather harnesses and candle wax. Great!

I emerged a few hours later bleary-eyed and thinking I really could have used those comics when I was thirteen.

In my research on the topic, I’ve discovered that the word yaoi is actually an acronym in Japanese meaning “no climax, no purpose, no solutions,” which is kind of a creed for the genre. A gay agenda of sorts. And though the appeal of such nihilistically themed stories does have its limits (many of them end with some sort of self-mutilation or terrible tragedy) and somewhat offends my American need for some type of reasonably workable resolution, any comic book series that offers spectacular scenes of wild, passionate, and otherworldly homo-sex is worth a second look in my book.

I now look at all the young ladies around me-in my classrooms, on the train, at the makeup counter-in a very different light. Are these girls, beneath their cotton tops and cardigans, behind their cherubic, innocent, immaculately painted faces, just mad for a peek at a lusty all-male hump-a-thon? Do they long to be a fly on the wall in the men’s locker room? Do they lose sleep palpitating over the divine clash of lips, cheekbones, and sinewy male flesh that fill the scenes in their precious comic books?

Your typical Japanese Joe finds it difficult to say the word “gay” without giggling, as if by uttering it he is professing to believe in mermaids. I sit on the train again and watch four young inebriated professional men stumble onto the train. They are impeccably put together, their skin polished to a fine shine, their hair sculpted in tight waves, their tailored suits pressed, their rock-solid masculinity melted by alcohol into a fluid and suggestible ambivalence. I look at the ringleader of the pack, the loudest one to whom the others obviously defer. He rubs his face languorously with his perfectly moisturized fingers, stands with his legs far apart and his crotch tilted out. He is telling a story and repeatedly putting his arm around his drunken colleague next to him to stabilize himself as he sways back and forth. I wonder if he realizes how often the young girls on the train gaze at him as he banters with his be-suited colleagues-joking, laughing, snorting, backslapping-and how more than a few of these girls really wish that the guys would just shut up, unbutton their tailored shirts to the navels, whisk their hair out of their eyes, and start making out.

I know I do.

# times used Japanese-style squatting public toilet: 1

# times used Japanese-style squatting public toilet backwards: 1

# times wished to God Japanese public toilet offered toilet paper: 1

In which the resilient city of Tokyo is once again under siege and the city’s citizens must run for their lives from a giant foreign monster who has brought his own eating utensils.

“Just don’t forget,” Jimmy coos over the phone as we discuss the details of his upcoming trip to Tokyo on my dime. “You owe me.”