Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan ed. by Mark McLelland et al. (review)

In the title of a 2001 online article, Mark McLelland asked, "Why Are Japanese Girls' Comics Full of Boys Bonking?"¹ Notwithstanding the playful title, McLelland was one of the first scholars writing in English to take the genre of boys' love (BL) seriously. Fifteen years later, this question is less surprising as boys' love manga has proliferated in Japan and abroad, and slash (gay-themed fan fiction) has gained prominence in the West. The idea that women might enjoy fantasies of gay male romance and sex has achieved a degree of mainstream recognition, even in the United States. As McLelland argues in that early essay, the more interesting question is not "Why?" but "Why not?" or more specifically, why do we assume that gay images should be the domain of gay men alone? McLelland, joined by Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker as editors of a new collected volume, offers various and nuanced answers to this question and others: not only "why?" but who is reading, what is at stake for readers, and writers, and how the greater prominence of boys' love has both granted legitimacy and threatened free expression.

The volume is arranged more or less chronologically, beginning with a chapter by Barbara Hartley on Takabatake Kashō's illustrations of bishōnen(beautiful boys) in the 1920s and ending with a chapter by Mark McLelland on the future of boys' love in light of government censorship such as the "Non-Existent Youth Bill" and grassroots attempts to remove BL from public libraries. Overall, chapters focus on fans (fujoshi or rotten girls, that is, female fans of boys' love), on professional and amateur writers and artists, and on discourses around fans. While there is some close reading of prominent texts, the emphasis is more on reading practices.

The two standout chapters in this volume are translations of essays by Fujimoto Yukari and Ishida Hitoshi, which originally appeared in a special issue of the Japanese literary magazine Yuriika (Eureka) in 2007 on boys' love studies. Fujimoto's essay is an update and reconsideration of an essay she first published in 1991, which is also available in English translation.² In revisiting her earlier argument that the male characters stand in for female readers, Fujimoto finds that as the genre has matured and diversified, the scope of playing with gender has widened to "experiments in transgressing every possible border of sexual difference" (p. 85). While boys' love manga, with its generic code of masculine seme (top) and feminine uke (bottom) pairings, is superficially heteronormative, Fujimoto argues that couplings contain more nuanced character traits that are not limited to a strict male-female binary, and playing with various pairings allows readers to experience sexual fantasies freed from gender oppression. Ishida likewise takes on the issue of heteronormativity in boys' love, along with the yaoi ronsō (boys' love debate) begun in 1992, which argues that the genre is homophobic and appropriates and/or misrepresents gay culture. The fact that characters often claim they are not gay and disavow gay sex as disgusting (kimochi warui) adds fuel to the debate. Ishida summarizes the response of BL readers and writers, who tend to assert that the male characters are fantasies, not meant to be understood as real gay men but as points of identification for female readers. However, Ishida argues they are both: "Understanding the intersection of representational appropriation and self-projection will help us see why yaoi/BL endlessly demands the reinsertion of gender power dynamics via the roles of uke and seme to a world where the gender binary is deconstructed through featuring two characters of the same sex" (p. 229). These two chapters help to bring the Japanese language scholarship on boys' love and the debates surrounding it to a wider readership.

Chapters by James Welker...