One hundred ways of looking at a youko: in praise of doujinshis

    It's been five years since I first walked into a Japanese doujinshi sale, and that long ago day (Sunday November 12, 1993) is still the closest I've ever come to heaven. The feeling is indescribable: entering the vast, dim, hangar-like space of Higashi-kan and seeing before me a sea of tables piled with stacks of comic books, all featuring the guys who then occupied my every waking moment, all doing anything I could imagine and a few things that had never occurred to me. I was the kid in the candy store with a fifty dollar bill: 'anything I want, anything.' It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, it was winning the cash for life lottery, it was a willing genie from the lamp saying 'And what would Madame like to see today?' It was heaven.

    So it seems odd to me, and sad beyond belief, that most western fans must pursue their obsessions without the aid of djs.  A series without djs is like a meal without salt- a little flat, a little... unsatisfying. Wonderful in its own terms, perhaps, but still carrying a sense of something missing. I know, because almost all my favorite series have no dj fandom to speak of. Basara, Earl Cain, Patarillo... neglected masterpieces, all. For one thing they're mostly shoujo manga, and what sparks large fandoms is shounen anime. Even so, there's no saying what's going to inspire the Japanese to draw djs and what will leave them cold. It's pure luck of the draw. Slam Dunk was a monster fandom, with its painfully ordinary highschool basketball players; Sailor Moon inspired more than the male otakus for many years; but no one quite knew what to make of Utena's cat-like sensual bishounen, and most people didn't even try.

    Which is a pity, because djs serve an invaluable purpose for the fan. They make everything bigger. Just for a start, they let
you know how the Japanese themselves view these creations, which is often very different from our own takes.  I say the man is a violent and unpleasant thug, but his Japanese fans insist he's a pure soul who rapes bishounen because he sincerely wants to rape bishounen, and the sincerity of his motivation makes him a saint. 'The sad heart of a terrorist' as Takuboku wrote, admiring the terrorist's pure feelings while the rest of us were distracted by the bits of the terrorist's victims lying scattered around the railway station. A distinct lesson in cultural perspectives.

    But rationally or not from our pov, djs widen the bounds of the canon and open it up to unheard-of possibilities. They give you a hundred different takes on a character instead of the mangaka's one. Visually speaking, this is a definite plus when you're dealing with a shounen series, because shounen art isn't interested in ordinary aesthetics. The djs allow you to get over that first hurdle in the way of fandom: 'But it's so ugly!! Some djkas imitate the style of the series, a little toned down; some do their own stylized takes; many simply normalize the proportions of the characters so they look more like real people.

    After you've been looking at these variant versions for a while, you come to have the image of a 'meta-character' in your head: meta-Kurama, let's say, who's a little taller and a little more ectomorphic than his manga counterpart. Even when you go back to the YuuYuu manga, you react to it as just Togashi-sensei's way of drawing the 'real' Kurama.

    This dj 'editing and expanding' function works even better when it comes to the characterization of the characters. The djs add extra dimensions and psychological depth often lacking in the manga or anime, usually for quite legitimate reasons. Ai no Kusabi is a tragic story. Iason has no reason to crack jokes in it. The idea that Iason might ever crack jokes in itself violates our western notions of literary decorum. Tragic characters must be serious. If they make pointless jokes, they
belong in a comedy. Get your genres straight. But if a Blondie can fall in love, why can't he be a fan of bad puns as well?

    The Japanese are much more flexible about blending genres: your doomed lovers are likely to take on round-faced chibi cuteness for a panel or so, or to suddenly squawk in high-pitched voices if they're anime. Schizophrenic, Mimi has called this, and so it often seems to us. Still, the drops from High Serious to Low Comedy occupy only a frame or so and we simply ignore their (to us) distracting intrusion. Djs give you whole stories- whole issues- of Low Comedy. It's an eyeopener to see Iason worrying about holes in his underwear, or Hiei turned into a three-year-old out shopping for Mama Kurama: and somehow reassuring. The djs normalize the characters, removing them from their heroic and highly dramatic settings and showing them in the common light of day. The Eternal Warriors become, briefly, people like us. Trowa the djka trundles his 'shinkan' to the publisher two days before Comiket and begs to have it done in time; the Seiya guys argue the merits of kaki-fry bento (breaded oyster take-out) over yakisoba (fried noodles)-- and the very ordinariness of the vocabulary removes them completely from the Apocalypse Now  atmosphere of their series.

    Of course this genre-shifting function works in reverse, from Low Comedy to High Seriousness, a shift that westerners may find more congenial. Life as we read it is serious, easily tending to tragedy. We see comedy as an unreal genre that agrees to ignore temporarily the fact that life is serious. When western fans write stories about fantastic action comedies like Man from Uncle, they usually drop the lightness and comedy entirely and write dark, angsty versions of Napoleon and Illya. 'I want to write realistically,' they say, a statement which carries the assumption that comedy isn't realistic and angst is. But this western bias is a problem when you deal with anime, because the series are aimed at children and are mostly gag. Serious takes on the characters have to be inferred through the (often) deformed proportions of the characters and the relentless comedy (idiocy, a westerner wants to say) of the action.

    The djs do an awful lot of this inferring- teasing out the emotions the characters might well be feeling in a situation and presenting them in complete stories. So what if Dragon Ball's Gohan just shrugs in good manly Japanese fashion when his father Goku dies? What would he likely be feeling about it underneath? That's the story you read. People who see only the manga ask how I can be a fan of that 80% idiotic to 20% serious series Papuwa. Well, because I have a stack of djs where the proportions are reversed: where Gunma's 'grudge diary' listing all Shintaro's meannesses are sparked by unrequited love for him, and where Magic's 'doting Papa' devotion to his son is the result of a very unlovely set of incestuous fixations. Makes the witless gag Papuwa characters look like case studies from Freud, and gives an interesting air of nightmare to the whole island setting: sort of like a Bosch painting with monsters casually walking across the desert landscape behind St.Anthony.

    But what has all this to do with the real canon character, you ask? Simply, it opens up possibilities. We only see one or two facets of the character in his series. Djs either show us the rest or suggest that they may exist. They shake our imaginations loose from the predetermined givens of the series. (There are few series so satisfying that I'm content with them exactly as they are, with no desire for more. Anime Utena is the only example I can think of. I like its stylized allegory and don't really want to see it translated into everyday terms. But I'm not passionately devoted to any one character over the other; and Utena is unusual for an anime both in its surrealism and in the depth of thought that went into its making.) Djs give you another way of looking at what may be a stock character or a minor one or one you feel got shortchanged in his series. This is satisfying enough just for the fan wanting More of her beloved character. (However long they may be, series never give a besotted fan enough.) It's absolutely invaluable if you happen to be a fanwriter. The djs give innumerable hints on stories to write, scenarios to choose from, takes to take. Just one great big Suggestion Box a whole shelf long: My Charas in various psychological positions, like the artists' reference books that show you how to draw someone running or playing golf or about to dive. If I'm tired of caring self-sacrificing Kurama, I know where to find versions of evil Kurama or psychotic Kurama or Kurama the avatar of chaos, that will give me enough hints to do my own.

    The djs create a secondary universe that wraps around the canon characters and action. They're like an oral tradition that springs up about a set text, one that both expands on and subtly alters the content of the original. The secondary universe doesn't have the authority of the original, naturally: but it makes a nice break from it, or it fills up the holes in it, or it suggests interpretations that may in fact reflect back quite nicely on the canon character. (OTOH of course, there may be no connection at all.) What do we know about Youko Kurama, really? Very little- but here's a couple of stories to suggest what he might have been like in his heyday. And yes, you can see how this amoral rapist and thief might be the same person as the one who took out Karasu in the anime. And here's another where he provides the emotional (and possibly internal) consolation that Minamino Shuuichi can't get from Hiei: and yes, you can see how this youko might have turned into the gentle Kurama we know from the manga. Often enough a dj character's whole function is to make explicit some unexplored facet of the canon character's psychology. The attachment between Kurama and Hiei is unstated in the manga: there, yes, but its precise nature and depth unspecified. Two guys who fight together and then go their separate ways. Dj Kurama notoriously gets turned into the patron saint of helpless love and devotion to Hiei-- except when dj conventions require that the shorter Hiei take on that archetypal uke/ female role. This means that the sympathetic canon Kurama must then be cast as the no-good snake in the grass- the cold-eyed seducer- and that's what happens. Just a direction that Kurama didn't take but might have.

Djs are A/U City, a playground of the imagination where all the rules are off. You can put your guys into any situation and see how they look in it. You can grab any archetypal role and try it on for size. Zechs as Innocent Virgin or Zechs as Demon Seducer; Zechs as Man of Sorrows or Zechs as Devious Schemer: they're all there. Making a character archetypal expands him just as much as making him ordinary, and gives an extra depth to the series as well. A story where vampire Treize recognizes the evil in nice young Zechs and makes him as undead as himself? Don't tell me that doesn't run off the real Treize/ Zechs relationship.

    Of course, this freewheeling 'multiplicity of approaches' goes double when you get into yaoi. Yaoi exists, in Tom Stoppard's phrase, to do onstage the things that most people do off. And since it's all offstage in the manga or anime (if it's an ordinary manga or anime), anything goes. If ordinary djs are a harmonic line twining in and around the basic melody of the canon, sometimes coinciding with the notes and sometimes departing from them, yaoi is best seen as a complete variation: the basic melody transposed and turned into a different song.

    Yaoi is a separate erotic universe, parallel to the canonical one but following its own rules and logic. It's not the canon characters so much as sexual fantasies about the canon characters. And sometimes you'll recognize the original melody/ character in the yaoi version and sometimes you won't. It doesn't really matter: yaoi and manga both have what look like the same person, so you can agree for the moment to suspend your disbelief that Gohan and Piccolo would actually have sex together and watch them do it. Yaoi stories may be immensely serious but the exercise of yaoi is not. The 'i' of yaoi- 'Imi nashi': no meaning indeed. Pull out all the costumes from the yaoi dress-up chest and try them on for size. How does Servis look in the tears of a Helpless Uke? 'Boku wa, nii-san no mono da.' (I belong to my Big Brother.) Nahh, I like him better in the coolness of a Sardonic Seme. 'Fuku wo nuide, Shin-chan. Zenbu.' (Take your clothes off, Shin-chan-- all of them.) No, no, put him in the ijiwaru (malicious) smiles of a Snotty Uke. 'Takamatsu-yon-man en, kaese! Shinai to, yarasete kurenai zo.' (Takamatsu, pay me back my 40,00 yen or I won't let you screw me.) No, NO, he's gotta be Pure Love: 'Jan! Aishteru zo, Jan!' (Jan I love you Jan!) Such richness! This is why I prefer a regular series with a yaoi fandom to an actual yaoi series. Djs give you a million Servises and all of them are the manga Servis and none of them are. June, where Izumi is Izumi is Izumi and can never be anyone but Izumi, seems immensely flat by comparison. Sex isn't just a variation on a theme there, it's the theme itself, and most of the action as well.

    And yes, yaoi reflects back on the manga text. Viewed through the yaoi scrim, the canon becomes a thing of wonder. Yeah, here's the malicious brusque Hiei of the manga, scornful and untouchable: but about him flits the protoplasmic multitude of helpless Hieis raped by loving besotted Kuramas, or Tide's unwilling seme, protesting 'You're in love with me, not the other way around!', or shota-con eight-year-old Hiei getting jerked off in Kurama's school washroom, or Hiei having a casual screw with Karasu that makes him realize for the first time how far he's come from his former self, or post-coital Hiei rejecting Kurama and thereby denying the attachment that threatens his concept of himself, or the heart-breaking demon Hiei who wants to feel the emotions for Kurama that Kurama feels for him, but can't because he is what he is: 'I hope, if you ever need them, there will be warm arms to hold you'- since mine can't. Oh, the possibilities inherent in one taciturn little youkai drawn to amuse ten year old boys.

    Can fanfiction perform the same functions as djs? My own reflex reaction is no, not really, or not for me. Anime and manga are pictorial forms. The characters exist as pictures for me. To have variations, I need to see other, new pictures of them. Changing the form to a totally verbal one loses the essence of the character. (I can happily read stories about novel characters, though. The original Peter Wimsey exists as words on a page. Seeing him in a fan's words on a page just adds dimension to the original concept.) Japanese text stories, when they're conventional stories with dialogue and plot, have the same flatness for me. 'You say this is Magic, but I don't see Magic.' This goes double if he's doing something manga Magic wouldn't. It's one thing to see him doing it in a manga dj: there my eyes are addressed before my brain. With texts it's the other way around. The rational, orderly text story speaks to the intellect before the sense, and intellect says 'Hey- wait a sec!'

Prose forms that don't meet the intellectual expectations of the brain can sometimes slip around its rational defences. The prose poem stories in Japanese- brief, suggestive vignettes- can suggest many of the same possibilities as a manga picture or even better a separate 'cut'- storyless illustrations, often mysterious and unexplained. (Dorian as some kind of ice divinity-
who? why? what happened? like a dream fragment remembered on waking.) But I still think a word poem goes better with pictures to illustrate it. And no doubt the resonance of the Japanese prose poem owes a lot to its being in a foreign language. English prose poems tend to be banal (something to do with the fact that most people aren't poets), and the psychological vignettes aren't much better. But since we gaijin simply don't draw the way the Japanese do (or are trained to do, whichever), we don't really have a choice. It's stories or nothing for us.