'Write something about yourself for the members,' Sue said, and at once my mind went blank. What's your name and what do you do? Well- my name is Marie-Jeanne, and yes it's French so it comes out sounding like Mahree-Zhan, but most people call me something like Jan or Shan. I'm from Toronto in what's supposed to be a bilingual country but isn't, except for the labels. I've done a bunch of fun things for a living, like reading library catalogues written in Latin describing manuscripts written in Greek, and changing diapers in a daycare, but rather more recently I was living in Tokyo, teaching English and studying Japanese.
The draw for me was all the sword-and-samurai stuff on TV (every evening at 8:00 there's at least one), but in front of the 8:00 Saturday night show there was always this peculiar cartoon that I used to catch the last ten minutes of- and then the last fifteen minutes- and then I started watching it entirely: something surreal called 'Papuwa-kun' that had a talking fish with legs (in fishnet stockings) and a huge well-spoken snail and- well, never mind. I never watched it very closely but I used to keep the set on for ear practice... and then, well, the hero's father showed up, a sort of surreal Hitler-type who looked like David Bowie, with a private army and a fixation on his son, and then the hero's uncle showed up, a one-eyed beauty with long blond hair and a black fur-trimmed coat, and it was all still absolutely incomprehensible but I started watching closer. But then the hero and his uncle came to the showdown and I could tell from the preview (so obvious, these Japanese) that uncle wasn't going to come out of it alive and hero was going to be struck with remorse, ho-hum, so the next Saturday I was watching a Star Trek TNG tape my brother had sent me instead. Got to be 7:50, whoops time to set up the Abarenbo Shogun tape, good-bye Captain Picard, helloOOOO NURSE!! **WHO** is **THIS**??? **This** is uncle, very much alive thank you, in a flashback of himself at eighteen, relating the tragic story of how he killed his best friend by accident. And was uncle gorgeous at 18? You betcha. Uncle was bikei to die for. (Bikei- 'beautiful form'. When I said that to Mary Kennard of Comic Box, she answered "He ain't bad now." True.)
Well, that did it. Ever hear the French phrase 'coup de foudre'? The bolt of lightning falling in love routine? That was it. I was history. I was seized by the absolute necessity to know- just to know- everything about this guy and his series and just what the hell was going on and I hadn't the first idea where to start. Thank god my sister had been an anime fan for nearly a decade by then. I called her long-distance in howling frustration, and she sent me to the anime magazines that carry synopses of the current series. That scratched the itch a little. I found the 'cel' books made from the anime series- then the manga on which the series was based- then the monthly magazine in which the manga ran. And the manga, wouldn't you know it, had just done a bunch of twisty plot stuff and was veering away from being a boy's gag comic and showing every sign of becoming a yaoi manga. (Well, first episode I read had Uncle, with a seductive smile and a cigarette in his mouth, leaning over to light it from the cigarette held in his friend's mouth. As an iconographic signifier for penile frottage, not bad.)
Those first few months were hell. I was a junkie short on fixes. The anime stopped, the manga came out only once a month with 12 pages, and the period between issues felt about as long as the Pleistocene and the Jurassic combined. My new fan friends, Mary and Jean, did their best to get me a new addiction but nothing quite worked. Seiya and Shurat and Arislan were pretty but... I was a Papuwa junkie and I wanted Papuwa.
Then one day in November Jean said "Mary and I have found a comic sale to take you to. It's small"- small in Japanese terms means only 1500 people selling- "but there'll be Papuwa zines there." There were. Oh boy, were there. I didn't buy them all. I stupidly took Jean's advice and bought selectively; and after reading half of them in three days I came to the surface, stunned with amazement. It's a provable fact that something about Papuwa makes people want to draw yaoi. It was never a huge fandom, but it attracted a disproportionately high number of good artists. (This is pure luck of the draw. Yuuyuu was a huge fandom, but a good 85% of the stuff was dreck. No-one knows why.) And I had never seen this kind of pan-sexual wonderland happening anywhere in my life before. There's a famous Japanese film called Ugetsu about a poor potter in medieval times who's seduced by a young noblewoman. (She's a ghost, but that he doesn't know.) She takes him into her mansion and shows him how the better classes live, and the potter at one point, reclining on the grass after an al fresco picnic which is clearly about to be followed by al fresco sex, utters the classic line, "I never dreamed such pleasures existed." Precisely. I never dreamed such pleasures existed until I found them in the strange, wonderful and frequently gut- wrenching polymorphous perversity of the Papuwa dojinshi.
Well, that was my downfall. I continued to go to sales and spent huge amounts of money on the fandom which, alas, dwindled in the way the cicada fandoms of Japan do. I also realized I could do in English what I was reading in Japanese and write my own stories. Trust me, that was like being given the equipment to make my own heroin. I've been a happy woman ever since. However, one thing leads to another, and the doujinshi artists of yesterday become the professional artists of today, and the taste for yaoi that began with Captain Tsubasa turns into a demand for more and yet more. For once in step with history, my initiation into yaoi coincided with the explosion of yaoi publication in Japan, and until I left there in April of '96 I was surrounded by a cheerful explosion of homoeroticism unthinkable in any other country in the world. And now that it seems ready to spread into America as well, I'm glad to be in the front line of the fight.
Jeanne