Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson
There are yakuza and there are yakuza. The real-life version and the movie version alike tend to be short, pugnacious, crop-haired, uncouth, and painfully 'manly.' You know they stink of tobacco and alcohol and cheap hair oil. (Or even expensive hair oil. It's hair oil and it smells.) This may be some gay guy's wet dream, but it's not a yaoi one. No look at the yaoi yakuza. Oh my god. The things the female erotic imagination does to the unlovely reality- the sheer audacity of it- takes my breath away. Now, it may be no more daring to reshape a mobster into an icon of m/m love than to cast a schoolboy or an office worker in the part, but it strikes my mid-Pacific sensibilities as a most subversive act. The yakuza are just such an epitome of 'otoko-rashii' in real life, and the male myths about them are just so deeply entrenched in popular culture. See any monthly shounen manga for an idea of the reverence that the yakuza ideal still receives. To turn those conservative and dedicated heterosexuals into passionate bum-fuckers looks to me like the female imagination launching a radical attack on a basic male myth. (Though I'd bet it's not intended to undermine the myth in any way. I'd bet some of the artists involved consider it simply their way of paying homage to the yakuza.)
But even within the yaoi genre there are yakuza and there are yakuza. I'll admit, most of them leave me cold. It's all hierarchy and male bonding and self-sacrifice, like the shounen manga. The guys are noble and sincere, and the plots turn around deep manly devotion or the necessary conflicts between a man's heart and a man's duty. It's just an eroticized version of the myths the yakuza tell about themselves. 'Giri/ ninjo'- been there, done that. You'd think the morally ambivalent figure of the yakuza with its dark undertones of violence and sexuality- id made flesh- could do better than that. Where, I used to wonder, is the-- the sense of strangeness that the best yaoi produces, that delving into the dark unconscious and fishing up of uncanny archetypal figures?
Well, right here in Ousaka Miya's Face, for a start. The woman zeroes in on what is for me a major yakuza hot button- their tattoos. What are tattoos but a transformation of the human body into a canvas?
And with the yakuza's full-body tattooing, there's a shocking disparity between the beauty of the picture itself and the place in which it's found. The male body is supposed to be the embodiment of the active masculine principle: it does things, it acts upon others. Tattooing turns it into a passive object, a work of art, a feminine thing to be viewed. It makes the yakuza body beautiful in a totally artificial fashion, more artificial even than female make-up. Make-up wipes off; tattoos are forever. Ousaka's hero has the same ambivalent blend of male and female, seme and uke, destructive active principle and passive thing of beauty, as his own tattooing. Her sensuous style (oddly reminiscent of Angel Sanctuary's Yuki Kaori at times) makes the most of this erotic ambivalence. Many people have written about the unchancy and sexual quality of tattoos, and I won't add my two cents further, but the dragon on the main character's back is a good place to start when looking at the erotic eccentricities of his story.
Which is as well, because continuing can be difficult. Every so often Mimi sends me a book saying 'This one makes no sense.' Mimi's always right about that. They don't, though not always for the same reasons. I'm not sure (I'm never sure with Mimi's series) why Face makes no sense. Some of it is the kansai-ben, the regional dialect of western Japan where (legendarily) yakuza are found. Some is what looks to me like extreme ellipsis in the Japanese dialogue. Some is because Ousaka either throws in fantasy images without telling you that's what they are, or throws in totally impossible events that we're to take at face value. And some is because the story isn't even trying to be realistic. It's all id-and-archetype country around there.
But what's definitely true is that 1) we're dealing with a guy called Kaga who's 2) been the bodyguard and effective nursemaid to the son of his gang's leader since the boy was five or so and 3) has the galloping hots for the kid- not because he's a shota-con per se but because the boy has saved his soul. How he did that is up to you to figure out from the high-flown and elliptical Japanese text. Don't ask me. But redeemed Kaga's gratitude doesn't take the form of pure disinterested Masa-type love. Kaga wants to screw the kid senseless. Ok- the vulgarity of the English can't begin to capture Kaga's peculiar emotional mindset, which is a mix of loyalty, self-abnegation, idealism, tender protectiveness and rampaging devouring lust. None of these stand in opposition to the others. Kaga or his author feel that the first four emotions are all most naturally or at least inevitably expressed by the last; sweet attachment and gratitude to a little kid naturally results in fantasies of bloodily deflowering him. Kaga's devotion to and sexual infatuation with his (nameless throughout) master is the ground under his feet, the fact that keeps his world turning. He seemingly manages to feel two or three mutually exclusive emotions every morning before breakfast. In the end it's rather exhilarating to see someone dispose of the western notion 'But people don't do that' with such panache and such a sexual flair.
The work's attitude to sex has me bemused. Sex, and pretty violent sex, is so basic to Kaga as to be unquestioned: it's the way his self expresses itself. Moral considerations of right and wrong never enter into his reactions, which is what you expect both from Japanese culture and yaoi; but social considerations of done and not done do, which is normal for Japanese society but quite out of place in 'icky fantasy' yaoi. This has the disconcerting effect of giving an air of reality- foreign reality, but reality- to the violent and energetic Id-landscape which is Face. This isn't a dismissable piece of yaoi erotica, a drawing to be crumpled up and thrown away. It's a convincing and detailed oil painting that stays with you afterwards.
Kaga fantasizes the boy's face and body laid over that of whatever rentboy or bar hostess he happens to be screwing at the moment, greatly to the distress of his partner who doesn't care to be called 'Young master' during sex. He also seems to fantasize raping his bedmates and leaving them hemorrhaging among the sheets, surrounded by the scattered 10,000 yen notes he's paid for their bodies. I assume these isolated images are fantasies, since rentboy and bar hostess remain thoroughly devoted to him throughout. If they're in fact reality, we're in a weird world indeed. But we are, in fact, in a weird world, where all prostitutes have hearts of gold and Kaga's adolescent master is occasionally drawn as the size of a three year old. Again, at one point Kaga tells him exactly how he feels, immediately offering to cut off whichever finger the boy likes and saying he quite expects to be booted out of the organization as well. Naturally, by yakuza law, wanting to rape the Don's son and heir requires the usual tokens of yakuza apology. I mean, it's all impossible, but it's not yer everyday by the numbers romance.
Obviously a lot of people may find all of this too hard to take. The book eroticizes violence (see the story where Kaga kills the man who raped him at sixteen, in which the killing becomes an epiphany of fused love and hate); it eroticizes the urge to violence (to the extent that Kaga can fall in love with anyone but the young master, he falls in love with men or even boys who are 'beasts' like himself); and it sure as hell eroticizes and romanticizes sex with kids. Anyone allergic to any or all of these had best stay away. The caveat is that it eroticizes all these through the eyes of a man who knows he's not normal, knows he's not justified, and doubts most of the time that he's even human. It's a special glimpse into one man's and one mangaka's odd erotic universe. Without saying that this is the way the world should be, it says that this is the way Kaga's world is.
Note for those intending to buy- two of the five stories come from BBoy Zips. Snow was collected in #8 (Orgies, though orgies of what isn't stated) and Gloria in #7, Showbiz.