By which criteria, Yamagishi Ryoko's Michel Dutoit qualifies in spades.

We first see Michel from the standpoint of his half-brother Rupert. Michel has moved in with Rupert following their father's death, and spends his time swanning about the house singing an annoying little song when spoken to and flirting with all and sundry including Rupert's fiancee Alice. Rupert, being thick as a plank, thinks Michel has designs on Alice. The only one who sees otherwise is Rupert's best friend, the dashing long-haired Hal (you don't want to know what he does for a living, but I'll tell you anyway. He's a veterinarian and a best-selling romance novelist.) Hal knows Michel is in love with Rupert because Hal is in love with Rupert. Obviously. 'Everyone Loves Rupert', who needs a dose of psychic Ex-Lax. Michel OTOH needs some brains. He demonstrates his feelings for Rupert in obvious ways, like burning his hand on purpose and nearly drowning. Eventually, in a fit of common sense marred only by his tears, he runs off with Hal because he can't bear the idea of seeing Rupert in his married bliss.

It still takes another 100 pages before we get to see Michel and Hal in bed together, because first we have to flashback a few years to Michel's involvement with Serge, a long-haired French rock singer modelled on oh guess who Robert Plant. That he actually has the skeletal looks of the present-day David Bowie is neither here nor there. This work came out in 1987. Serge tears up Michel's picture of the brother he's never met, and Michel slashes his wrist in despair. Serge stops the bleeding and Michel takes off down that long lonesome highway, because that's what shounen-ai heroes have to do. It's a Rule that lonely misunderstood outsiders like Tora-san and every shounen-ai hero in existence must leave whatever poor thing passes for family and home and be Alone.

And so back to the present, with another flashback to Michel being sexually abused by the priest at the orphanage where he was raised after his mother's suicide ok ok, you know how it goes. We're back in the present so Rupert and Alice's boat can disappear in a storm on their honeymoon and Michel can angst some more and thick Rupie can begin to get an inkling that hey Michel cares about him. In the last episode Michel re-encounters Serge. Serge looks a whole lot healthier, and Michel acts a whole lot sicker. This was an episodic series that appeared from time to time. The feeling one gets is that Yamagishi was leading up to a grand finale death-bed scene for Michel, but never got there. Just as well. Shounen-ai heroes also have to die tragically and beautifully, but it's rather a pain when they do. I'm always pleased when the mandatory last chapter doesn't get drawn. (Or you can just say 'no' to the last volume of Wind and Tree Song, on the grounds that it's not justified by anything that's gone before and is only there because it's another Rule that shounen ai and Shakespearian heroes die in the last act.)

Yamagishi Ryoko is most famous for turning the revered figure of Shoutoku Taishi, the rather dull and prudish by all accounts prince who introduced buddhism into Japan, into a first-class whore. (One wonders if nothing is sacred to the Japanese.) She's one of the shounen-ai biggies. And easy as it is to laugh at the unlikely and romantic peculiarities of shounen-ai, I have to admit a more than sneaking fondness for the genre.

It may be because it dates back to my own young years, when the kind of clothes worn weren't in fact all that weird, and contains all these iconographic referrents to the heady 70's when anything seemed possible. That the referrents exist in an impossible mish-mash (yet another avatar of Plant being a novelist and a vet, say) doesn't even feel all that strange. The 70's was a drugged decade, and we all saw weirder stuff than that, even if the Japanese didn't.

Besides, shounen-ai gives you some heavy plot to justify all that angst. After your fifteenth BBG story where A sees B in company with Someone Else and weeps all over the page because He Doesn't Love Me Anymore until discovering ten pages later that It Was All a Mistake we screw like bunnies happy end (aka Angst Light), some serious childhood tragedy that isn't revealed in the first three pages goes down just super.