Kazarimado/ The Window

Author: Belne
Imprint: June Comics Special
Publisher: Magajin Magajin
ISBN:4-906011-17-9

Reviewed by Jeanne

Belne's world runs on a high romantic ethos, even if her artstyle takes a little getting used to. She's a few years younger than the 49ers, and much of her work appeared in June publications, which is an advantage of being younger than the 49ers and able to draw distinct BL while they were drawing shounen ai. I still detect a hint of the shounen ai world in her- see that high romantic ethos, not to mention her characters' chins.

But Kazari Mado begins with a classic WTF situation. An alligator comes to someone's door saying he's checking accounts for the gas company. The long-haired bikei type in gauzy chiffon who opens to him looks momentarily kerblonxed. Alligator becomes flustered. 'This is Room 17, isn't it?' 'Yes,' says the beauty. 'Come in.' Alligator goes Uhhh ahhh..., Beauty says '80 pounds.' 'Uhh, I'm an alligator,' says the alligator, 'is that OK?' 'In advance,' says the beauty. Your reviewer goes and pours herself a stiff drink, comes back and reads the cover blurb which tells you that we're in 70's London dealing with a male prostitute who sits in the rounded turret window of a hotel. Passersby who show an interest are instructed by his pimp in the street to go to room 17 and say they're checking accounts for the gas company. The alligator? Is your average respectable businessman alligator, rather shy and wistful and romantic. 'I'm a very foolish alligator,' he says with sad tears in his eyes. 'Falling in love with a man in a window, yes,' the whore agrees kindly. (A very considerate alligator too. 'I hope my hide won't scratch you?' 'My claws don't hurt you?' 'I hope my skin isn't too cold?' And good in bed too.) So umm yes. It's about an alligator and a male whore.

The other stories aren't quite of this order of surrealism. People come to window guy for consolation. He consoles them. There's the gigolo whose clients are women and who doesn't even register the male whores in his world. A guy with Want Go To Hell tattooed on his arm. (People who object to fangirl Japanese don't know manga English and have no concept of cultural tit-for-tat.) The two schoolboys who appear together, the superior older type instructing his besotted friend in the ways of the world. A clown who won't take off his make-up. They get- hot sex and lots of it, some of our whore's casual emotional ministrations, and a low-key catharsis. Afterwards we see the guy and his pimp in some casual situation, usually revealing just who the client was.

I find something quintessentially female and appealing in this book's tanbiesque romanticism. We're light-years away from the 'whore with a heart of gold' trope. That's conventional (and male) thinking, which can't get over the basic fact that it's a whore with a heart of gold, and hence slightly subhuman. By contrast our hero is, in his own way, superhuman, somehow removed from the realm of the everyday. Both tender and worldly-wise, both professionally detached and sweetly melancholic, he has his own little tristesses- a thing for the gigolo, for one- but there remains a basic mystery to him. His pimp (if he is a pimp) touches on it in the last story, where the two of them go to Fortnum and Mason's to buy tea and then have a picnic in Kensington Gardens. "Whenever we go walking together in the early afternoon, I want to ask him- but of course I don't ask him, because it's not allowed- why--?" Why when evening comes does he dress himself in a woman's gown, put on his long gloves, rouge his lips and his nipples, and go sit in the window? If I were being fanciful I'd draw parallels with Buddhist bodhisattvas who take on the form of prostitutes in order to enlighten those capable of being enlightened. It's not quite that, but... it's close.