Midare somenishi

Author: Kodaka Kazuma
Imprint: Bamboo Comics- Reijin
Publisher: Take Shoubou
ISBN: 4-8124-5292-9

Reviewed by Jeanne Johnson

OK. I know. 'Kodaka Kazuma has an historical manga with a red- haired uke and a black-haired seme.' 'Hey! A Kizuna A/U!' Well- no. Not unless you expand the meaning of alternative universe to include 'alternative personalities.' There's nothing gentle and sweet about this Ranmaru clone. Shirou likes to kill people. It's a problem. His father solves it by disinheriting him and packing him off to a temple, where it's hoped his blood-thirsty urges can be kept under control somehow. Not a hope. On the way he and his men and his little brother who's followed after him are ambushed by mountain bandits. One's an okama ('queen' in English- a man who dresses and talks like a woman) with a taste for ripping apart sweet young flesh ie Fujimaru the younger brother. To keep Fujimaru out of the okama's clutches, Shirou yields his virgin ass (reluctantly and with much clenching of teeth) to Sougetsu, the Enjouji-clone 'kashira' (bossman) who undertakes to teach him all about semes and ukes and who's really on top. By the end of the first story Shirou has become the boss' righthand brigand and bumboy. But the vengeful okama is still around, peeved that a) he hadn't been given Fujimaru and b) that Sougetsu is more taken with Shirou's ass than with his. Hell hath no fury like an okama scorned. After which we proceed through a melodramatic spiral of events accompanied by much humping and pumping of muscled bodies. (Lord, the abs on those guys.) Plus a few tender bishounen bums for those who like that sort of thing.Life as usual in Kodaka-land.

The series began after Kodaka did a 'cut' (a stand-alone picture) of a red-haired samurai that garnered a lot of attention from the fans. She says she'd meant him for a seme, but it seemed to her that doing the 'looks like a seme but is really an uke' thing was more Reijin-ish. (Does this mean Reijin has a reputation for doing perverse yaoi? There *is* something ayashii uhh sort of wrong about its overall tone, in this writer's humble opinion.) The sort-of- wrongness doesn't stop at doing seme/seme. Possibly Kodaka always writes high-flown melodrama, but I discern certain points in common with Minami Megumu's decadent Hanaotoshi world. That villainous okama with a thing for little wee-wees is pure Megumu. And as if one weren't enough, s/he's balanced by a second pure- hearted okama that Shirou meets later on. There are incestuous relationships both suggested (the overtones of buracon- excessive brotherly attachment- between Shirou and Fujimaru) and overt (a spoiler. See below in the spoiler section.) There's the odd reverse mirror-imaging between the two pairs of brothers- Shirou the seme manque and Fujimaru the coded-female uke; and Chihiro the okama older brother in the latter part of the story and Tatsuma his rambunctious very male younger brother who in the end is told to 'save' his older brother.

And of course there's the division of sexual labour. The men are excessively male (black-hearted destroyers wrestling with the angst caused by their tenderer feelings) and the coded-females are excessively female (of the saintly self-sacrificing school of Japanese womanhood.) Shirou and Sougetsu's relationship is the lust of enemies who will eventually kill each other as the highest expression of their devotion. Real manly love. Fujimaru and Chihiro use lines I swear I've heard from the heroines of classic jidai- geki pictures. For those up on Japanese cinema, these two are Mizoguchi heroines like the sister in Sanshou the Bailiff or the wife in Ugetsu: loving forgiving *strong* victims.

This sort of stuff can't remotely be called characterization. It's archetypification, but so what? So much of manga is. Midare somenishi (and if anyone knows what that means I hope they'll tell me, because none of my dictionaries has a clue) is shamelessly over the top, even for Kodaka, but the result is a thoroughly enjoyable romp. She deploys all the cliches of erotic melodrama with great gusto and immense energy, so that a good cathartic time is had by all while the tears and blood flow in approximately equal proportions.

Click here for spoilers