Manga Shelf 

Aestheticism 

'Papuwa' began in April '91 as a manga strip in a shonen (boys) monthly magazine called 'Gangan'. The story starts with a young man called Shintaro fleeing in a boat with a jewel he seems to have stolen from a mysterious outfit called the Ganmadan-- which could be an army or a business group, for all one knows. He intends to sell the jewel for cash and go rescue his little brother Kotaro: from what, is not said. But a plane marked 'Ganmadan' fires on his boat, and he washes up, shipwrecked and unconscious, on a desert island inhabited by a little boy in a grass skirt- the eponymous Papuwa- and his dog Chappie. Papuwa takes the jewel while Shintaro is unconscious. When he wakes up he tries to get it back by throwing knives and other such persuasive activities, but Papuwa proves to be invincible. "If you want it back," he says, "you have to work for it"- literally, 'pay for it with your body', a line which provided later dojinshi artists with much fodder. So Shintaro becomes a sort of domestic slave, cooking, cleaning, and washing Papuwa's underwear which he changes seven times a day; also trying to get the jewel back from Papuwa and find a way to return to Japan. 

In the following episodes various types from the Ganmadan show up to try to recover the jewel, unsuccessfully of course. There's a certain sense of jealousy at work as well: Shintaro is the number 1 in the Ganmadan and bringing him down would be a coup. Four of them- Tottori and Miyagi, who are 'best friends' (that's 'besuto furendo' in katakana, which the doujinshi artists took to mean' fuck buddies'), the wild Koji and the lonesome Arashiyama wind up staying on the island. One learns a little about the island's history, how in the distant past the island was an archipelago that sunk, and how Papuwa is the last descendant of the archipelago's inhabitants. One learns rather more than one wants to about the odd animals who live on the island (drag queen giant fish and bisexual snails, mainly), all of whom can talk because, as our informant (a dead bald eagle, if you're wondering) says, the island is the last holy place in the world. 

One also becomes aware that a person called Magic is watching the island. There are teasing end panels for several months before he finally makes an appearance, announcing himself as the head of the Ganmadan (who are a band of killers bent on world domination) and Shintaro's loving Papa. He wants Shintaro back, with or without the stone; Shintaro wants Kotaro back from wherever Magic has hidden him away; and after a lot of slanging, Magic leaves without fulfilling his mission. But he does give the history of the two tribes of the Red and Blue Stones to his son, who's apparently never heard it before. In the distant past there were two tribes, each of whom owned a magic stone. They joined together and created a peaceful prosperous kingdom. But the Blue tribe became ambitious, took its stone and left, while the Red tribe remained on its native island. Shintaro just thought the 'hiseki' (secret stone) he'd stolen was a nice valuable jewel, good for pawning, and hadn't realized it was the hereditary treasure of his family, the Blue clan. (A note on names: that's what they're called, the Blue Clan or Family, but fannish convention is that the family name is Ganma. This does mean, as a Japanese fan pointed out, that Gunma is Ganma Gunma- because last names come first, naturally.) 

Magic leaves, and the strip goes back to its 'assassin of the month' or 'funny happening of the month' format. Among the assassins is Shintaro's cousin Gunma, the scientist, who captures a lot of fan attention because of his particular love/ hate relationship to Shintaro. The manga however began to have serious moments among the 12 year old jokes, with references to the imprisoned Kotaro waiting for his brother and hints about the connection between the Ganmadan and Papuwa and the stones. (Papuwa had a stone of his own- the red one- but forgets what he did with it.) Gunma's infatuated tutor-cum-babysitter Dr.Takamatsu also makes an appearance, bent on revenging Shintaro's treatment of Gunma. And there's reference to the mysterious 'hisekigan' (secret-stone-eye) some quality of Papuwa's eye that lets him blow holes in things when he's so inclined. 

Finally there came an almost totally serious episode with Magic, and from this point the tone of the manga begins to get more serious. We see Magic at the beginning blowing holes in a mountain side with his hisekigan (which is often called the Ganma eye) and lamenting that he really can't control it properly without the stone. He returns to the fortress of the Ganma-dan and his inner chambers, filled with stuffed Shin-chan dolls (I said, 'more' serious, not completely serious) and a large picture of his son to which he addresses his reminiscences of what good times the two of them had when Shin-chan was a boy. An aide comes and announces a message from Magic's brother Servis, saying he's coming to the Ganma headquarters. Magic seems less than delighted about his brother's return after an absence of seven years: "He's the only person whose thoughts I've never been able to read." Also Shintaro always liked him better than his father, which was the beginning of the very popular school of Servis/Shintaro yaoi (or Shintaro/Servis. The fans are divided on which is the seme.) Servis appears at the end of the episode, a one-eyed blonde beauty in a fur-collared black coat. (His appearance was followed next day by a flood of Magic/Servis yaoi stories. Tons.) Servis says he's heard what happened and is here to bring Shintaro back from the island. 

The next two episodes show Servis on the island, defeating Shintaro and persuading him to come back to Japan. Shintaro says he only wants to see Kotaro and asks why Magic has shut him away. Servis tells him about the Ganma eye, which Shintaro knows about but has never seen put in use. (Magic has the Ganma peculiarity in both eyes rather than in the usual one, but he won't use it in front of his son: 'He'll think I'm a monster.') It's a characteristic of the Ganma family, an exceptionally powerful ray of energy that comes from their eye. (There's another, evidently weaker kind that comes through the palm of the hand, and in a flashback we see Servis training Shintaro to use it. Shintaro, alone of his family, was born without the Ganma eye- and he's also black-haired and black-eyed in a blonde blue-eyed family, a telling point.) Servis says it's extremely difficult to control, and to prove the point relates the tragic story of his best friend Jan. (Jan's a male BTW. There are no women in this strip.) 

In their first battle Servis' entire squadron was wiped out except for himself and Jan. Jan was a black-haired guy who looked a lot like Shintaro. They were discovered by enemy soldiers who were about to kill them, so Servis for the first time used his Ganma eye. "The next moment all I could see was the countless number of the enemy dead and the lifeless body of my friend. I gouged my eye out then and there." Love (the Japanese word 'shin'yuu' meaning your closest best friend and buddy, is read by the Japanese fans as 'lover' on all occasions), tragedy, eternal regrets- and the fans went wild. Mountains of djs this time, sparking the genre the fans call Jan/Sabi (the Japanese name being Sabisu. There's actually a reason why Jan is Englished as Jan and not Jon, but the latter is more what it sounds like.) "I wasn't able to control the power of the Ganma eye," Servis says. "The only person who can control it- even though he has two of them- is Magic." It turns out that Kotaro has two Ganma eyes as well, and either Magic is afraid he won't be able to control them (which is what Servis says in this episode, using the conditional: if it gets out of control) and will hurt someone, or he already has hurt people (as Magic says to him in a side story) and must be kept apart from other people. 

Shintaro returns with Servis, who hands him over to his brother. Magic thinks everything can go back to normal now but Shintaro is still bent on finding where Kotaro is in the fortress. He succeeds, aided by what seems to be a psychic link between the two of them, but is appalled to discover that his sweet little brother has only one desire in life, and that's to kill their father. Magic and Servis appear; Kotaro aims his Ganma eye at Magic, and Shintaro unthinkingly runs between them to shield him. The blast knocks him out of his body. We cut to the island where Papuwa suddenly says "Shintaro's dead," to the consternation of everyone, not least of all the fans who were left dangling for a month with this very cliff-hanger ending. 

Well, Shintaro's not dead: he's a ghost with the proper iconographic halo. But his body was altered after the blast, turning into a large blond stranger who claims that he's Magic's true son, imprisoned inside his own body for 24 years by the dark haired Shintaro who is an impostor. True son or not, he doesn't get on with Magic any better than the other Shintaro. He takes Kotaro (who thinks his new brother is just keen: "He looks just like you, Daddy") and heads off to the island to get the jewel. Magic, Servis, Gunma, Takamatsu and Shintaro's ghost get there first, courtesy of Shintaro's new spiritual connections. The search begins for a new body for him, which the same ghostly advisor as before says can be found in a shrine in the east of the island, but they must defeat three guardians on the way in order to get it. 

In an interlude before the quest actually begins, we have a moonlight conversation between Servis and a Takamatsu looking much handsomer than he's ever done before- another signal of the gradual shift from gag comic to serious yaoi. The scene not only includes some seriously sexy body language from Servis (leaning close to light the end of his cigarette from the end of Takamatsu's which inspired- can you guess?- oceans of Sabi/Taka yaoi), it also reveals that Takamatsu's devotion to Gunma comes from his devotion to Gunma's dead father. Aside from that fact and the man's name, we learned nothing else about this new brother, but it was enough to inspire the prolific school of Taka/Lu slash. (The name in katakana is Ruza which I spell Luzar, out of deference to the small portion of fans who want to English it as Luther and in a determined effort to ignore the majority who would more correctly spell it Loser. After the Dark Schneider Polish Sausages and Quatro Vaginas of manga and anime, a little Loser shouldn't bother me, perhaps: but it does, oh it does.) 

The next episode introduced yet another new brother at the end, the stunningly handsome, hugely sinister Harlem come in menacing pursuit of the others with the newly appeared blond Shintaro (called White Shintaro by some fannish convention) and Kotaro. Handsome or not, Harlem has clearly been doing terrible things to Magic's aides in his absence (aides-shmades: they're catamites pure and simple. Name of Tiramisu and Chocolate Romance. Need one say more?) Both are bruised and manacled and Tiramisu is without his pants, a detail which then inspired (some other topographical feature of) Harlem/Tiramisu yaoi. Episode after that revealed that Harlem is Servis' twin, thus disconcerting the fans who'd done stories that showed him as the second brother. Episode ended with Servis' group on the island finally reaching the shrine and the last Guardian. We don't see his face in this episode, but he's wearing a Ganmadan uniform and carrying a human eyeball in his hand and seriously discombobulating both Takamatsu and Servis. And of course it's Jan, still 18 years old even after a quarter of a century has passed. 

The next installments reveal that Jan is a creation of the red stone's, centuries old, who was sent out into the world to bring Magic down when his power began to grow too great. His true identity was discovered before he could do so and he was killed. "But it wasn't you who killed me," he tells Servis, and then White Shintaro shows up and tosses a Ganma eye bolt at him and he disappears in a landslide for an episode or two. We don't find out for fifteen months who *did* kill Jan, giving the fans lots of time to write speculative stories. Only one of them- Nakamura Rumi of Swastica- guessed right, but she did it in spades. 

We also discover why Jan and Shintaro look alike and what's the deal with White Shintaro. After Jan's body was destroyed the Red stone set out to make a new one, but before it could be finished Magic's son was about to be born. The stone replicated Jan's spirit and sent it into the child's body, knowing that some day Jan's clone would come back to the island. The replicated spirit naturally took over from the true spirit, WS. Since Jan and Shintaro are the same person, and Shintaro needs a new body, they join together: and at that point the artist went on a three month vacation. Before she left, she thoughtfully provided a group portrait of the brothers so the fans could do proper Luzar stories instead of having him in back view all the time. (This is perhaps the only drawback to manga: you can't write stories about a character until you know what he looks like.) 

The fans did so, producing piles of 'How did Luzar die' stories, when they weren't writing "Don't do it, Shin-chan!" stories. Having Shintaro turn into Jan was an immensely unpopular move, and Shibata may have taken note of the fact. She's a dojinshi fan herself, unlike those artists who merely tolerate them. She even publishes her own dojinshis, which is a problem. Here's this fanzine that looks like canon and what are you going to do with it? The artist herself was the source of the Magic/Jan slash tradition. In any case, when the story resumed, the combination hadn't worked. Shintaro was Shintaro in Jan's body and Jan was the disembodied spirit. (He grabs the body of one of Harlem's men temporarily, but eventually gets a new one from the Red Stone.) The story wandered around through most of '94, with lots of small-scale fights (Shintaro and White Shintaro a lot), lots of Servis being seriously unpleasant to Jan ("**My** best friend died 25 years ago"), lots of Harlem and his men, one of whom Marker was Arashiyama's master ages before they parted on bad terms and another of whom, Riki (or possibly Liquid, but I hope not) turns out to have a fondness for Disney animals and thinks he'd died and gone to heaven when he meets the bratty little beasts on the island. He takes to looking at sunsets, which prompts Marker to go to Harlem and ask him to bomb that place to smithereens right away- "It's dangerous for us to stay here. This island changes people." It's Riki's body that Jan takes because Riki matches the vibrations of the place.

 There were also lots of dropped hints about Luzar- how he was a brilliant scientist and Takamatsu's patron and so on. Finally we got around to Servis and Harlem remembering their older brother: Servis had him as a wonderful person and the only one who sympathized when Jan died; Harlem had him as a serious jerk if not a complete sadist, who killed Harlem's pet bird one time when Harlem was being recalcitrant about going to bed. The fan vote in previous dojinshi was about 90% for Luzar as odd-man-out nice guy of the family, and Shibata evidently decided it would be fun to put a spanner in those works. 

After this the series went ballistically unlikely. Bear with me while I recap the high points- or low points, if you like. 

Revelations about the past proceeded to come thick and fast. How Luzar Died: after Servis gouged his eye out Luzar went into a tailspin and eventually took himself off to war where he was killed at once. Strong suspicions that it was at Magic's orders. Then we got the Switched Babies bombshell: to revenge Luzar's death Takamatsu and Servis changed the newly-born Gunma and Shintaro over, so that Shintaro (original and White versions) are really Luzar's sons and Gunma is really Magic's. This upset all the emotional relationships to date as well, but the artist seemed not to care. Plot point is that Takamatsu leaves Gunma in order to be with Luzar's true son WS, reasoning somehow that he was responsible for WS' 25 years of captivity. Gunma is in conniptions not merely at being abandoned by Takamatsu but also at finding himself Magic's son. Then it transpires that Shintaro isn't Jan's clone after all, as Jan deduces when the merger fails to take- he's a creation of the blue stone, which detected the interloper in the baby's body, killed it, and substituted something that looked like Jan in order to deceive the red stone into thinking its plan had worked. Shintaro being on the Blue Stone side, Jan stabs him to death (or should that be 'death'?): only to have him replaced by yet another personality lurking in Shintaro's neural systems, the guardian of the blue stone, Asu-- a seriously nasty bit of goods. But Blue Stone Asu has a hard time staying in Shintaro's body- which was, you'll recall, originally Jan's body and a creation of the Red Stone. Shintaro's personality keeps reappearing and kicking him out. Blue Stone promises Asu something much better, he disappears for a bit, and the Papuwa/Shintaro party can get ready to fight Harlem and his special squad- also Magic, who's settled his differences with his younger brother somehow and is determined to kill his one-time beloved son Shintaro. He takes to solilquizing about his high and lonely destiny--something about how no-one can understand the sorrow of being one of the Blue clan and having these enmities thrust upon one. 

While Magic and Harlem are conferring, Asu shows up in his new body, surprise surprise it's Luzar's that the stone has been saving for some emergency like this one. Being in L's body has given Asu L's memories, including the one of detecting Jan's origin from his blood tests and following after his squadron. Finding Jan wounded and Servis unconscious, Luzar killed Jan and was about to carry his brother away when Magic appeared and told him to leave Servis where he was. Magic reasons that if Servis learns who killed his friend he'll come to hate Luzar which will start a rift in the family. Luzar obeys, they both leave, Servis comes to and thinks he's killed Jan and all goes as before. Luzar blames himself for causing Servis to gouge out his eye, goes all dramatic with remorse and takes himself off to battle to seek his death. End hideous revelations for the series and not a minute before time. Hideous revelations at least have the effect of getting the traumatized Servis (who'd concluded from the Jan's statement 'It wasn't you who killed me' that Magic and Harlem had) back into Jan's arms, greatly to the fan's relief. 

More happens, of course. The evil Asu throws a couple of stones through Takamatsu who's appalled at seeing what appears to be his beloved sensei come back from the dead. Takamatsu's dying words are an injunction to Gunma to love his cousin White Shintaro. The two join to battle Asu and are nearly killed themselves- but Luzar's personality reappears, takes temporary control of his body, and goads White Shintaro into aiming his Ganma eye at him, the purpose being to destroy both Asu and himself together. Luzar dies a hero. Magic is inspired by this example to make peace with his sons, including Kotaro who is bound on killing him with all the uncontrolled force at his command. Magic has to battle Kotaro and is nearly overwhelmed, but his brothers and nephews all add their strength to his and he prevails. During the battle Papuwa and Jan and the island inhabitants take both stones and leave the island, which has now become unclean. Their departure seems to be the final blow that defeats Kotaro, who gives up the fight and lapses into unconsciousness. 

Comes the last episode, more than a little rushed because the artist was feuding with her publishing company. Happy ending all around. Kotaro is in a coma, watched over by his loving father Magic who's retired as General in favour of Shintaro. Gunma and WS are an evident item- WS having turned into a scientist always in Gunma's company. Harlem has forgiven Luzar. Takamatsu is still alive, in spite of that stone through his chest, and Jan suddenly turns up to ask Servis to marry him. "I'll die before you do," Servis says, in tears, and Jan says, "Nah- look, I'll become a famous scientist and find a way to keep you young and beautiful forever." (Nice throwaway line. In the artist's current series, he's done just that- at least, he's managed to keep Takamatsu alive and young but Something Horrible has clearly happened to Servis and we're all back to our favourite game, waiting to see how Shibata's going to torture us this month.) 

Right, thank you for sitting through all this. Now to your questions. 

What makes Servis number 1 uke/seme of choice? 

1) He was the first relatively straight character to appear in the series. It took a while before Shibata started cutting him down- which she did, eventually, turning him into the indulged youngest brother who goes around being tragic instead of getting on with life. Even Jan tells him, at their first re-encounter, to shape up and stop moaning over his past. But when he first appeared he was perfect- cool, humorous, polite to Papuwa, friendly to Chappie, and nice to the little animals on the island who behave like bratty six year olds. Also the only real adult in the series. Also invincible. Also tragic. 

2) Also tragic. A dead shin'yu whom you killed yourself and have been mourning ever since is dynamite. 'Servis mourns Jan' goes right along with Kirk mourns Spock or Whoever mourns Whoever in touching that universal nerve of loss and grief. (Servis/Jan ultimately gets competition from 'Takamatsu mourns Luzar', my personal threnody of choice. In spite of the former's six month head start, Takamatsu wins the tragedy award because, though Luzar does come back briefly, he dies again, tragically and beautifully, killed by his son.) 

3) For about six months, he was the only brother. Yes of course Gunma must have had a father, but he was never mentioned and hence was ignorable. But for the Japanese, as I must have said, 'nii-san' is practically an erotic term. It is an erotic term: it's what real ukes call their semes, or male prostitutes their clients. For fan artists, nii-san/ototo is a must-slash; and I'd guess a lot of fans wanted to slash Magic with someone but didn't want it to be Shintaro. My friend Akemi, not a Shintaro fan, says she can't see Magic/Shintaro: Magic is just too much the loving father. Magic hits on everyone else because he can't allow himself to hit on his son. So if not Shin-chan, then Servis. The Harlem fans naturally do lots of Harlem/Servis when they aren't doing lots of Harlem/Tiramisu. But the volume of older generation couplings is dictated by the length of time the characters have been around: so Magic/Servis is by far the biggest, followed by Takamatsu/ Servis, Takamatsu/Luzar (which gets its boost from Luzar being dead and because it can reflect on the long-standing Takamatsu/ Gunma coupling), and Harlem/Servis. There's a little Luzar/Harlem, basic SM stuff from those people who decided that killing birds meant Luzar was naturally into human vivisection; a little Magic/Harlem (but two seme's- what can you do with them? Boring) and hardly any Magic/Luzar at all except from people intrigued by the psychology of the coupling. 

4) Political incorrectness alert. Remember fans are fans are very young Japanese women. So though the professional june stuff has no trouble with two manly men together, the amateur stuff has to answer the question 'Which of them is the woman?' Servis is. He has the longest hair in the series, a fact Harlem comments on at least once, disparagingly; and he wears sexually neutral clothing, that famous fur trimmed gown. (On the island it loses the fur- thank god- but becomes even more reminiscent of a black velvet hostess' gown.) Also he can feel- women feel, remember? while men choke back their tears. Also in yaoi men rape, and Servis doesn't come off as a rapist (though there are, naturally, a few Servis rapes Shintaro stories. If it can be thought of, the fans will draw it.) 

And in fact the real woman/child in Papuwa is Gunma, because he's younger. Shibata started him as a feist, carrying a load of grudges and a diary in which he writes down everything that Shintaro ever did to him. In spite of the facts, fan opinion was so strong in slashing him as Shintaro's hopelessly loving uke (perhaps the same fans who didn't want to do Papa/Shintaro and didn't like to put Shin-chan with Arashiyama either) that she revised him and cast him as Takamatsu's weepy little catamite. The fans then turned him into the embodiment of all the female/childish virtues- the loyally loving innocent who wonders why everyone can't just get on without this awful fighting all the time; and by series' end Shibata was following suit. It's rare that an artist responds to the fans' opinions in this way, but it makes for interesting, not to mention interactive reading. No fan, by the way, will admit it works this way. No no. They were just picking up on the latent features in the character that the artist had put there. 

The difference between Servis and Gunma is that Servis is clearly capable of being on the top. With the younger members he almost has to be. He's older and stronger, and taller than Shintaro, the hero, at least. The fans get tied up by this last detail when they slash him with Shintaro (I should go to bed; that's the fourth time I've typed 'Shinatro' in five minutes) or Takamatsu or Magic, and it sometimes leads them into realistic stories, where Servis is the emotional top but the sexual bottom. The most perverse zine I ever read- it's a short story- slashed Gunma and Servis, and made Gunma, on a technicality, the seme, while insisting over and over on the lily-white purity and unstained chastity of both. I liked it so much I did an English version, but I couldn't keep the Decadent fascination with virgin sex. 

What does Magic do with his two Blue eyes besides blow holes in the landscape? Nothing. The details of just how Magic is intending to achieve his stated dream of world conquest with his army of assassins are left to the readers' imaginations. Many do battlefields littered with bodies and Magic standing in front of them; some posit an on-going state of world-wide anarchy with ignorant armies clashing by night; some make the Ganma-dan analogous to the CIA and the FBI. (I like the last one. There's a famous line, where Magic asks his teenage son "Who do you like better, Servis or me?" and teenage son- who's reading a gay leather magazine- says "Servis. For someone like me he's irresistible," and his father tells him sternly that same-sex love is wrong because it's unnatural- and all the fans, thinking of Tiramaisu, are going 'Give me a break'- at any rate, the parallels to J.Edgar suddenly hit me; and the army of assassins does sound a lot like the CIA, doesn't it?) We only see the ganma eye being used three times- once with Magic, once in Servis' flashback, and the first time when Papuwa turns his on somebody and Arashiyama realizes it's the (in Japanese) Ganmaho- but we don't know what a ganmaho is. (But yes, the Red tribe has it too. The two families were once one. Jan doesn't: he's a servant, sort of, not a real member of the family. Sort of. The point is moot.) However the characters are always knocking each other around with the milder form that comes through the palm of one's hand: and we assume that whenever the brothers are fighting and the Ganma headquarters is rocking on its foundations that that's what they're using.