Sapphire

Author: Tanaka Yuuko
Imprint: Halloween shoujo comics Special
Publisher: Asahi Sonorama
ISBN: 4-257-98242-X
vol 2: 4-257-98532-1

Reviewed by Jeanne

Auden didn't write, but might have if he'd lived to see Japanese manga:

About BL they were never wrong,
The old mangaka: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

(Or sitting in a classroom, mostly. But that's shounen ai.)

It's not that I have anything against manga where the sexual relationship of the protagonists is the story itself, as in Nitta Youka's works. But I still prefer to have other plot things happening that feed into the sex, as in Kodaka Kazuma. And I like it even better if you have the BL fed by a totally non-BL plot. Full-course meal there. It's not *all* about the ghei.

The Japanese, bless them, are quite happy to write ohh detective stories police stories adventure stories ghost stories and horror stories with, yes, BL happening somewhere in the mix. Sometimes the BL is intrinsic to the manga and sometimes it's a throwaway detail that's just there for fun. The latter of course is common in shoujo manga- we have the main story which also happens to involve this umm guy with a thing for other guys. Aoike Yasuko's From Eroica with Love is perhaps the classic example of that. In the late 80's western fans embraced the thing with glad cries, thinking it was a manga about an openly gay man's pursuit of a straight one. Revolutionary! Groundbreaking! And in Japan, ho-hum. Also wrong in its perceived focus: the romantic spy adventures were always equally if not more important than Dorian's passionate pursuit of Klaus. And from a Japanese pov, the series is really about Klaus. *He's* the character that makes it worth reading.

Still, however commonplace the trope may be in Japan, it's rather pleasant for the western reader to find these guys with the thing for other guys casually rubbing shoulders with everyone else. (Can't call them gay. Gay in English at least is a social construct largely nonexistent in Japan.) This unquestioning approach creates the impression, true neither there nor here, that same-sex love is just a normal part of everyday life, not worthy of special notice or remark.

Take the series Sapphire, a nice piece of fluff from Hallowe'en Comics. As the name might suggest, Hallowe'en Comics deals in Weird Tales- spooks, possession, psychics, anything odd. Here we have a psychic boy, an orphan all set to become a juvenile delinquent, except that the victim he selects for his pickpocketing is a professional psychic stronger than himself. The pro takes the kid home, being in need of some help around the shop as it were, and ends up adopting him and giving him a new lease on life. The pro is also a female-dressing okama, rather a stunning one too. An article is waiting to be written about the construct of the okama in mainstream culture, but someone else can write it. The impression I get is that the effeminate umm speaker (is what it seems to come down to: you can tell an okama by the way he talks) is considered humourous mostly. But there are 'straight' okama characters, and Sapphire is one of them. A western pov sees her as close to androgynous, with all the best characteristics of both male and female- strong, caring, maternal, courageous, principled, and with a mean right hook. No sex or even romance, though there's a media type who hangs around Sapphire. 'She's a *guy*, you know' Sapphire's rambunctious ward tells him in exasperation. 'Yeah- I know' the TV type says, wondering what the kid's on about. (Volume two has a couple of unrelated weird tales/ ghost stories as well, one of which is a little love story with a vicious sting in its tail. Worth checking out if you read Japanese.)

Go to Makiho review