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37/50: once more with tango apasionado (mizushiro setona, "the cornered mouse dreams of cheese" series)

What is there left for me to say about Mizushiro Setona's "The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese" and its sequel "The Carp on the Chopping Block Jumps Twice"? It is a series that has been in my life for a long time; there are bl readers who are younger than my relationship with this series. I've written two reviews/recommendations for it in the intervening years, neither of which I particularly like but together form more or less a comprehensive overview of the plots and themes and my fascination with the story. Though I routinely reread this series every Valentine's Day (a mark of a true sicko), I rarely come away with anything to say about it, other than "it is so good, and I wish everyone would read it."

To talk about "Cornered Mouse" is to realize that there is no new discourse under the sun. "Cornered Mouse" is a bl story serialized in a josei magazine, written by a mangaka who began her career in bl but, by the time "Chopping Block" completed its publication, had fully converted to josei—as confounding an entry into the "what gets to be called bl?" conversation as you could hope for. It features a character (Imagase) who is openly and unabashedly gay, as well as a character (Kyouichi) who identifies from beginning to end as straight, despite a prolonged romantic and sexual relationship with a man, cleanly straddling the stereotypes about how Heisei-era bl presented gayness as identity or lifestyle. It prominently features a number of female characters, who are (ex-)wives, ex-girlfriends, affair partners, lovers, harpies, nuisances, roadblocks, and scolds, yet it does so with a richness and tenderness towards their characters that few romance stories, bl or otherwise, have achieved since. The main pairing switches, repeatedly, but in a way that feels vaguely like they're doing it specifically to piss off "riba/vers" fans. Years after its heyday, it got a live action adaptation, one that significantly deviates from the source material, but in a way that (as I will later argue in this entry!) makes it one of the few bl live action adaptations that treats itself like a standalone piece of art, as opposed to merely an extension of the source material.

Is this because any era of bl will be richer, more varied, more human than the calcified impression it leaves on the next generation? Perhaps it is impossible to understand how much bl is being written and published and read every day, even if you were alive and reading during that time period, but especially if you are a later reader trying to recreate the landscape? Or is it because Mizushiro is a generational talent, uniquely capable of portraying complicated human drama and convincing you that two people emoting at each other is a plot that deserves multiple volumes?

The world will never know.

Whatever the reason, "Cornered Mouse" remains one of my favorite manga, one that has stood up to endless rereading. Without my knowing it, "Cornered Mouse" and I have grown old together, seen each other through all stages of life, at our worst and at our best. I've gone from being the freshman of Kyouichi and Imagase's flashbacks to being the married woman at her school reunion to suddenly realizing I'm older than both Kyouichi and Imagase, old enough that Kyouichi saying "we're both too old to frantically scramble after love" no longer feels like advice and now feels like seeing your younger sibling achieve self-awareness.

"Cornered Mouse" is special for many reasons, but its ending is one of the most special, a denouement that stuns me no matter what age I am when I read it or how often I've read it. Few bl can boast multiple break-ups, its main character almost getting happily married to a woman, and a reconciliation that almost immediately ends in another break-up before concluding with the two main characters settling into domesticity, all while joking about a hypothetical separation. And for all that, "Chopping Block" is not an ambiguous or unhappy ending. The details once sketched are unabashedly romantic, and you could almost envision the romance movie filter another mangaka may have cast. In a gently falling snow, Kyouichi and Imagase reconcile. They brush the snow off of each other's shoulders. They promise to buy each other rings and to start over.

But they, like their readers, are too aware of the baggage they bring, together and separately into this moment. Mizushiro is a powerful writer, one who does not shy away from negative feeling and who is able to, as the TikTok moms might say, bless this mess. Where other writers may have been tempted to throw that baggage into the Tokyo Bay, for their characters to wipe everything away for a clean start and a happy ending, Mizushiro makes her characters bear the weight. Their relationship, she argues, only exists because of it. How fitting, then, that the last line of the story is of Imagase saying, "you can carry it with you."

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I have read "Cornered Mouse"/"Chopping Block" multiple times, and each time I've come away with a different and (imo) more complete understanding of its characters. In 2009, I read the final act of "Chopping Block" as Kyouichi dreading the mess he would make if he ever met Imagase again, and then being shocked with the force of his lust when Imagase demands that he fuck him in the apartment hallway. In 2022, I thought it was about Kyouichi being freed from his self-imposed confines of needing to be a "good person."

But in 2026, I am not only older and wiser, but also in possession of an advantage past Cathy could never have dreamed of: an interview on the story with none other than Mizushiro Setona herself, as well as the editor who was in charge of most of the manga's run.

In her interview, Mizuguchi notes that from Imagase's perspective, "Cornered Mouse" is simply the story of a man pursuing the object of his desire. As a result, Imagase does not change much from beginning to end. But Kyouichi not only has to learn to accept affection from someone he would have never considered a romantic interest but must also learn how to live as a wholly different being: a man who loves another man. "Sometimes you have to undergo a tremendous transformation in order to make a relationship work out," Mizushiro says. (You see, even Mizushiro agrees with me: bl is about transformation!) She laughingly concludes that "Cornered Mouse" is ultimately Kyouichi's grand adventure to find out what love really is.

In 2026, I think this is the key to unlock all of "Cornered Mouse." It is Kyouichi's journey to understand both what love is for him and, by extension, the people who love him. Much of the first volume is dedicated to Kyouichi struggling with his identity as a straight man, not because straightness has some inherent value to him, but because (as a victim of comphet) he can only think of love in these traditional boxes: a man loves a woman, a gay man loves men, and so on. As a straight man, he must be incapable of loving another man; if his feelings, then, are not love, what are they?

Perhaps this is the Heisei in "Cornered Mouse" coming out, but even at the end, Kyouichi remains steadfastly straight. In Kyouichi's mind, his love for Imagase does not make him gay, but rather a straight man who has to jump over a series of mental hurdles for the impossible object of his desire. By the time of "Owl," he believes he has everything figured out. Imagase loves him, desires him, makes his life better—therefore, Kyouichi thinks, he must overcome himself. He must do the work so that he can desire Imagase in return. If he can overcome his own nature, he will be like a koala who can eat more than just eucalyptus leaves—a man who can "eat" more than just women and who therefore can desire both genders.

But shockingly, because Imagase loves him, Imagase denies Kyouichi's capability for love. It turns out that Imagase is the koala, an animal evolved specifically to eat the poisonous leaves of a plant that barely offers any nutritional value. This perversity has become Imagase-the-koala's whole personality. Imagase conceptualizes himself as a martyr, a tragic figure who has carried an unrequited crush for a decade, the fly who is caught in Kyouichi's unknowing web. In this way, he is invulnerable. If Kyouichi rejects him or strays away from their relationship, it doesn't need to hurt, because it does not change Imagase's feelings. That there might be more delicious and more nutritious plants to eat is none of the koala's business—that there may be other men out there who would want Imagase and are better suited for him is, as Imagase derisively informs Kyouichi during the midnight drive to the beach, none of Imagase's business. Just as a straight character might reject the advances of his gay friend, so too does Imagase reject the earnest displays of affection from Kyouichi, simply because he does not believe Kyouichi is capable of loving a man. Imagase does not expect reciprocity from Kyouichi, any more than the koala needs the eucalyptus' consent.

That Tamaki is even able to break into this equation and make a convincing argument that she is the right partner for Kyouichi speaks to the strength of her character. Though she may be softer and quieter about it, she, like the two male leads, is a character so full of self-conviction that it borders on selfishness. Raised as the illegitimate daughter of a man who nevertheless loved her and her mother, she knows that love may be unconventional and find itself in less-than-ideal circumstances, so she does not take Kyouichi's shortcomings—his hangups about his ex, his not making her an honest woman or asking to meet her mother—to be a sign that their love is doomed. As strongly as Imagase rejects Kyouichi's efforts to love him, Tamaki embraces Kyouichi's efforts to love her. She believes that Kyouichi can make her happy, whereas Imagase has long come to terms with his own belief that Kyouichi can only make him miserable.

Though Kyouichi is not an arrogant man, he has a strong sense of pride. He could never accept a relationship that dooms his partner to constant unhappiness. The worst thing someone could ever tell him is, you're no good for me. To be happy, he must be able to make his partner happy.

Thus when Imagase returns in the final eponymous chapter of "Chopping Block" and tries to talk Kyouichi into taking him back, Kyouichi rejects him repeatedly. Having soaked in Tamaki's love, Kyouichi knows what he will no longer accept. "Make me your lover. I won't tell you not to get married. I will make myself small. I will be obedient. I won't complain. What is a little unhappiness on my end, if I can just sleep with you again? I didn't know how good I had it. I love you so much I could die if I don't get a scrap of your attention." These do not move Kyouichi—in fact, they make his heart colder, for Imagase's pleas are the requests of a man who thinks he must grovel and hence incontrovertible proof that Imagase still cannot trust Kyouichi's love.

Here, at the very end, Mizushiro allows Imagase tiniest bit of transformation. For all of his crying and pleading, it is not until the final chapter that Imagase, sitting on the bed that Kyouichi and Tamaki share, having fucked and been fucked by Kyouichi, allows himself to be truly vulnerable. When Kyouichi, exasperated, asks Imagase what he really wants, Imagase finally breaks down his walls. "I want a connection with you," he says. "I want to believe I have you." For once, he puts his heart in Kyouichi's hands. He sees them both as equals—that is, he finally sees them not as a straight man and a gay man, but two people trying to love each other. This is what Kyouichi has wanted from Imagase since "Melancholic Butterfly," and it is the final motivation Kyouichi needs to break up with Tamaki and choose Imagase again.

What is love, as envisioned by "Cornered Mouse"? It is not just going along with the whims of another person, no matter what Kyouichi's dad may have told him. It is not enough being with someone who loves you, as Kyouichi learns from Natsuki and his first relationship with Imagase. It is not always something that makes you happy, as Kyouichi tells the reader in the final chapter of "Chopping Block." Love is something that requires work. It is faith in your commitment to each other, even when that is not easy or comfortable, when you'd rather run away. It may not fit traditional roles or have conventional titles, as Tamaki teaches Kyouichi. It is the wanting to be with someone, to nurture each other in that being, to say "I want to make you happy, and I want you to make me happy."

It is the desire to be happy together.

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The movie adaptation of "Cornered Mouse," directed by Yukisada Isao, is an ambitious attempt to cover both "Cornered Mouse" and "Chopping Block." Its streamlined structure highlights what Mizushiro cleverly hides with a constantly evolving stream of conversations and arguments: that functionally, the two volumes feature the same plot happening over and over again. Kyouichi and Imagase reunite, they fuck, they attempt to date, Kyouichi is tempted by the advances of a woman, Imagase is hurt, they break up.

For Mizushiro, these cycles and variations are Kyouichi's journey up the mountain of love, his doubling back and encircling all the way to the peak of revelation. For Yukisada and/or Horiizumi Anne the screenplay writer, these become an opportunity to examine the greed and discontent of a man who does not know what he wants and thus is unable to open himself up to the possibility of love.

Movie!Kyouichi is a very different animal from manga!Kyouichi. He is chillier, more self-contained, less sincere in his dealings with the other characters. While manga!Kyouichi is weak to the strongly held feelings of others, easily flattered and prone to being sucked into someone else's whirlpool of affections, movie!Kyouichi seems to get himself into affairs simply because he never refuses sex if on offer. One gets the sense that instead of being moved by someone else's affections, he actually finds the messiness of love to be off-putting, even disgusting, and prefers a friends-with-benefits situation because it cuts the emotional attachment at the knees.

Kyouichi has always been the emotional center of "Cornered Mouse," and this change in his movie character results in a movie world that is overall much colder and much crueler. For instance, Mizushiro is very careful to frame Natsuki as a victim just as much, or perhaps more so, than Imagase believes himself to be. There is no question that Kyouichi wrongs her horribly at the end of "Cornered Mouse" by running back to Imagase at the first opportunity, and the fact that he betrays her in such a predictable way absolves Natsuki of any sin she may have committed trying to force Kyouichi to pick between them.

In the movie, though, Natsuki is offered no such grace. She is written and played as a hard, glitteringly bright character, against whom this whole love triangle slides off, leaving barely a trace of mess or friction. Her desire to rekindle a relationship with Kyouichi feels like an attempt to one-up Imagase, whom she clearly dislikes. Her disappearance from the story is now a punishment for her aggressive play, a "fouling out" in this love game. You could hardly imagine her and Imagase meeting for drinks and a kiki, as their manga counterparts are revealed to do.

Crucially, though the manga elides any on-screen depiction of Kyouichi cheating, movie!Kyouichi does so repeatedly and methodically, with very little guilt or shame. He cheats on his wife, even after he discovers she hired Imagase; he cheats on Imagase with a former affair partner instead of an old high school friend; he cheats on Tamaki, and purposefully, with premeditation. On Tamaki, whom in the movie he has proposed to!

This may sound like I am criticizing the movie, but I actually think these changes make for a fascinating adaptation. In this age of "Nolan's Odyssey," we can recognize that "Cornered Mouse" is one of the few times a bl live action adaptation has been brave enough to adjust the interpretation of the source material to fit the medium. In the manga, Mizushiro imbues the plot with Kyouichi's feelings, and he is a man full of feelings. Yukisada himself recognizes this; he describes the original story as a flood of lines about love. Mizushiro's Kyouichi feels guilty for never realizing Imagase's affections when they were in college, responsible for the pain Imagase went through discovering himself as a gay man, angry and possessive over Imagase dating other men and annoyed at himself for feeling that way, worried that he is not treating Imagase as sweetly as he would a girlfriend, grateful for the love and care that Imagase shows him, conflicted that his years of living as a straight man has conditioned him to think of that love as "lesser" somehow. When Imagase tells him in "Owl" that he is a good, kind man who is worthy of love, you believe it. You have seen Kyouichi's heart and are rooting for him. It hurts you, just as it hurts Kyouichi himself, that Kyouichi cannot tell Imagase in this moment, I love you, don't leave me.

The movie makes its characters walk the same tightrope as the manga, but come to very different conclusions. Yukisada retranslates Imagase's beach soliloquy in "Owl" from Imagase releasing Kyouichi into the morning light to Imagase damning Kyouichi to an eternity of solitude. His Kyouichi is a bad man, and his Imagase knows it. When he says to Kyouichi, "You'll have anyone who loves you, but ultimately you can't trust that love," it is accusatory, and we believe him whole-heartedly. These lines appear in the manga too, but there they are followed up by Imagase's enumeration of Kyouichi's many virtues as a lover, all traits that movie!Imagase knows movie!Kyouichi has never demonstrated. Yukisada's Imagase turns away from Kyouichi. "You will never understand," he scoffs, and that realization hurts you, just as it hurts Imagase. When the scene ends with Imagase screaming, "I loved you," into the sunrise, you do not want Kyouichi to say I loved you too in return. You would not believe him, and neither would Imagase.

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Sometimes when you hold a question in your heart, the world provides an answer. I knew I wanted to write about "Cornered Mouse" again, as part of this "50 weeks 500 words" project, but I thought I didn't have anything left to say about the manga itself. (This, as you see from the rambling above, turned out to be a lie, but I didn't know it at the time.) Then I had the opportunity to rewatch Wong Kar-Wai's "Happy Together" in theaters, and as the lights blinked on in my little indie theater, I had a shocking realization: that I love the movie adaptation of "Cornered Mouse" because it's actually Mizushiro's story told through the lens of "Happy Together."

I suspect any reader of this blog that has borne with me for this long is already familiar with "Happy Together" (1997), but for those of you who are not, first, go watch it immediately, and second, go to sleep, think about it, and then watch it again. Though it does not stem from the miasma of influences that created "Cornered Mouse" or most Heisei bl, "Happy Together" has all the trappings of the most tragic Heisei bl. In it, two gay men from Hong Kong run away to Buenos Aires, intending to start a life together, but then break up at the tail-end of a disastrous road trip. A fight at a tango bar reunites them, and they attempt to reconcile, only to find that, regardless of whether or not they love each other, they cannot be together. (The title is, you see, ironic.) They once again go their separate ways, likely to never meet again.

Yukisada mentions in an interview that he was deeply affected by the sex scene between Tony and Leslie in "Happy Together," but in all practical ways, the movies do not resemble each other in the slightest. "Happy Together" was made during the Christopher Doyle era of Wong Kar-Wai's filmography and features his signature blown out colors, bright saturation, jittery camera movements, and strange framing and compositions. "Cornered Mouse" is ashy, desaturated, and minimalist, filmed so conventionally as to be boring. "Happy Together" is filled with Wong Kar-Wai's signature character monologues, which "Cornered Mouse" assiduously avoids, despite Mizushiro's style seemingly crying out for it. "Happy Together" is a nostalgic journey of homesickness blown up in yellow sodium lights, while "Cornered Mouse" is a cold city tragedy told in the language of a Brutus magazine page.

But I can't help noticing that there are two stretches in "Cornered Mouse" that are wholly original to the movie, and both have direct analogues to "Happy Together."

In one, Yukisada offers us a look into Kyouichi and Imagase's cohabitation in the lead-up to Natsuki's introduction. While on the roof waiting for the laundry to dry, they play a game of "guess where my nipples are," eventually dissolving into giggling and wrestling, catching the attention of an older lady across the street who looks on disapprovingly. Mizushiro had written Imagase and Kyouichi's life together as a stereotypical married life, just with Imagase as the wife: Imagase cooks, cleans, and sends Kyouichi off to work every morning with a kiss and a smile. But Yukisada translates this into puppyish roughhousing, just like Po-Wing and Fai's uneasy time together in Buenos Aires—fighting for bed space, feeding each other little bits of food, half-naked chores and an endless stream of cigarettes.

"Cornered Mouse" is not Yukisada's first manga adaptation. In 2018, he directed a manga adaptation of Okazaki Kyoko's "River's Edge." In an co-interview with Mizushiro about the film version of "Cornered Mouse," Yukisada says that he has always been skeptical about adapting manga into film. A manga, he says, is a complete product of both visuals and narrative.

Yukisada recognizes that most movies do not show you a character's interior life, and that to do so in a movie is to risk being cheesy or didactic. "Subtraction," he says, "is necessary to create a film." The miracle of manga as a medium is that it can show you both an image and tell you what it means. The miracle of film, on the other hand, is in its sleight of hand, the way it can imply something by showing you something else explicitly.

What, then, can the "Cornered Mouse" movie show us that the manga never could?

"Happy Together" features a final third that transforms the movie from simply a failed love story to an exploration of the precariousness of living in the margins. Po-Wing and Fai are not just gay, but immigrants, alienated from their home country and their families, barely capable of speaking Spanish, and stuck working dead-end jobs. In these circumstances, love feels like, as S. might say, an impossible condition. Instead, they frequent cruising spots and look for anonymous sex instead of true intimacy. At the very end, though their hearts long to find home in each other, they are forced to confront their loneliness, which seems like it will haunt them forever.

Similarly, in creating an original ending for his movie adaptation of "Cornered Mouse" where Imagase and Kyouichi do not end up together, Yukisada almost rips these same elements from "Happy Together." In one scene, Kyouichi goes to a gay nightclub, but is so overwhelmed watching the men around him freely and openly expressing their desire for each other that he ends up fleeing in tears. In the final scenes, Imagase (like Wong's Po-Wing) tries to find comfort in the arms of another lover, but is unable to follow through and dissolves into piteous sobs. The movie ends with Kyouichi, also like Po-Wing, waiting all alone in an apartment that his lover once shared, arranging the last remnants of their presence as if trying to summon them ritualistically.

"Cornered Mouse" the movie is a remonstration towards men who try to keep themselves invulnerable and thus are never open to true love. Movie!Kyouichi tries to be invulnerable and thus is not ready to love or be loved. He wants to be cornered into love, to be offered no way out, because then he does not have to take any actions himself. Even in the end, he cannot tell Imagase, I love you. He can break up with Tamaki. He can ask Imagase to live with him. But he is not capable of making Imagase believe in his love. He does not deserve Imagase's affections and so ends the movie without them.

The movie returns time and time again to an image of Imagase perched on a stool by Kyouichi's bed. It is not an image that appears anywhere in the manga. It feels like the last scenes of Po-Wing in "Happy Together," and I love it. He looks so lonely, so small. He is silent, and you can only imagine how he feels. He seems to bear the weight of his love on his shoulders, and he wears it heavily. In the manga, Kyouichi says Imagase is cute (kawaii/可愛い), which Imagase jokingly points out means "should be loved" or, perhaps, "worthy of being loved." This scene, of course, does not appear in the movie. But if it did, I think, Yukisada would have written it another way. For in his movie, Imagase is instead kawaisou/可哀想: pathetic, pitiable, or perhaps, "worthy of our sorrow."

There will never be another bl manga that is quite like "Cornered Mouse," just like there will be another movie that is quite like "Happy Together." But the appeal of the "Cornered Mouse" movie is the recognition that there doesn't have to be. Each new story is a new chance at love, a new opportunity to tell us something new about love we haven't heard before, as long as we open our hearts and let it.

You can buy a copy of "Cornered Mouse" and "Chopping Block" wherever Seven Seas is sold.

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