19/50: and what i glimpse is love (wayama yama, "let's go to the family restaurant")
On the splash page to chapter 17 of Wayama Yama's "Let's go to the family restaurant," the sequel to her hit "Let's Go Karaoke!", Oka Satomi stares at the reader through a donut, which he holds up to one eye, obscuring half his face. His expression is oddly serious, though with Satomi, you can never really tell. In the margin text on the next page, Wayama (or at least, the authorial voice) asks us, "What do you see through the hole of a donut?"
What do you see when you look at "Famiresu"?
What do you see when you look at Oka Satomi?
I see what I see every week when I write about bl. I see a story about love.
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If I had started this post with, "this summer we are finally getting an anime adaptation of one of the best non-bl stories about a boy coming to terms with his queerness," you'd be forgiven for assuming I was talking about the fantastic Cygames adaptation of Mokumokuren's "The Summer Hikaru Died." But I am here to argue that "Famiresu" (and, to some extent, "Karaoke" as its prequel) deserves its laurels too, that Wayama's unique talent in not saying, in guiding her readers and characters through quiet spaces where they can figure out their own stories in their own time, has made it too easy to dismiss Satomi's own "coming out" and journey to acceptance.
Yoshiki is, of course, explicitly queer (in love with his same-sex best friend), but queerness in "The Summer Hikaru Died" does not live and die there. Yoshiki is marked as "different", "abnormal": his family is different, his mother doesn't fit in, his sister doesn't go to school, he likes weird music, he feels restrained by the small town around him, he wants to move to Tokyo. When 'Hikaru' attaches to Yoshiki, with his red eyes and abyssal chest hole, it is only making Yoshiki's queerness visible and concrete. 'Hikaru' is the queerness metaphor as monster-object. Perhaps Yoshiki is able to handle him so well without totally falling apart because Yoshiki has been training all his life—or at least all his time with Hikaru—for this.
Satomi is also a boy to whom a monster-object has attached, who then must grapple with what it means to love and care for a monster. It's just that in his case, the monster-object is not a mysterious cursed being from the mountains, but rather the yakuza. Kyouji, like 'Hikaru,' hides the visible signifiers of his otherness—his tattoos—when out in public. Kyouji, like 'Hikaru,' behaves in alien, frustrating ways, as if he does not know how to act normally. To protect Satomi, Kyouji must balance the monster part of him—braining another man in an alley with a briefcase, threatening Okada—with the normalized exterior that he has adopted to blend in. But none of those behaviors can truly hide who Kyouji is: a member of the yakuza. He is marginalized, he is dangerous, simply having dinner with him taints by association. His "kind" can only hang out with each other, in a world full of its own rituals and slang and signals, a world that innocent young boys must be kept out of, in case they are assaulted or—worse—converted.
The yakuza have always been a deeply homosocial trope in fiction, but in "Famiresu," Kyouji's status as yakuza so dominates Satomi's anxieties about being with Kyouji that it becomes its own queerness metaphor. Satomi clings to a normal, non-yakuza life like a straight man in a bl clings to heterosexuality, even as he unconsciously twists his life into an abnormal shape for Kyouji. It's not a coincidence that Satomi and Kyouji's meetups have the air of an adulterous tryst; Satomi is married to his normal life and Kyouji to the yakuza. As a result, they cannot text each other too much or meet up too often, and must constantly lie to other people about their relationship. Instead of compulsory heterosexuality, Satomi struggles with compulsory normalcy. When Kyouji asks him about his dreams for the future in chapter 5, Satomi can only come up with the vague notion of becoming a civil servant. He has no real attachment to it as a concept; it's obvious that the real draw is that being a civil servant is the exact opposite of what Kyouji does. All this leads to the great yakiniku breakup of chapter 9, where Satomi tells Kyouji they shouldn’t meet up anymore. Normal people don't hang out with yakuza, just like normal men don't fall in love with other men.
If "The Summer Hikaru Died" begins with Yoshiki's explicit queerness before exploring a queerness metaphor in 'Hikaru,' then volume one of "Famiresu" is the queerness metaphor that becomes an explicit exploration of queerness in the chapters which will likely make up the second (and final?) volume. In Chapter 10, Satomi has one of soon-to-be-many gay mental breakdowns and then spends the rest of the chapter asking anyone who will give him the time of day, including Yahoo! Answers, whether it's gay for a man to hug another man (answer: definitely yes in Satomi's case). Finally the issue with Kyouji is not that he is a yakuza, but that he is a man.
This being Wayama, however, it isn't an issue for long. "Famiresu" is not a romance, even if Satomi and Kyouji like each other, any more than queerness is defined simply by one man being in love with another man. There are so many kinds of love and affection in "Famiresu," none of which are normal, but all of which are real. Masanori's friendship with Kyouji is hardly normal, and his relationship with his father definitely is not. Satomi's coworker Morita appears to be in the habit of hugging men often and suggests that Satomi was simply grateful for the grub, while Satomi's classmates Mana and Maruyama seem oblivious and/or unfazed by Satomi's wild man-hugging hypotheticals. "No one cares if you like or don't like someone," scolds the anonymous answer at the end of chapter 10, embodying the entirety of the Wayama-verse worldview. Instead of worrying about liking or not liking, normal or abnormal, stop wasting time. Wake up early, study, eat breakfast, vote, shit, sleep. Text your 43-year-old situationship. Ask him to bring you 20 pork buns and two cheesecakes.
In other words, live your life.
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What do you see when you look through a donut? Or put another way, is a donut a wholeness through which a hole is punched, or is the donut only whole because of the hole? Do you see the hole as an absence, a missing thing, a lack, or is the hole instead a defining characteristic, without which the donut would not be complete?
Is there something wrong with Satomi and Kyouji? Or is that wrongness something that defines them, without which they would not be themselves?
Do you see the hole? Or do you see the donut?
A horrible thing once happened to Oka Satomi. He went to hell to look for a monster. Once there, he was able to do what Orpheus was not and brought a man back from the dead. Like the little mermaid, he gave up his voice to save a man. It felt like love; it was probably something very close to love.
Chapter 17 doesn't frame love with loss; it frames love through loss. For Satomi to get to "I like Kyouji," he had to finally admit what has been haunting him this whole time, the coffee stain on the painting of Satomi's heart that he has been trying to rub out since the beginning of "Famiresu." He had to finally revisit being fourteen again, the heart-pounding terror he felt when he thought Kyouji was dead, and the terrible heart-pounding he felt when Kyouji told him, "I'm not gonna die and leave you behind." A "normal" person would not have crashed a yakuza karaoke competition to mourn a not-quite-friend. A "normal" person would have walked away and gone to his choir festival. A "normal" person does not need to experience love and death as two sides of the same coin to understand something about himself.
But what use is clinging to "normal" now? Hadn't Satomi already made that choice for himself four years ago, when he walked into Karaoke Heaven with Kyouji?
It is hard to say what Satomi and Kyouji have. The only thing we can say about it is that it is not "normal." When Satomi asks Yahoo! Answers, he does not get useful answers. When he searches on the internet for an explanation, he comes up empty. When he is approached by Okada with photographic evidence, he cannot explain. When he hugs Kyouji on the street, no one even registers what is happening. Strangers walk past them, uncomprehending.
In the end, love is nobody's business but your own. It is a thing and only a thing between two people, who must set their own definitions and walk their own paths. In this way, all love is abnormal. There is no normal love. In the end, the only way Satomi can arrive at an answer is by talking to Kyouji. It is only through Kyouji asking him, what do you want us to be? that Satomi can face his own feelings and arrive at an answer.
"I like him." That's all we have.
That's enough. That's everything.
You can buy "Let's Go Karaoke!" from Yen Press. Its sequel is licensed only in my dreams, but you can buy the Japanese digital release of volume one here and follow the Comics Beam releases here.
If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.
Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.
Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.
Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.
This is legit good writing advice, especially the first bullet point! In playwriting class we did a bit where every bit of dialogue had to be an accusatory question and it was glorious.
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