THE CULTURAL CONTEXTS BEHIND WHY KURAMA OF YU YU HAKUSHO IS CODED “FEMININE”
I recently roped my pal Anna into reading YYH (as every manga fan should!!!), and in the process of re-reading it myself, I became embarrassingly obsessed with the greatest bishonen of all manga (contenders not accepted), Kurama. This shouldn’t have surprised me, I was obsessed with Kurama as a young teen and he was my favorite manga character for a very long time, and yet, I was pretty taken aback by the intensity of my own feelings. It’s just… I thought I’d grown out of fangirling bishonen, I guess? But apparently not, bishonen are forever.
So in my obsession, I’ve been reading various people talk about what it is about Kurama that’s so fascinating, and particularly how and why Kurama is coded “feminine” and how this makes him interesting and appealing to (especially female) fans. It’s all very interesting, and since Kurama was one of the early major examples of the “bishonen” to Western fans, as well as being very formative to a lot of Japanese fans, there’s much to discuss here; but I didn’t really see anyone talk about why Kurama is the type of character he is, so that’s what this post is about.
This post disregards one of the (I believe) major factors, which is that Togashi is a Patalliro! fan, because that’s a post I want to write some other day.
One factor is, like manga researcher Natsume Fusanosuke pointed out during the YYH episode of popular talkshow BS Manga Yawa, Kurama is a character modeled after the Kurumada Masami tradition of shonen manga:
(Yes, these are all men, even the last one. Yes, even if his name is “Aphrodite”.)
Natsume argues that this early scene of Kurama
is directly parodying Kurumada’s works such as Saint Seiya and Ring ni kakero, and I have to agree with him; huge hair that defies logic, using a rose as a weapon, the affected mannerism and speech, it’s all right out of a Kurumada manga. Kurumada Masami’s works were early examples of (unintentional) “fujoshi bait” Jump series along with Captain Tsubasa, featuring lots and lots of pretty boys stoically befriending and fighting each other with nary a girl in sight, and just like Captain Tsubasa, Kurumada’s extravagant style and over-the-top storylines are highly distinctive and have always been ripe for parodying. Saint Seiya ran in Jump until two weeks before YYH began serialization.
Another factor is that the major fox demons of Japanese and Chinese traditions are female. Arguably the most famous (named) fox demon of Japanese legend is Tamamo-no-Mae:
She is said to have been a courtesan to Emperor Toba, and the most beautiful and most wise woman of Japan. When the emperor fell ill, an onmyoji (one of the Abes, traditions differ) exposed her as a fox demon and she was chased down, and it is said she become the Sessho-ishi and killed any traveler who came near.
Tamamo-no-Mae is sometimes regarded as a personification of another famous fox demon, Daji of China. She was a courtesan of King Zhou of Shang, and legend has it that she enjoyed nothing more than tormenting people and hearing their screams of pain. The king was so infatuated with her beauty he let her get away with any indulgence, including killing his other courtesans and his ministers – which, legend says, is why the Shang dynasty fell (pretty misogynistic legend to be fair). To manga/anime fans, she might be more familiar as Dakki, the psychopathic main villain of Fujisaki Ryu’s adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Hoshin Engi:
So the two famous fox demons of legend both transform themselves into the most beautiful women in the country and gain power by tricking the emperor into sleeping with them. Which gives a whole different context to that time Kurama became the second in command to Yomi, a king of Makai (a context Togashi surely wouldn’t have been unaware of).
Another bit of fun manga trivia: another yokai-themed manga began in Jump while YYH was running, called Jigoku sensei Nube, and this series has another “feminine” appearing fox demon called Tamamo (not even trying to hide the courtesan connection, there):
Tamamo was another long-haired and smart prettyboy who got instantly popular with female readers, and he had a nice friend/foe relationship with the protagonist that resulted in them getting shipped a lot (obviously).
