what draws me to decay i think is how utterly it rejects dichotomy. it comes from both within and without; it's the mechanism that forms the clock counting down the days until we die, and it finds its way back to itself inside the body through inertia and opening. rot is a connective force that reaches out to itself through us, and rot is a destructive force that pulls everything apart, literally and metaphorically. to exist is to be marked; to be stained indelibly. to touch is to accumulate that stain and spread it. corruption is the tie that binds and the teeth that fray the cord between them until it breaks.
this is what makes medical horror so effective when done right, i think. the idea of a "clean" invasion, of a sterile cut that excises all traces of its existence after it passes through you, save perhaps a neat and tidy ridge of scar tissue; a fading point of entry with no exit. an isolated site of violence and violation meant to halt the progress of infection that is nevertheless seething with pain and inflammation, struggling against its restraints. the exertion of another's will, another's dominance, over one's own body, and the wiping of the feet that walked all over it, the hands that grasped and tore into it, to remove all traces of their having ever been there after. the denial of any real connection, however grotesque and unwanted. gloves and masks and scalpels separating skin from exposed skin. a bloodless wound, a sickness and soreness whose reality is denied.
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 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 is 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 unfazed and oblivious 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.
having friends who you discuss and write niche pornography with is like. ok here’s the nuclear launch codes for my psyche. don’t do anything weird with it haha
When it comes to books that act as ephemera for the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays, most collectors would seek out items like the retrospective 2-MINUS magazine Ameya Style or the volumes of Theater Book and June that featured contemporary articles about the TGG’s plays. The information included in these books is incredibly valuable as many production stills, descriptions and even whole screenplays were printed in these publications. That isn’t to downplay the importance of other adjacent books though, such as the Suehiro Maruo magazine Only You, which features a digest version of Galatia Teito Monogatari’s screenplay. There are even more magazines that have since been shrouded in obscurity, two of which acted as the direct source of several of the most iconic images affiliated with the Tokyo Grand Guignol.
The above image is from the October 25th, 1985 volume of Emma magazine. My knowledge of these publications is pretty much nonexistent outside of the fact that on the auctions I found this (and the next featured book) on, both volumes were listed as “photo magazines” or something like that. They definitely contain pictures, that’s for certain. Either way, this photo was a specially shot production still derived loosely from a scene in the TGG’s first play, Mercuro (1984). Despite the close association, this photo is usually given with the play, there was no scene in the original screenplay where Ameya emerges from Kyusaku Shimada’s torso. It was said on the Twitter account TGG_Lab that this scene was based on a variation of the play that was performed at an event hosted by Peyote Workshop known as End of the Century Live, said version of Mercuro being a loose descendent of the iconic televised performance of the play that was shown on Tokumitsu Kazuo's TV Forum. Both renditions were heavily abridged variants of Mercuro’s most iconic special effects scenes, with the televised version specifically being a crossing of the openings of act one and act two. One thing of note is that near the end of the article on the side, a special teaser is given for the upcoming December 1985 debut of Litchi Hikari Club.
The next photo spread is of a similarly iconic production still, this one being a direct capture of (what was likely) the opening of the first act of Litchi Hikari Club. In said opening scene, an execution is conducted to the tune of the S.P.K. song Culturcide wherein the light club hang a student who crossed their strict rules. This student is apparently different from the one who is blinded by a spotlight later on in the same act. This photo is from the April 11th, 1986 volume of Focus, a magazine that happens to contain a fairly interesting coincidence. In my prior essay regarding the parallels between Litchi Hikari Club and the futurist movement, I mention how Ameya at one point cited an airplane accident as a direct influence for Litchi’s story. According to his recollections, the accident occurred not long after the televised performance of Mercuro, which was in 1985. While I originally had a hunch while writing the essay, I’m fairly certain the airline accident he’s referring to was the Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crash on the 12th of August, 1985. The time frame matches Ameya’s descriptions, and to this day it’s still recalled as being one of the deadliest airline accidents in history. In the same volume of Focus that this image came from, an article is featured a few pages earlier that concerns the accident.
A description of Litchi's opening can be read in this excerpt from a lengthy Twitter thread by user Shoru Toji where she gives an in-depth description of the play's 1986 rerun and the subculture around it:
I saw Litchi Hikari Club on March 27th, 1986, the first day of its rerun, at a live house called Super Loft KINDO. It was a renovated iron factory in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. The place was previously destroyed by Hanatarash with a live set where he went through the space with a bulldozer. If I recall correctly, the hall was illuminated by fluorescent lights from a high ceiling with exposed steel frames. The walls were painted black. The curtain separating the audience seating from the stage was a set of white sheets, like the kind you’d find in a hospital. There was no announcement when the play was ready to begin. Instead, the fluorescent lights suddenly went out, and a set of speakers in the ceiling emitted hissing noises. The stage was dimmed to the opening queue of Culturcide from the Seppuku Dekompositiones EP, and I thought to myself “This is SPK!”. And with the sounds of synchronized stomping and a ringing flute, the curtains were drawn back to show the scene of a line of students marching through the darkness in single file with lights hoisted over their shoulders. The way the lights aligned in their rows reminded me of spotlights.
They marched all about the stage, going right, left, forward and to the back, all at once in an orderly manner. They were taking orders from a man standing on a podium. That man was Tsunekawa in the role of Zera. He stood with an overhead spot bathing him in red light. He pointed in many directions, with the students loyally following each command he made. Eventually, the left side of the stage began to loudly rattle with the starting of a U-shaped quarry conveyor belt. Another student is carted into the stage from the belt, screaming “Please, don’t do it! Please, forgive me!” as he’s suspended upside down from the belt. The light club place their lights in the back of the stage and hang their first victim at the front with a chain.
This reminds me of the turn of the millennium Japanese indie music scene (what i know if it) more than any other movie i've seen. Aesthetically, tonally, sonically. Lost and lonely girl unsuccessfully creating a better self through writing. Equal measure fun and despair, riding in this girl's mind and the primitive CGI places it goes.
