31/50: you can't always desire what you want ("ichigenme: the first class is civil law" and "don't blame me!")
We English-language bl manga fans have not always had it easy, but those of us who are Yoshinaga Fumi fans (and especially those among us who have been fans since at least the mid-2000s) have always eaten well. Most of her work has been licensed, which is unsurprising in the case of her award-winning non-bl series like Ooku and What Did You Eat Yesterday?, but is exceptionally surprising when it comes to her early explicitly bl work like "The Moon and the Sandals," "Truly Kindly," and "Solfege." For this I think we have "Antique Bakery" to thank. A shoujo series (with a prominently gay character) so popular it received an anime adaptation and Japanese, Korean, and Thai live action adaptations (none of which, in my opinion, ever fully captured Yoshinaga's particular charm and style), "Antique Bakery" was the first of Yoshinaga's series to be licensed in English, and for a while it remained understandably her most well-known. It is, as we all know, not enough to be good to make it in the English market; you must also be sellable, and when all else failed, you could always bill Yoshinaga Fumi in the mid-to-late-2000s as "the creator of Antique Bakery."
Which DMP did, when they licensed "Ichigenme: The First Class is Civil Law" under their 801 Media imprint. How else do you sell this two-volume manga, whose plot requires you to have, of all things, a passing understanding of the "zemi," a uniquely Japanese higher education tradition where undergraduates choose a small-group seminar that historically furthered both one's academic and social/professional lives? In this story, straight-laced and determinedly middle-class law student Tamiya joins a zemi purely based on his interest in the subject matter, only to find out that due to the professor's notoriously easy grading, it is The Gathering Place for his well-to-do classmates who don't care at all about studying. Among them is Tohdou, the son of a congressman, who despite his frivolous personality and appearance earnestly pursues first Tamiya's love—and when that fails, his friendship.
"Ichigenme" is one of Yoshinaga's earliest professional works, but in it you can already see the bones of what will come: the complicated complicity of women and the men they love that appears in "Ooku," the archetype of the competent man who hides his trauma behind a frivolous exterior that will later haunt "Antique Bakery," and the finely detailed food spreads and depictions of domesticity as an expression of love that star in "What Did You Eat Yesterday." Tamiya and Tohdou are not Yoshinaga's strongest character work; they are constantly shown up in both volumes of "Ichigenme" by the supporting roles: their classmates who show no compunction using Tamiya's bookishness for their own gain, a professor who attracts Tamiya's respect and then attention, later Tohdou's own brother who weasels his way into the bed of Tamiya's colleague. My personal favorite is Terada, a female classmate and Tamiya's only other friend, who is ostracized by the entire student population when a nude picture of a woman who looks suspiciously like her appears in a magazine. Terada, like many other Yoshinaga characters, is steely, shameless, all-in on her own survival, and she is undoubtedly the heroine of her own story. Tohdou—and to a lesser extent, Tamiya—are involved, but it is as if they along with the readers are reacting to the merciless rhythm of Yoshinaga's plot, a world over which they have no control. This is another common Yoshinaga trait. Her main characters often suffer this fate.
But this is the joy of reading a Yoshinaga Fumi bl. What she offers in her stories is not a series of dots that connect into a line, but a scatterplot of interactions that each time miraculously shows her reader something about the experience of living in the world. She excels at the tension between two objects, be they faces or characters or concepts or even body parts. The most classic of the Yoshinaga Fumi scenes is of one person shouting down another in righteous anger, while the expressions change on the other's face. The tension is always in the shot/reverse-shot. She has never been proficient with the full human form, least of all when it comes to bodies naked and writhing in a sex scene. When Tamiya and Tohdou have sex, as they eventually do, their bodies engage in congress without us or even the rest of them. We see a hand or a tongue on a body part, and then, separated by panels and pages, a close-up of their faces reacting in pleasure.
The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint. You need a story strong enough to stand on its own, but expansive enough to fill more than a few chapters. You need the vision to build out a world, but the discipline to not get distracted by too many sideplots. Yoshinaga's answer to this has always been the anthology approach, with a strong opening to ground the setting and dynamics before playing couples (both romantic and otherwise) off of each other (both directly and indirectly). The most perfect example of this is the second volume she gave to her debut work "The Moon and the Sandals," which eschews any kind of connective narrative tissue in favor of a series of interludes into her characters' lives. The most moving for me is a very short chapter she dedicates to a female side character who was rejected by Kobayashi, the main character, in volume one. Upon learning that Kobayashi is now dating her brother, she tries to put on a brave face, but then collapses into tears, and it's her monologue fervently wishing for time to heal all wounds and give everyone "our place to belong" that closes out volume one. "Naru-chan Thereafter" is her exit from volume two. Framed as if the reader has managed to grab her off the street for a quick interview, it consists only of panels of her face as she reassures us that she is happy. This is the luxury the two-volume series affords us: a space for all characters to find their happiness and a space for Yoshinaga to flex her creative prowess.
When Yoshinaga is at her peak, her tendency to skip along the surface of time in her characters' lives feels poignant and well-observed. When Yoshinaga falters, her almost pathological avoidance of linear storytelling is frustrating. So it is with the second volume of "Ichigenme," which comes off like a superfluous collection of original doujinshi, with its many sex scenes and the sudden pivot to Tohdou's brother Hiroaki. Where I think Yoshinaga lets the story down is Tamiya and Tohdou's dynamic. At the end of volume one, they are more than friends but hardly lovers, but volume two opens with a smash cut to them gainfully employed and happily cohabiting, with nary a thought for the seven years of in-between. The Tamiya and Tohdou here are only superficially similar to the characters we meet in volume one, and much more similar to extras we might have met in "Antique Bakery," which Yoshinaga had either finished or was writing simultaneously at the time of "Ichigenme" volume two. Freed from the structure of the zemi, Tamiya and Tohdou's interactions feel aimless, even at their liveliest, in a way that's not true of Kobayashi and his eventual lover Toyo from volume two of "The Moon and the Sandals."
But it's still a joy to sit with them, to see where their lives have taken them. The final story, about Tohdou's brother Hiroaki, is Yoshinaga at her most heart-strings-pulling, most quietly devastating. It doesn't fit with anything else thematically in "Ichigenme," but still, you cannot be upset watching a master practice her craft. Perhaps Yoshinaga is the rare type that either excels at the oneshot or the five-plus volume saga. If I mourn "Ichigenme's" short run time, it is because after this, Yoshinaga will write the long series that cement her as one of the all-time greats. One cannot help but wonder what she could have done with a true bl epic.
Yamada Yugi has not fared as well as Yoshinaga Fumi in recent times when it comes to English licenses, but once upon a time someone—or many someones—employed by the constellation of now-defunct publishers must have loved her as much as I still do, because a surfeit of her early work was licensed ("Spring Fever," "Glass Sky," "Laugh Under the Sun," "Picnic"). I've already written about "Close the Last Door," and I meant to save the rest of this post for another week so that I would have a backlog and could get off the weekly treadmill, but I love Yamada Yugi (and you, my reader!) too much to hold back.
Yamada's works may have never gotten the acclaim of "Antique Bakery," but very few bl manga have ever surpassed "Don't Blame Me" in its use of the two-volume format. "Don't Blame Me" is Yamada Yugi's transition from oneshots to a longer running series, though even in her current career, she remains a one-volume queen. Perhaps that's why the first chapter of "Don't Blame Me" feels so unconventional, too self-contained and unromantic for a bl, more like a pilot to a slice-of-life josei that was never written. It opens not on either half of the main couple, but on thirteen-year-old Makoto, who pays a surprise visit to his cousin Kaji Toshiaki after seeing his name in the credits of a mediocre romance film. Upset by Kaji's denouncing of his dreams to one day direct a movie, Makoto is determined to find out what happened to the passionate Cousin Toshi of his memories, only to get himself entangled in the whirlwind of Kaji's friends, all former members of their college film club, who take it upon themselves to acquaint Makoto with the endless complications of adult life—including Kaji's boyfriend Nakamura.
One reason why I wanted to add "Don't Blame Me" to this week's discussion of "Ichigenme" is that they are both two-volume series with very similar premises that turn out to be drastically different and, in those differences, reveal their creators' styles. Though they both star college students and main characters who are surprised by a guy-on-guy French kiss as an initiation ritual (both even feature a character who turns away from the study of law against his father's wishes!), from there Yoshinaga and Yamada's approaches to storytelling heavily diverge. While things technically happen in "Ichigenme," they often do so in the background; Yoshinaga's interest is mostly in the changing internal lives of her characters, which she either depicts through her signature microexpressions or in internal monologue. On the other hand, characters in early Yamada Yugi rarely change; instead her stories meet her characters where they are and hold space for —or rather, are wholly in service to—their antics. When Yamada Yugi is at her best, it feels like being caught up in someone else's tempo, tumbling faster and faster down the hill with her characters and dreading when you will eventually smack head-first into the end.
I know I have leaned too heavily on cinema as a comparison as of late. I cannot promise I will stop. "Don't Blame Me" is a story about loving movies, after all. What Yamada Yugi understands is that manga is a visual medium, perhaps the only one that can match movies for visual tricks. "Don't Blame Me" is full of scene transitions that, like dissolve cuts, only work because of the medium. In volume one, a character is forced to interrupt a dramatic scene between Makoto and Kaji by yelling "cut", which suddenly transforms the panels that came before into a scene. In volume two, the climax of the college backstory arc breaks into present day and the return of Makoto by way of a VHS being played. I would never go so far as to say Yamada Yugi is formally inventive, but she has such an intuitive understanding of how to move a story from scene to scene. Though nothing about the paneling or the style tries to convey cinematic language, reading "Don't Blame Me" feels like watching a quirky dramedy, more so than other manga that actually attempt to look like a movie.
The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint, and reading back this series in 2025, what I marvel at the most about "Don't Blame Me" is its ruthless economy. The amount of things Yamada Yugi manages to shove into the nine short chapters of "Don't Blame Me" would make a modern uke taking in a bl manhwa horse dick blush. The opening and closing chapters being told through the point of view a thirteen-year-old cousin aside, there's also unrequited love between two half-brothers, a returning alum struggling with depression, someone's mother in the hospital,detailed notes on John Carpenter's films, a pregnancy, a whole student movie being filmed, and of course, Kaji and Nakamura's love story. In 2025, you'd be tempted to think I was describing a three-season Korean webtoon.
How does Yamada Yugi manage it? I think it is because she is a master at pacing and momentum. A good story must know where it is going and how to get there and above all it must make you feel like it is bringing you along. When for instance Nakamura begins to get jealous of what he perceives to be Kaji's feelings for fellow club member Kujirai, Yamada Yugi does not let Nakamura's feelings dominate the story. There is no easily severable "jealousy arc." Instead, the jealousy sits like a quiet passenger in volume one alongside the other pieces of the story: Kujirai's troubled relationships with the various men in his life, which Kaji tries unsuccessfully to detangle, Kaji's burgeoning interest in cinematography and film-making, Nakamura own friendship with Kujirai who is less "other man" and more "chaotic relationship counselor." By the time volume two turns its eyes squarely on Kaji and Nakamura, the jealousy doesn't feel like a plot point added just to progress the relationship. It is natural. It has been there the whole time.
This too is the luxury the two-volume bl manga can offer us. Time enough for everything, and time enough for love, too.
-
Last week I talked about the two types of desire in bl manga, the cannibal and the artist. But there is, as always, a secret third thing: he who doth protest desire too much.
It would be a cliche to say that bl is often about repression, men refusing to confront the shape of their true desire. But in the best of these stories, that repression is not just of desire for another man, but of desire, period: denial that one could be capable of wanting another person at all, rejection of the body as a locus of desire, horror that one can be rendered so foolish by unruly passion, which accomplishes no purpose except for itself. In "Ichigenme," Tamiya is repulsed by his own lust. When he is forced to confront his disappointment that a kiss from a male professor was not any kind of advance but rather just the bad habit of a drunkard, he tries to use Tohdou's obvious attraction for him as a weapon with which to hurt himself, as if to turn himself permanently off desire once and for all. When Tamiya comes out, it is with very specific words in mind: that he is "unable to have sex with a woman," not that he is gay. Sex of any kind, especially penetrative sex, embarrasses him even seven years later. It is not that he is embarrassed of finding men attractive (he unabashedly tells Tohdou to his face that he finds his brother Hiroaki handsome), but he is embarrassed, still, by his very embodied desire for Tohdou specifically. There are maybe issues here for Tamiya to unpack, but alas, the title of the series is not "The First Class is Sex Therapy."
In "Don't Blame Me," the three point of view characters—Makoto, Kaji, and Nakamura—think of themselves as observers to the passions of others and are shocked when they are forced to confront it in themselves and, in the case of Makoto, in their loved ones. Nakamura is so horrified by his greed for Kaji's body that he overacts and tries to reject Kaji's friendship too. Why, he bemoans, can he not be satisfied by simply spending time with Kaji, watching John Carpenter marathons with Kaji, seeing the love of movies bloom in Kaji? Why must he also want Kaji carnally? Like Tamiya, Nakamura can only conceive of desire as some horrible force that will bulldoze everything on the path to consummation, a sign that there is something wrong with himself. It is hard enough for him to bear the weight of his own desire; the idea that it might be requited, that he might have to bear Kaji's desire as well, is unthinkable.
As for Kaji, Yamada Yugi performs a clever sleight of hand with Kujirai, who is positioned in "Don't Blame Me" as an object of fascination, inspiration, ridicule, and ultimately desire. It's Kujirai that makes Kaji want to pick up a camera; it's Kujirai whose expressions Kaji wants to observe; it's Kujirai whom Kaji thinks he can sleep with. But Kujirai points out rightly this is because Kaji is chronically avoidant, more comfortable trying to solve other people's problems and filming other people's desires than confronting his own problems. "You're not in love with me," he points out. "You're just trying to take the easy way out." In any case, for all his hypersexuality, Kujirai doesn't actually have sex with any of the main characters of "Don't Blame Me," as implausible as that sounds. He may be crazy, but he does so with a deep sense of responsibility for his friends and cordons himself off appropriately.
This too is the luxury of the two-volume bl, which gives us time enough for everything, even different kinds of desire. Kaji wants to be moved, but only at a remove, from behind the viewfinder and never in front of it. Time and time again, he films Kujirai's most vulnerable moments, and Kujirai never flinches, yet when Miki turns the camera back on Kaji (and Nakamura with him), Kaji balks. If he is to mature at all, he must learn that "I want to film him" is not the same as "I want to fuck him." If desire were only the compulsion to admire from afar, to capture beauty and wrestle it into a frame, then everything would be simple. It would be rational, as Makoto pointed out, if Kaji's love interest were Kujirai. But "the scariness of Carpenter's films," Nakamura points out, "comes from not having explanations." Desire, too, is irrational. In the end, all this theorizing is for naught. "You make me feel stupid thinking about things too deeply," Kujirai informs Kaji, throwing a drunken Nakamura into his arms.
We want what we want, and who we want, no matter how irrational or embarrassing.
You know what else is embarrassing? Having to once again explain that 801 (the publisher of "Ichigenme") and June ("Don't Blame Me") are both DMP imprints and thus zombies with uncertain fates, shambling along with their half-dead list of publications. If you want your own copy of either series, you're best off trying to find them secondhand, or sometimes on Amazon. As for me, not to brag, but you'll never buy these babies off of me.
