ESSAY
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Brokeback comics crazeKai-Ming Cha
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Picture this: a cozy bedroom of a ski chalet in northern Japan, where two lithe men make passionate love to each other. Asuka's lean body is damp with moisture, his face is twisted in ecstasy. Saliva drips from his lover's parted lips as he breathes heavily.
Gay porn? Almost. Yaoi? Absolutely. Yaoi, the acronym for the Japanese phrase "Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" ("no peak, no plot, no meaning") is a genre of comic from Japan that has slowly captured the minds of women all over the United States. Commonly referred to as yaoi or "boys love," these comics feature romantic relationships between two beautiful men and are created "for women by women," meaning they are written, illustrated and read by women.
"The genre's got a huge and diverse audience in here," says Jeff Ayers, store manager of Forbidden Planet, a comics store in New York. "It's attracted a ton of dedicated readers whose appetites I've found increasingly difficult to sate."
Those new to the genre are often confused by the concept of two men in a passionate relationship getting the attention of women. The best way to understand yaoi's appeal is to think of it as Brokeback comics - like the movie "Brokeback Mountain." While viewers may have found the first sex scene between the cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal shocking, the emotional bond between the two draws the viewer into the story line and normalizes the sexual aspect of it. Similarly, yaoi comics focus as much on the relationship between two people as they do on the sex.
Just last year, yaoi was gaining a foothold in the American graphic novel market and growing. The erotic images and romantic stories were finding their way into retail chains like Borders, traditional comics shops and Amazon.com. But with Borders' financial troubles and publishers meeting reader demand for sexier boys in steamier situations, the yaoi market may go back online and back underground, where it began.
Unlike its popular big sister, manga (Japanese comics), yaoi has never actually been big. Last year, yaoi accounted for $6 million within the $210 million domestic manga market, as estimated by Kuo-Yu Liang, vice president of sales and marketing at Diamond Book Distributors. The company is the United States' biggest comics and graphic novels distributor and distributes yaoi to major book retailers like Borders and Waldenbooks as well as Books-a-Million, a chain of bookstores in Bible Belt America that has been a consistent supporter of yaoi.
Yaoi had a fan base in the United States as early as 2001, when the first yaoi fan convention, Yaoicon, took place in San Francisco. From there, the growing popularity of manga intersected with yaoi as publishers began exploring the various genres within manga, and experimented with bringing it to the United States. Knowledge of the genre also spread by word of mouth - in the form of online shouts and whispers - and manga publishers responded. Yaoi imprints sprung up to feed fans with story lines about angsty teen boys falling in love with schoolmates and hunky co-workers who secretly lusted after each other. Small, yaoi-only publishers also emerged, serving up the more erotic and pornographic fare that is increasingly in demand.
"Yaoi allows for a kind of enjoyment - visual stimulation without the self-examination," says Tina Anderson, a writer whose yaoi is published in the United States and Germany. "It allows you to distance yourself from the fantasy." What Anderson touches on is the way heterosexual sex in entertainment caters to the male point of view. A common complaint among high school manga and yaoi readers is that male-female sex shows the woman and little of the man. Yaoi, on the other hand, shows the man, and as one 15-year-old remarked, "It shows everything."
But the popularity of yaoi and the demand for pornographic man-on-man love has brought the industry to a crisis. Publishers polybag and label their books (some even put boilerplates inside their flaps, stating that all characters depicted within are 19 or older), but no amount of shrink-wrap can protect them from the content itself - or the resistance of the large chain bookstores to carrying it.
"Everything in print is available and orderable for our customers," says Jim Killen, graphic novels buyer at Barnes & Noble. B&N carries mature fare like Preacher and From Hell but doesn't stock everything its Web site does. But there is a certain line that the retail chain refuses to cross.
"While we do embrace a move toward content more mature in theme aimed at a more adult audience, we do not shelve those manga featuring gratuitous explicit/graphic sex and/or sexual violence."
It's the natural progression for business to expand, then contract, then expand some more - or just die out.
"Yaoi doesn't have to take over the world," Anderson says. "In Japan, (yaoi) is niche. Manga is big, but boys love is just an aspect of it. We don't need the whole world into yaoi."
Yaoi won't die, but the category has carved an interesting niche out for itself. The books are popular and sell well. Comics shops and even some branches of the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya have devoted sections to yaoi. But the mainstreaming of yaoi has come to a halt. As Borders suffers, don't expect Barnes & Noble to pick up the slack, given its track record of shying away from explicit material.
"With the chains dropping the yaoi ball," Ayers says, "it's any savvy manga retailer's chance to shine." {sbox}
Kai-Ming Cha covers comics and manga for Publishers Weekly and has written reviews for Entertainment Weekly. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page M - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle
