Tag Archives: Fumi Yoshinaga

Knowing, Forgiving, and Loving Are All Different Things

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I sort of felt like the essays I wrote for tcj online got kind of lost in that site’s giant scroll…so I thought I’d reprint some of them here. This one is on Fumi Yushinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.
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Fumi Yoshinaga is not at her best in the short story form. In longer series, her weakness for glib psychoanalyzing can be overwhelmed by her virtues: sublime nonsense in Antique Bakery; a matchless feel for character interaction and development in Ooku.

In All My Darling Daughters, though, the tales get clipped off with pat endings and pat-er moralizing before Yoshinaga can plumb either nonsensical heights or emotional depths. The second story in this collection is perhaps the most painful example. A college teacher semi-reluctantly acquiesces to a series of blowjobs from a homely, obsessed student with serious self-esteem issues. He feels more and more guilty — but when he tries to turn their relationship into something less exploitative…she dumps him because he’s too nice! Isn’t that a goofy, unexpected plot twist? Yoshinaga seems to think so anyway. In fact, she’s so enamored of the clever reversal that she neglects to put actual people in the story. The scant efforts at individuation (the girl has big breasts! the guy has — oh, wait. He doesn’t have any distinguishing characteristics at all) serve only to emphasize the extent to which these aren’t people so much as gears grinding together in the service of a soft-core clockwork sentimentality.

That’s the story which really left a bad taste in my mouth, but a couple of the others also seemed vacuous and manipulated. In one, three childhood friends largely fail to fulfill their dreams; in another, a radiantly kind and generous woman loves the whole world so much she has trouble loving one man in particular, and so she…well, I won’t spoil the twist ending. Who am I to deprive you of the full weight of a thudding cliché?

For much of this book, in short, Yoshinaga seems to be on autopilot; writing throw-away plots for characters she hasn’t thought about. Which is a shame since, when she is engaged, she remains one of my favorite manga-kas. She becomes a different creator altogether when she’s dealing with the Yukiko and her mother Mari, who are featured in the first and last story and have walk-on parts in the rest.

The first tale, in which Mari decides to marry a much younger man and Yukiko decides as a consequence to leave home, is constructed, not around a single irony or reversal, but instead through a series of quiet moments and incomplete but shimmering revelations. The last of these is somewhat overdetermined — but it’s rescued by the story’s final page, in which Yukiko sits on the floor, her head bent forward, while her mother spoons against her in a comforting hug.

Yoshinaga uses her spare lines and mastery of body design to great effect — the curtains and bed in the image seem almost to fade into nothing, concentrating the eye on the kneeling figures. Yukiko is in pale colors; Mari, on the other hand, is in a dark shirt and dark pants. Cupped together, Mari seems like an anchor — and also, with her newly cut hair, like a boy or a man. The position is itself almost sexual — an intimation echoed in the immediately preceding scene, which hinges on jealousy and reads like a break-up as much as a mother/daughter parting. Mari’s hand rests under her own head and against Yukiko’s spine; it’s a virtually hidden, but very intimate and tactile detail. Mari’s expression is relaxed and unreadable; she looks like she’s asleep. The picture is both eloquent and mysterious; you can see the love between the two women, but the exact components of that love — its sensuality, its history, who has needed to lean on who, and when, and how — remain private.

If Yoshinaga sometimes seems indecently eager to wrap up character and narrative in a neat package, at her best she does the opposite. As Mari’s young husband says of Mari in the final chapter of the book, “knowing the history doesn’t mean her issues will disappear. Knowing, forgiving, and loving are all different things.” There is no key to Yukiko or Mari, no twist ending that will tell us who they are. In the book’s final panel, Mari laughs unexpectedly, and not only is it not entirely clear what she finds funny, we never see how Yukiko reacts. There’s a dignity in that; a sense, perhaps, that you need some measure of not knowing, if not for forgiveness, at least for love.

Likely Changes

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In his discussion of Ooku, Suat argued that the book was a failure because it did not accurately reflect gender relations in historical Japan. Specifically, Suat felt that, were some significant percentage of the male population of Tokugawa-era Japan to die of illness, women would not move into positions of prominence, and certainly would not inherit the Shogunate and take over rule of the country, as Fumi Yoshinaga has them do in this series.

In the comments to Suat’s post, I replied that, personally, I really couldn’t care less what would or would not have happened had Ooku’s alternate reality “really” come true. To me the series was about relationships, love, and exploring both in the light of shifting gender expectations and realities. It’s Ursula K. Le Guin, not Hal Clement.

After reading Ooku volume 3, I stand by that — I still love the series, and it’s plausibility as “history” has little effect one way or the other on my enjoyment.

But..at the same time…it’s not quite right to say that history is unimportant to Ooku. Obviously, the setting matters a lot — though I disagree with Suat that plausibility is necessarily the only, or even the main, way to think about how history figures in the book. Or, to look at it another way, I think Suat dislikes the book because he sees human nature as being only so flexible. Yoshinaga, on the other hand, chooses to write about an alternate history precisely because she is fascinated with the way that time can shape individuals. Suat says, “this is what Japan was like.” Yoshinaga says, with James Brown, “time will take you on.”

As an example:

This is perhaps the emotional high point of volume 3. Iemitsu, the female shogun, is in love with Akimoto, but because he is barren and she needs a heir, she conceived and bore a child with another man. The sequence above is her declaration that her love for Akimoto will survive no matter how many other men she sleeps with; her heart will remain true forever. Akimoto is struck, not only by her devotion, but by her alteration. In volume 2, we saw Iemitsu as a desperately unhappy and bitter adolescent, prone to tantrums and rage; earlier in volume 3 we saw her as a passionate young lover. Now, though, she has mastered herself and found her heart; she’s changed, and it’s because she was something else that what she is now has resonance and meaning.

So this is in some sense a defining moment for the character. It’s, emphasized graphically by the way Iemitsu is placed dead center in the panel, and by the way the white background is contrasted with the all-black panels below.

But, despite it’s importance, this isn’t Iemitsu’s only defining moment, or the final defining moment. The story, like time, goes on, and as it does so it starts to be unclear whether Iemitsu’s pledge of eternal loyalty is really, or exactly, eternal. Arikoto asks his friend and former servant Gyokuei to serve as Iemitsu’s consort, and Iemitsu seems to develop feelings for him. And Arikoto’s importance to her also seems diminished as Iemitsu takes up more duties as a ruler, planning policy and finally being recognized as the lawful shogun despite being a woman. (Again, the gender-reversal implicit in having the woman be distracted from love by her career is surely intentional.) Iemitsu doesn’t actually turn Arikoto away, but there are signs that she might, or that’s it a potential. The most ominous of these is here:

Iemitsu has lost interest here, not in Arikoto, but in O-raku, the father of her child, and a man who looks almost exactly like Arikoto. Though she was never that enamored of O-raku, she did for a while look on him with some affection, and the fact that she has moved on so easily seems to bode ill for her devotion to Arikoto as well.

Yoshinaga certainly isn’t saying that all women are fickle, or that people can’t be trusted, or that no love lasts. It’s possible that the passion between Iemitsu and Arikoto could rekindle in later books. And there are certainly instances in the series in which people can’t or won’t change — most notably Kasuga, the longtime power behind the throne, who vowed long ago not to take medicine, and dies rather than break the promise. But even Kasuga is forced to consider, at the end of her life, the possibility of allowing a female shogun — and to reassess her longtime distrust and dislike of Arikoto.

In this sense, it seems to me like the alternate history serves to point up contingency, and the way that people are reshaped, or respond, to time and history. The fact that this isn’t the way things happened, and that gender roles are rearranged and reshuffled, emphasizes the ways in which individual characters negotiate with, or succumb to, or try to defy their fates.

One of the most memorable sequences in the book for me was this:

Masasuke here believes that his decision to enter the inner chamber led to the death of his wife. But he doesn’t regret his choice, in part through what seems to be simple coldheartedness, in part because he saw no other option. It’s hard not to agree with Gyokuei’s indictment of “Dastard!” — and yet, at the same time, Masasuke’s logic seems sound. I may not know enough about Japanese history to agree or disagree with Suat about whether Yoshinaga’s alternate history is or is not probable, but I can say that this particular mixture of callousness, resignation, and complacency is certainly painfully recognizable. When time and circumstance go up against love and honor…well, love and honor often don’t do so well. That’s not the only truth in Ooku or reality, but it is a truth. Ooku remains one of my favorite series going not because the stories in it might or might not have happened, but because there’s conviction in the way individual characters deal with the history they have.
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It’s worth noting that Suat is often preoccupied with the intersection of history and fiction, and with how the latter betrays or misrepresents the former. Two places where he deals with these issues are in his review of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms and yesterday’s review of The Unwritten.

Ooku Volume 1: Some Impressions

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Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku is set in an alternate Edo period Japan where the male population has been halved by an epidemic known as the Redpox with the women taking the majority of male societal roles as a result. Noah has a short synopsis and glowing review of the first volume at the previous HU site and is probably its most articulate proponent. In fact, his gushing enthusiasm for the series is the reason why I picked up a copy of volume 2 without even bothering to read the volume I had at hand.

I’m a bit more ambivalent about what I’ve read so far.

One of my problems with Ooku is that it asks us to accept a logical leap of faith without sufficient justification: that a Japan reduced to a population consisting of 25% men would be ruled and dominated by women over the course of 3 Shogunates (80 years). The haste with which the scenario is dispensed to the readers in the initial pages of the first volume suggests that Yoshinaga is less concerned with the internal consistency of her scenario than with its final consequences.

Continue reading →

Ooku: The Inner Chamber

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Somewhat uncharacteristically, I’m actually reading a book that’s up to the minute. There are a bunch of reviews of Fumi Yoshinaga’s highly acclaimed Ooku out at the moment. One I looked at today is by Kate Dacey

I’ll be honest: I’m not quite sold on Ooku yet. For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been. If anything, it reminds me of a BBC miniseries: it’s tasteful, meticulously researched, and a little too high-minded to be truly compelling.

That got me thinking…you know, I really don’t have anything at all against BBC miniseries. Cutely homely, talented actors performing fairly well-written scripts — I’m cool with that. Sure it’s middlebrow — but everything middlebrow isn’t bad.

More to the point, I’ve actually seen the weirder, more daring, pulpier, louder, and splashier version of Ooku. It’s called Y: The Last Man, and it’s really not all that good.

To back up for a minute, for those not already familiar with the plot: Ooku is basically a costume drama set in an alternate past. Sometime in the 1600s or so, a plague in Japan killed most of the men. Now, in the 18th century, women hold most positions of power and authority, and the few remaining men are second-class citiziens, carefully protected (and commodified) for their seed.

Y: The Last Man also, of course, featured a plague that killed men — but it was (over) orchestrated for maximum drama. Not just most, but all of the guys (except one) died, and it all happened simultaneously. The narrative then centered around women trying, somewhat efficaciously, to fill male roles in the face of a sudden, devastating apocalypse. And, of course, there was spy nonsense and relentless action and everybody shooting each other — all the flash Dacey is missing in Ooku.

There’s no doubt that Ooku is really quiet — which is actually what I like most about it. Rather than big, macro-level statements about Men and Women and How the World Has Changed, Ooku focuses on the small details. Most of the story follows Mizuno, a son of an impoverished samurai family. Mizuno is in love with a childhood neighbor named O-Nobu, but he can’t marry her, both because he’s too poor and because he’s too valuable: as a fertile man, he is basically his family’s chief asset, and they need to sell him off to a wealthy wife. Desperate to avoid marriage, he gives himself in service to the Ooku — the male seraglio of the female shogun. The bulk of the narrative is given over to his rise through the ranks of the Ooku, culminating in a final, bittersweet denoument.

Again, for me, the best part about how Yoshinaga handles this tale is how subtle she is. In Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughn put up a big flashing light every time he touched on gender (look! supermodels collecting garbage! woo hoo!) Yoshinaga messes with gender expectations too…but she also suggests that, even in this new world, there are gender realities which are going to be slow to change. The result is not so much an earthquake as a series of tremors; the furniture shifts, and a couple of things break, but you have to look twice to see just what has happened.

For example, as I’ve mentioned, men are treated as sexual chattel in a way that’s analogous to the treatment of women. In some cases, we learn, men are actually sold to women as prostitutes — though this is more about women’s desire for children than it is about (pure) sexual pleasure. Moreover, while some men clearly do feel degraded by this set up, there are other options too; Mizuno, for example, actually gives himself for free to women because he feels sorry for their childlessness, and..presumably…because he enjoys it as well. Similarly, in the inner chamber seraglio itself, the men are, on the one hand, feminized (they are all obsessed with clothes and gossip and with being chosen by the shogun.) But, on the other hand, they still behave like men in a lot of ways — they participate in staged swordfights, for example…and (as happens not infrequently in all male communities like prison) they initiate newcomers through rape.

Mizuno himself is also very thoughtfully portrayed. A boisterous and open-hearted man’s man, in many ways, he’s also achingly naive and vulnerable; after fighting off the would-be rapists, for example, Yoshinaga shows his stern face collapse into exhaustion and despair. (“”Forsooth, O-Nobu,” he tells himself, “I have brought myself to a most terrible place indeed.”) Yoshinaga plays deftly with different kinds of knowledge, innocence, and insularity. On the one hand, Mizuno is shocked again and again by the ways of the Ooku — particularly by the homosexuality, which is, understandably, very rare in a world with almost no men. But, on the other hand, Mizuno, hailing from the cosmopolitan center of Edo, is actually much more stylish and fashionable than his new peers — there’s a great line (and kudos to the translator) where he calls one of the seraglio a “palace bumpkin” for not recognizing that gray kimono’s are in fashion.

We’re presented, in other words, with a clash between two worlds slightly different than each other, and each also different from our own. It’s a quiet tour-de-force, anchored by a trope that’s familiar in any context: true love. Again, there’s a parallel with Y: The Last Man. In Y, the main character Yorick spends the whole series racing about the world trying to find his girlfriend; true love is essentially a MacGuffin. In Yoshinaga, on the other hand, it’s not space but the much more unyielding wall of cultural reality that separates the lovers, and there isn’t anywhere in particular to run. Mizuno’s certainty that he will never be with O-Nobu colors the whole story with a deep melancholy. His agonized final lament (“‘Twas only through your kimono that e’er I felt the warmth of your body — ’tis not enough to take to a cold grave”) is unbearably painful and sensual at once — as, for that matter, is his night with the shogun herself. And yes, the twist ending made me cry — not that that’s the hardest thing to do, necessarily, but still.

Unfortunately, Mizuno exits the story at the end of this volume, and it looks like the rest of the series will focus on the shogun, Yoshimune, a character everybody else seems to love but who left me flat for the most part. Basically, she seems too good to be true; a lustful, miserly overlord with a heart of gold. It’s kind of fun seeing that stereotype cross-gendered…but only kind of, and I could weary of her quickly if she becomes more central. But whatever happens with the rest of the series, this first volume is pretty much perfect.

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Extra Bonus Self-Referential Hooded Link Section:

My review of Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery is here.

For more bishonen men forced into compromising positions with each other, do read Kinukitty’s column Gluey Tart: Adventures in Manporn.

And apropos of nothing except my own efforts at self-promotion — I’ve just started posting downloadable music mixes every week. The latest is called The Devil Always Shits In the Same Graves and includes gospel field recordings, Belgian psych drone, and Ukrainian black metal. So there’s that.

Update: Changed to reflect the fact that mulligans are not MacGuffins, no matter how much I might wish it were so.

Update 2: Kate Dacey clarifies her position in comments.

Antique Bakery

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A Matter of Taste

My knowledge of manga is far from encyclopedic — for all I know, bakery yaoi could be an entire, hugely popular sub-genre in Japan. In any case, if it isn’t, it should be — as Fumi Yoshinaga’s “Antique Bakery” demonstrates, the rabid consumption of pastry works perfectly as a background for a shoujo tale of semi-sinful, semi-infantilized, polymorphous desire. In Yoshinaga’s series, lust is as idiosyncratically arbitrary as a passion for strawberry tarts, and vice versa. The main characters are all defined, in more or less equal measure, by their relationship to sweets and to sex. For instance, Yusuke Ono, the Antique Bakery’s pastry chef, is a “gay of demonic charm” — if he is attracted to another man, homosexual or otherwise, that man will succumb to his advances. Ono’s romantic talents are matched only by his culinary ones — in fact, his sexual exploits seem, if anything, less orgasmic than his almond-flavored-sponge-cake. People who eat his pastries thrash and shriek and moan in ecstasy. Eiji, the straight assistant chef, offers his body to the cook after sampling the white-chocolate-flavored-mousse (Ono refuses; he finds Eiji unaccountably unattractive.) The only one nonplussed by the glorious desserts is the shop’s owner, Keiichiro Tachibana, who has no sweet tooth — he prefers savory dishes. By a narrative, if not a thematic, coincidence, Tachibana is also the only man on earth immune to Ono’s “demonic charm.”

The series gets off to a slow start with a passel of confusing flashbacks and a couple of maudlin and unmotivated episodes in which Yoshinaga seems to be struggling to figure out what she’s doing with the concept. By the end of the first volume, though, things start to hum along nicely — chef Ono transforms for the first time from gawky, geeky, female-phobic nerd to slick, fashion-conscious gay predator; owner and wannabe ladies-man Tachibana prances around clutching a counter-girl outfit; and we get the first of many extensive and meticulous lessons in pastry making (freeze your strawberries before making compote, kids.) From there, the series spirals off into ever more refined realms of goofiness, accelerating with the introduction of the looming Chikage as semi-competent counter-staff, and probably reaching its peak in volume 3 with the debut of two top-heavy newscasters who begin their television segments by singing a theme entitled “Big-Busted Female Announcer Unit Haruka and Tammy!” Yoshinaga’s layout and design are sparse by shoujo standards — she uses basic grids, and often dispenses with backgrounds altogether. But she has a delightful knack for facial expressions — when Tachibana launches into his sales pitch, for example, he looks almost indecently smarmy. Her command of body language is also first rate. I think my favorite picture in the book is a cartoonish image of apprentice-chef Eiji as he’s about to head out for his French language lesson — with his eyes reduced to pinpoints, his legs slightly bent, and his skinny arms hanging helplessly, it looks as if his overwhelming dejection has actually swallowed up the surrounding art, leaving him hanging in space with only his bookbag and a pitiful high-school letter jacket to keep him company.

Of course, the series isn’t all just passion, gags, and baking tips. There is also plot, and – more problematically – plot arcs. Yoshinaga’s short-form sitcom set-ups can be perfectly entertaining. Tachibana dresses up in a Santa suit to make deliveries, and discovers that the only people on his route who care are the middle-aged drunks — children are terrified. Or, two women come to the bakery; one wipes cream off the other’s face and licks her finger, causing Tachibana to erroneously assume that they’re lesbians. Or, Ono and the clueless Chikage go for a sensual dance in the rain and then almost kiss.

Unfortunately, Yoshinaga is not satisfied with fluffy, frivolous good times; she also wants to give her characters Inner Lives. As a result, everyone in the ensemble is methodically saddled with a meaningful backstory, replete with childhood trauma and emotional obstacles to overcome. Chikage’s mother was abused; Eiji is an orphan with abandonment issues. As an adolescent, Ono discovered his mother having an affair with his schoolteacher; this, we are expected to believe, led to both his fear of women and his player lifestyle (though not, mercifully, to his homosexuality). But the most melodramatic past goes to Tachibana, who was abducted as a young boy — and who was so traumatized that he remembers nothing about his kidnapper except that the man forced him to eat cake. He has established the bakery, Yoshinaga implies, in a semi-conscious effort to catch his still-at-large abductor.

The pop Freudianism is depressingly ill-advised — the book is charming in large part because the characters are all id, and trying to explain in psychological detail why Tachibana strikes out with women, or why Eiji is devoted to Ono, is a lot like trying to explain why you love chocolate and I love vanilla. It’s pointless and, if taken too seriously — as it often is here — annoying. The transparent effort to add emotional heft by gratuitously dragging the bodies of young children through the eclairs is even more ridiculous — and not in a good way. Toward the end of the book, a serial killer with a sweet tooth and a thing for boys shows up. Is it Tachibana’s old abductor? Will the store owner overcome his past trauma? And is there any reason that this whole exploitive, brainless storyline shouldn’t piss me the fuck off? The answer to the third question, at least, is no — in fact, the cynically earnest drift into true crime almost ruined the whole series for me.

Almost, but not quite. Even at her most maudlin, Yoshinaga retains a keen sense of the silly — the detectives investigating the killer, for example, are obsessed with the bakery’s foodstuffs — and the denouement is just anti-climatic enough to relieve a little of the heavy-handed weight. Most importantly, though, the covers of each volume in the series are scratch-and-sniff…a detail I find inexplicably irresistible.

This review first ran in The Comics Journal # 285