Part One: History of Yaoi

First, the terminology. In Japan, the word yaoi usually refers exclusively to self-published or small-press comics focusing on male-on-male romance. These comics are created by and for women. In Japan, they usually run in self-published doujinshi (fancomics) or specialty magazines. The word “yaoi” is an acronym of the phrase yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (“no climax, no point, no meaning”), a criticism of the frequent plotlessness of yaoi manga.

In America, “yaoi” has become a catchall term for any manga or anime that includes suggestive situations between male characters, including mainstream shojo (girls’) manga that would not be classified as yaoi in Japan. In Japan, the general term for this type of manga is “boys’ love,” often abbreviated as BL. The term shonen-ai, literally “boy love,” is also used, but today often refers to older titles, especially early BL manga set in private boys’ schools. In American fandom, “yaoi,” “BL,” and “shonen-ai” tend to be used interchangably. The characters themselves are called bishonen, “beautiful boys.”Although many Americans encountering yaoi for the first time assume that it’s gay porn intended for men, it is very much created for a straight female audience. Manga aimed at gay male readers, known as gei comi or bara (after the now-defunct gay magazine Barazoku, or “Rose Tribe,” which popularized “rose” as a euphemism for a gay man), also exist, but no bara titles have been published in English. They are not closely related to yaoi and look very different; for one thing, the characters are more likely to be Tom of Finland-style musclemen or other macho physical types than the long-haired pretty-boys common in yaoi.

Boys’ love has a long pedigree in manga. In the 1970s, female artists entered the manga industry in large numbers, and for the first time shojo manga was drawn primarily by women rather than men. Most of these new creators were young women who had grown up on manga; they were drawing not just what they thought girls wanted to read, but what they themselves enjoyed. The most influential of these new artists belonged to a loosely-defined group known as the Year 24 Group, or the Forty-Niners, because many of them were born in 1949 (Showa 24 on the Japanese calendar).

The chaste schoolgirl romances of previous decades quickly gave way to envelope-pushing shojo manga drawn in flashy, flowery, experimental styles. Science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and occult horror sprouted alongside romances and slice-of-life stories. Within this wave of revolutionary new shojo manga were the first shonen-ai stories, drawn by roommates Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya. Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas (1974) and Takemiya’s Song of the Wind and Trees (1976) both involve romances between students at all-male boarding schools. It took Takemiya nine years to convince a publisher to accept Song of the Wind and Trees.

Hagio and Takemiya incorporated shonen-ai elements into their other manga as well. Hagio’s science-fiction manga A, A¹ (A, A Prime), for example, involves a love story between two men, one of whom is a “Unicorn” genetically engineered for high intelligence and limited emotion. One of the characters in her story “They Were Eleven” is a hermaphroditic alien who has to choose whether to become male or female. Many of these works first ran in the magazine Shojo Comic, helping to establish its longstanding reputation as the edgiest of the major shojo manga magazines (although nowadays it’s more likely to attract parental ire for manga featuring heterosexual sex scenes between teenagers).

When Hagio was developing the story that would become The Heart of Thomas, she considered making it a love story between two girls. As she told The Comics Journal in a 2005 interview, “When I wrote it as a boys’ school story, everything fell into place smoothly. But when I wrote the girls’ school version, it came out sort of giggly.”

Detail from From Eroica With Love (c) 2009 Yasuko Aoike

Whether it was the lure of forbidden love or the simple appeal of getting twice the handsome male leads per story, same-sex romances between beautiful boys soon became a popular element in shojo manga. As early as 1976, the genre was established enough to begin poking fun at itself. Yasuko Aoike’s long-running series From Eroica with Love follows the antagonistic relationship between straightlaced NATO officer Major Klaus von Eberbach and flamboyant art thief Earl Dorian Gloria, who flirts with the Major while committing daring thefts under his nose. Eroica is deliberately campy and peppered with in-jokes; the Earl is modeled physically after Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, while his henchmen resemble the other members of the band. Another early shonen-ai parody is the untranslated Pataliro!, by Maya Mineo, about a goofy-looking prince who thinks of himself as a handsome bishonen.

June magazine, launched in 1978, was designed to cater to the popularity of shonen-ai romances and bishonen male characters, then exemplified by androgynous rock stars like Robert Plant, David Bowie, and the members of Queen. At the time of its inception, June was envisioned as an alternative “cult” magazine with a glam-rock ethos and a lineup of new, up-and-coming shonen-ai artists.

In the 1980s, shonen-ai collided with the growing popularity of doujinshi, comics self-published by manga and anime fans, and yaoi was born. The doujinshi scene was dominated by female artists, and same-sex romances soon became the biggest and most popular genre. Yaoi doujinshi typically featured romance and/or sex between the male leads of shonen (boys’) manga series like the action fantasy Saint Seiya and the sports manga Captain Tsubasa, manga in which attractive male heroes fought and played together with exaggerated passion. Male-dominated action movies like Star Wars were also popular subjects. Although most of these yaoi were humorous, tongue-in-cheek parodies of the source material, the erotic content—ranging from chaste, unconsummated declarations of love to graphically depicted sex scenes—was often honestly arousing.

As doujinshi became a major part of the manga industry, doujinshi artists began to make the leap to professional publication, bringing yaoi sensibility into mainstream manga. The manga team CLAMP, for example, started as a doujinshi circle drawing yaoi based on Saint Seiya and the action/horror manga Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure before moving on to professional, original work with a long string of hit series including Tokyo Babylon Volume 1 (v. 1), Card Captor Sakura, Chobits, xxxHOLiC, and Tsubasa. CLAMP’s work often features same-sex or gender-bending romances and suggestive “fanservice” between handsome male characters.

Another early doujinshi artist to make the leap to professional success was Yun Kouga, who started her career as part of a doujinshi circle before striking out on her own. In Kouga’s elegiac 1980s/1990s series Earthian, two male angels fall in love while stationed together on Earth but must deny their feelings because their society forbids homosexuality. Kouga’s brooding, introspective take on romance has remained popular; her current BL series Loveless, set in a fantasy world where people are born with cat ears and tails, has a rabid fandom in both Japan and the U.S.

The manga often credited with bringing yaoi into the mainstream is the untranslated Zetsuai/Bronze, by Minami Ozaki. The saga of a decadant rock star in love with a rising young soccer player, Zetsuai (“Desperate Love”) began as a doujinshi before launching in the relatively staid shojo magazine Margaret in 1989. At the time, explicit same-sex romances were rare in mainstream shojo manga, but Zetsuai, later revived under the title Bronze: Zetsuai Since 1989, was a runaway hit. Many modern elements of yaoi, especially the emphasis on angst and emotional torment (Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics calls Ozaki’s manga “prolonged erotic psychodramas”), were popularized by Zetsuai.

By the mid-1990s June had become popular enough to spawn three spinoff magazines, one of which, Shōsetsu June, outsold June itself. Today, June is devoted exclusively to erotic BL manga, with plenty of explicit sex but little of the underground glam aesthetic with which the magazine started. Other yaoi and BL magazines abound, the most popular of which is Be x Boy. Most of these magazines are produced by small publishers, although some mainstream shojo magazines, like Asuka and Wings, have their own all-BL spinoff magazines.

Elements of yaoi can be found everywhere in modern manga. Even manga ostensibly aimed at male readers often include hints of BL fanservice. This is especially true of manga published in Shonen Jump, the most popular manga magazine in Japan. The manga in Shonen Jump are officially boys’ manga, but the magazine has a large and loyal female readership; fan polls often rank it as the most popular manga magazine with teenage girls in Japan, beating out the magazines aimed at female readers. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the hit Shonen Jump manga Death Note features two sexy male leads who sometimes find themselves handcuffed together, or that, in the first volume of Naruto, Naruto and his male classmate Sasuke accidentally kiss. Bishonen characters are also common in Shonen Jump manga, like the beautiful, long-haired male ghost who haunts a Go board in Hikaru No Go.

In shojo manga magazines, stories set in boys’ schools, often with hints of sexual tension between the students, continue to be popular, as do series like Sanami Matoh’s Fake or Kazuma Kodaka’s Kizuna, in which the male leads fall in love while working together. (In Fake, they’re cops; in Kizuna, they’re gangsters.) Male crossdressing is an increasingly common form of fanservice in shojo manga, although, like real crossdressers, crossdressing manga characters are often heterosexual. A typical example is Heaven’s Will, by Satoru Takamiya, in which the male lead, a teenage exorcist, just happens to enjoy wearing women’s clothing. (Female crossdressing is even more common but almost always takes the form of girls disguising themselves for pragmatic/plot reasons, such as getting into an all-boys’ school, rather than as a personal choice. Examples include Hana-Kimi, Girl Got Game, and Never Give Up … and go all the way back to the first major shojo manga, Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight.)

Yaoi and BL manga attract intense devotion from fans. In a 1998 poll in the Japanese magazine Comic Link, a poll heavily swayed by women’s votes, readers’ all-time favorite manga was Banana Fish, by Akimi Yoshida, an unusually gritty 1980s BL series set among New York street gangs.

Meanwhile, doujinshi continue to exert a huge influence on manga fandom. Today the largest comic-book convention in the world is Comic Market, or Comiket, a biannual convention in Tokyo devoted entirely to doujinshi. Although modern doujinshi cover every conceivable subject and style, including original stories not unlike the material in American indie comics, and male creators with no interest in yaoi now make up a sizeable percentage of Comiket vendors, yaoi remains the dominant category. Recent popular subjects for unlicensed parody include the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises as well as shonen manga like Death Note, Bleach, and The Prince of Tennis. Same-sex romances featuring original characters are common as well.

In Japan, yaoi has come to be strongly identified with female geeks. Fujoshi, a common self-deprecating term for anime and manga fangirls, translates as “rotten girl,” a reference to their dirty-minded obsession with yaoi. (It’s also a pun on the homophone fujoshi, meaning “respectable woman,” the exact opposite of a yaoi fan.) Nerdy shojo magazines like Wings, which published some of the first professional work by CLAMP and Yun Kouga, regularly feature BL romances alongside their usual selection of science-fiction and fantasy manga for nerdy girls.

No explicit yaoi was published in the U.S. until 2004, but once it appeared it quickly grew into one of the most popular genres of manga. Many American manga publishers now have all-yaoi imprints, like Digital Manga Publishing’s imprint Juné and TOKYOPOP’s Blu, which publish dozens of titles per year. Amazon currently lists over 500 books classified as “yaoi”; non-yaoi titles with strong BL themes are innumerable. Yaoi-Con, held annually in San Francisco since 2001, provides a gathering place for fans to check out their favorite titles, translated and untranslated.

On SF Site, Susan Dunman had this to say:

As author and illustrator, Makoto Yukimura creates a believable near-future that’s filled with the excitement of discovery on both personal and planetary levels. It doesn’t shrink from the many dangers faced by those exploring space, yet the overall tone is upbeat and positive, assuring those with big dreams that the adventure is worth the risks. In true manga style, the book reads from back to front, right to left. Because it’s so easy to get involved with this story, you may forget you’re reading the book backwards. That’s a very good sign. …more

And from the late, lamented Ninth Art comics review blog:

One of the most engaging aspects of PLANETES is how much emphasis is placed on the danger of living and working in space. Between showing how the lower gravity can alter your muscles and bone structure, to the radiation levels that cause cancer, to the just unbearable fear of the vastness of space, Yukimura presents space as a hostile and dangerous place in a way that most science fiction makes a point of avoiding. …more

Khaled Abou Alfa loves the book, but isn’t a fan of its American publisher, TokyoPop, better known, perhaps, for flooding the market with less literate works:

I have no idea how this little gem of a comic got through the Viz and Dark Horse net to be honest, because it is easily one of the best manga series I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of manga series. …more

The Village Idiot Savant picked up the book on the cheap. Lucky:

You never quite know what you’ll find in the bookstore bargain bin. Most times, it’s really marked down overruns that nobody wants; and on that rare occasion, you get a little gem whose value outshines its full price counterparts. …more

Otaku Champloo finds the book to be deep, indeed:

I may sound like a lunatic to say this, but reading Planetes is like reading Descartes and Marcel. It talks about man’s journey: from his self-centered beginnings, to one that is truly historical. Before this leaps into a philosophical paper (which I myself am evading as my head still hurts from last semester’s reflections), maybe we could place ourself further into the manga by looking at the importance of space. …more

PlanetES: Book 1

In other words, PlanetES is utterly gripping.

Yuri’s story arc, in particular, represents one of the most mature, nuanced, and subtle portrayals of bereavement that I’ve seen in any comic, of any genre.

There is some small amount of the old slam-bang razzle-dazzle, too. The female member of the team, Fee, headlines the book’s sole action/adventure storyline, semi-accidentally saving the world from an eco-terrorist plot — but only because she needed a good place to relax and smoke a cigarette.

But the real story here is Hachimaki’s outsized ambition, which everyone (including Hachimaki) agrees will only lead him to disappointment and self-destruction someday. We don’t get as far along in the development of his story arc as we do the others, but that’s perfectly appropriate for the hero of this kind of limited but serialized work, whose arc has to stretch across the entire set of books, and come to a resolution in the final volume.

The artwork is realistic (for manga), attractive, and effective. I am prone to get confused reading manga, occasionally losing the through-line on this or that sequence of images on some arbitrary page or another, probably just because I’m not used to the right-to-left reading pattern, but that didn’t happen even once, reading Planetes. Occasionally — like when Hachimaki walks out onto an “ocean” on the moon with a strange girl he just met — the art can be downright astounding in its quiet power. You can appreciate, in these moments, the blank silence that, statistically speaking, anyway, comprises the entire universe. Everything we care about, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is so rare, so unique, and so tiny, in the face of the light-years and light-years and light-years of emptiness around us, that we really don’t even count.

And that’s beautiful. So is this book.

Highly recommended.

(The image in this post, a detail from PlanetES Book 1, is copyright (c) 2007 Makoto Yukimura. The English text contained within said image is copyright (c) 2007 TokyoPop)