Comments on: Yaoi for Parents, A Crash Course in Boys’ Love by Shaenon K. Garrity — Part Three: Reading Yaoi

By: Jennifer Zito

Jennifer Zito — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:33:19 +0000

Unless I missed her, you’ve not mentioned Miyamoto Kano. She stands alone in the Yaoi manga world. Non corny realistism, and art that looks like candid photo shots of real emotions. She’s the best. Shame on me if I missed a reference to her. Shame on you if you really did leave out what I’d consider genuinely seminal work in the Yaoi genre.

By: kinou

kinou — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:10:40 +0000

[...] with such a dark past must have her story to tell, and this is hers; rejected for being too much …Graphic Novel Review Yaoi for Parents, A Crash Course in …There's also Yoshinaga's newest series, Kinou Nani Tabeta? ( What Did You Eat Yesterday?), which is [...]

By: Kelly

Kelly — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:07:39 +0000

I read all three parts to your posts. I just wanted to say I enjoyed it very much! Thanks so much for putting your time into collecting and typing all that up! It was very insightful, well written, and entertaining to read up on so many different things. (It was also eye opening seeing the debate going on with the blogger Isaac Hale from your other post.) I feel like my scope on BL has grown a lot coming across this. lol! And I have to say, I love all of Fumi Yoshinaga’s works. She truly is a master of story telling. I’ve been reading and purchasing all her books since I came across her first volume of Antique Bakery and Gerard and Jacques. (Which has become one of my favorites!)

By: ep

ep — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:22:03 +0000

“Yaoi world’s Jane Austen” sounds great! Fumi Yoshinaga had another 4 volumes doujinshi on Antique Bakery, with sex scenes among the leads. It is really interesting that she made (official?) slash stories on her own work. Anyway she is an out-standing author among other that produce plotless manga.

By: Travis

Travis — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:50:12 +0000

There’s also Yoshinaga’s newest series, Kinou Nani Tabeta? (What Did You Eat Yesterday?), which is a typical seinen slice of life cooking manga, only the protagonist is a forty-something gay guy and the meals he cooks are for his live-in partner. It’s great to see a realistic representation of gay characters in a series that’s not a romance.

By: Kate

Kate — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:29:12 +0000

I’d include Ragawa Marimo (New York, New York) and Motoni Modoru (Koi ga Bokura wo Yurusu Hani, Rika the Breeder) on that list with Fumi Yoshinaga. Though Motoni does her share of outrageous comedy as well, which is all we’ve seen translated of hers.

And of course, that’s only the manga. There is a thriving BL novel industry in Japan that includes mature works that we’ve never seen translated. June has only brought over a few BL novels, most aimed at teenagers. My Japanese friends tell me of all the wonderful BL novels they’re reading, and I know that I’m going to have to get a lot better at Japanese or miss them since they’ll likely never be licensed.

I think an important thing to note about reading yaoi, if this is a primer for the non-manga reader, is that the graphics are as important to telling the story as the dialogue. Western readers of comics are used to tracking from one speech bubble to the next and seeing the pictures as illustrations to be skimmed over. In manga though, they’re vital to understanding what’s happening and time needs to be spent seeing what they say. You picked a great illustrations from Antique Bakery that shows just that.