(A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing)
In the 90s rerelease of Fictional Opera, a short epilogue is included after the main story. This is an excerpt from a larger essay written by science fiction author, fellow aesthetic yaoi novelist, and friend of Yamaai, Azusa Noa (野阿梓) titled Simulacra/”Yaoi” as a Dream of Maidens, シミュラクラ／乙女たちの夢としての「やおい」.
While modern perspective on BL has changed from the time this was written, I still think it provides an interesting glimpse into how the genre was viewed in the 1990s. I’ve included some translator notes, indicated with T/N, to provide further context on some things Noa discusses.
**While this essay does not discuss such themes in detail, there is passing mention of rape, sexual harassment, and stories that involve adult men pursuing adolescent boys. Of course, this essay has major spoilers for Fictional Opera as well, but I assume if you’re reading this, you’ve already finished the novel.
The Basic Theory of Yaoi
“Yaoi” is an abbreviation of Yama nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi (or in English “no climax, no point, no meaning”) and was originally a self-deprecating term used by girls who were doing Aniparo (anime parody manga). It came to refer to “homosexual manga of boys, by girls, for girls”, and similar novels. At Comiket, the number of participants is said to be as many as 200,000 to 300,000, and more than 10,000 circles sell doujinshis centering on these parody books [as of this essay’s publication in the early 90s]. Among them, “yaoi” type circles have built up a huge presence.
How did this happen? I would like to discuss it below.
Three pillars can be considered as the origin of “Yaoi”. The first is the visual world, the second is the printed world, and the third is the media.
First, let’s talk about the visual world.
Around 1970, movies such as If…., Fellini Satyricon, and Death in Venice were released one after the other. In each case, a privileged and beautiful boy appears in the film, giving the viewer an intense and sensual impression. At that time, the Ooizumi Salon was home to two young talents who would eventually revolutionize the world of girls’ manga, Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya. There is no way that these films did not inspire these women, and a few years later that inspiration would come to fruition as Hagio’s The Poe Clan [ポーの一族, Pou no Ichizoku] and Takemiya’s The Poem of Wind and Trees [風と木の詩, Kaze to Ki no Uta], becoming a singular lineage of the genre.
T/N: Ooizumi Salon (大泉サロン) refers to a house rented in Tokyo by two manga artists, Moto Hagio (萩尾望都) and Keiko Takemiya (竹宮惠子), from 1971 – 1973. Hagio and Takemiya invited other shoujo artists to use the house as a place to live, work, bond, and share ideas. It became a key gathering place for members of the Year 24 Group (24年組, nijuuyonen gumi), a group of female manga artists who heavily influenced shoujo manga beginning in the 1970s.
Perhaps the greatest and first influence was the British free cinema, If…. by angry young people. By the way, although it is not well known, this was a parody or “imitation” (simulacrum) of the 1933 French film Zero for Conduct.
T/N: If…. is a 1968 British film produced and directed by Lindsay Anderson about a group of boys who stage an insurrection at a boys’ boarding school in England. Though now regarded as a landmark of British counterculture cinema, at the time of release it was highly controversial.
“Zero for conduct” is a rating given to students with poor behavior at the boarding school, which means that they are banned from going out on weekends. Here there are three bad boys and a beautiful boy who are constantly forbidden to leave. As they continue to play pranks over and over, they gradually become rebels against the system. Before long, the beautiful boy screams “Bullshit!” against the teacher’s sexual harassment, and with that single word the boys’ festive rebellion begins. The slow-motion scene in which the pure white feathers of a ripped pillow flutter like snow in the large bedroom at night is a famous scene in the history of cinema. This introduction to the story alone will confirm the connection between the two for those who are familiar with If…
T/N: “Bullshit” is based on subtitles from an old rip of the movie available online, though of course the original line is in French. Noa uses くそったれ！(kusottare!) which means shithead or bastard
Lindsay Anderson, the director of If…. said, “If it weren’t for Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, our film wouldn’t exist.” You could call it an homage to his predecessors, a cinematic quote, or an adaptation, but I would like to focus on this concept of “imitation” for now.
Satyricon [Fellini Satyricon, directed by Federico Fellini, 1969] is a visualization of the Nero-era novel Satyricon by Petronius, and in a sense, visualization is a kind of “imitation,” but Fellini further overlapped the decadent manners and customs of ancient Rome with those of modern Rome. Death in Venice is also a film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel, but Luchino Visconti (the film’s director) used an actual episode of Gustav Mahler’s life, the musician who inspired the original novel, to make his “imitation” a more essential repetition.
T/N: Fellini Satyricon follows Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón in the time of Emperor Nero in Rome. Death in Venice (the book) was written by Thomas Mann in 1912. The story follows Gustav von Aschenbach, a writer who visits Venice and becomes obsessed with a boy named Tadzio from a family of Polish tourists. In Visconti’s film adaptation, Gustav is instead a composer.
Next, in the world of the printed page, in the early 1960s, Mari Mori wrote The Lovers’ Forest [恋人たちの森, Koibito Tachi no Mori], The Bed of Dead Leaves [枯葉の寝床, Kareha no Nedoko], and I Don’t Go on Sundays [日曜日には僕は行かない, Nichiyōbini wa Boku wa Ikanai] which were based on the theme of homosexuality among boys in order to depict the delusion and decadence of pure love. At that time, the very existence of gayness was nothing but heresy, and these works were nothing more than the solitary production of a “genius” who was out of touch with the literary world.
T/N: Mari Mori (森茉莉) was a Japanese author and pioneer of tanbi shousetsu (耽美小説), or aesthetic novels.
Ten years later, these “boy love novels” came to the attention of Kaoru Kurimoto, who was a high school student at the time. A great shock and inspiration hit the untapped talent. In 1973, Shinji Fujiwara’s Aspirational Relationship [あこがれの関係, Akogare no Kankei], which was serialized in a weekly magazine, is believed to have been the trigger for Kurimoto to write Midnight Angel [真夜中の天使, Mayonaka no Tenshi]. And here too (similar to Death in Venice), Fujiwara’s work was an imitation of a real incident, and moreover, a retelling based on the narrative from a person who knew the incident well, like a folktale. We can see the composition of the stories that have been told by different speakers, and we can imagine one core that runs through the genealogy. In other words, the real incident surrounding Teruhiko Saigou was “sold” to Shinji Fujiwara and Jugo Kuroiwa (another Japanese novelist) by Shinji Hoshi, who was involved in the case, and was made into a work, which was then retold as a documentary by Hoshi himself. Kurimoto’s Midnight Angel was one of the side stream spin-offs of such “imitation”.
T/N: You might know Kaoru Kurimoto (栗本薫) for Guin Saga, a novel series spanning over 100 volumes and translated into multiple languages. Regarding Teruhiko Saigou, a Japanese singer and actor, I’m not sure what event Noa is referring to here. I’ll update this note if I get a chance to do a deeper dive on the subject.
But these talents of the visual and print worlds were not enough. The seed that would eventually bloom into a large, dark flower needed its own soil. In other words, the media.
The manga magazine COM published in the late 1960s organized manga doujin groups all over the country. Those networks, named Gurakon, were forced to suspend due to the suspension of publication of COM, and a long period of dormancy came. In 1975, the manga critic group Meikyuu (Labyrinth) organized Comiket, and for the first time a new network centered on doujinshi began.
T/N: COM (コム) was a monthly magazine that began publication in 1966 by Osamu Tezuka and his publishing company, Mushi Production, focused on avant-garde and experimental works. COM included a section called Grand Companion, or Gurakon for short, specifically for amateur and up and coming talents. Gurakon clubs eventually sprung up as a result. Many members of the Meikyuu group that would go on to found Comiket were involved in these Gurakon, and COM’s cancellation in 1971 is cited as a major contributing factor for them founding the event.
In the commercial magazines, OUT, JUNE, and Dakkusu were born to directly reflect the real voices of their readers. OUT initially took on the appearance of an anime information magazine in response to the anime boom (Space Battleship Yamato), but when they became a major publisher entering the industry, it turned into an aniparo magazine. This is a form of expression that is nothing more than imitation.
Even more decisive was the launch (1978) of JUNE, with boyish love as the main theme of the magazine. Here, Kurimoto of Midnight Angel and Takemiya of The Poem of Wind and Trees collaborated to clearly present the original image of the “boy love story,” and the path of “imitation” has been widely opened for each and every reader. Until then, there had been shounen ai shosetsu (novels about boys’ love), but not JUNE. This was entirely Kurimoto’s originality, and although it may seem contradictory, it was born through repeated “imitations”.
In the 1980s, imitations using beautiful anime characters (aniparo) in the underground network of Comiket became popular, competing with imitations using young girl anime characters (lolicon). The former was mostly carried out by girls, and the latter by male authors, but it cannot be overlooked that the maturity of this medium was accompanied by innovations in printing technology such as copying and light offset printing. It was also a niche that printing companies, whose work had plummeted with the development of the word processor, had captured as a new clientele. However, the technology they offered there was truly counterfeit technology. Only on this basis could it be said that the repetition of the visual and print currents merged to create the ocean that is Comiket.
Simulacrum
In general, imitation carries some negative connotations. In a world where the myth of originality is alive and well, it is not surprising that this is seen as plagiarism and piracy. However, I would like to take a more positive view of the concept of “imitation” (simulacra) outside of the context of such copyright awareness.
“Yaoi” eventually spun off from manga and spawned novels. In the 1990s, these underground works came to the attention of commercial publishers, who labeled them “aesthetic novels,” a catchphrase that had never been used before. Authors who have been active in doujinshi for a long time, have their own fans, and have a fixed clientele when they publish, are a boon to the depressed publishing world, where they are able to bring the bewitching flowers that they have been quietly cultivating into the sunlight. It has now become a genre of its own.
One of the most representative writers of this genre is Shikiko Yamaai. She is a natural-born hard-core pornographer who has created a bewitching and (literally) aesthetic world, depicting the sexual love of male homosexuals in an exquisite and gorgeous style.
On that note, Yamaai’s early feature Fictional Opera is a free creation based on the world of the TV anime Mobile Suit Gundam.
To briefly introduce the storyline, at the end of the first series, Char, who is aiming for the restoration of the Principality of Zeon, in order to avoid being on the stage himself, creates a replicant of Garma, and tries to manipulate it behind the scenes.
T/N: Noa actually uses the term “replicant” (レプリカント) here, which I can’t help but think is a Blade Runner reference. RJ7 could definitely be considered a replicant in that sense.
However, the real Garma is actually alive, with a scar on his face, and spends his days as a male prostitute in the streets.
After abducting Garma to Zeon, Char keeps him alive and tames him for the education of the replicant. However, the replicant, sensing Char’s latent love for Garma, rapes him to secure its identity and gain an advantage over Garma.
A mirror-image love affair ensues, and eventually Char joins in for a threesome, but when Garma’s wounds are surgically treated and the mirror images become completely indistinguishable, Char shoots the replicant dead and installs Garma as the head of Zeon…and so on. Well, this is the story, but those who don’t understand it won’t really understand it. It’s just the way that world is.
There are some interesting imitations here. First of all, the work itself is an imitation of the anime called Gundam, and it is a clear copyright infringement, but here I would like to pay attention to Garma’s wounds.
The scar on his face is, of course, reminiscent of Char’s own. However, the scar and the mask that conceals it are a kind of stigmata of his privileged existence as a beautiful character, which is transferred to Garma, making him a mirror image rather than a puppet of Char.
Moreover, a triple mirror twin appears here with the addition of the replicant.
When this relationship breaks down, it means that the mirror image of each other is destroyed, which is why the replicant had to be shot dead.
What is this mirror/imitation that repeats as a theme? If we jump to the conclusion, isn’t that the place where “yaoi” occurs? In other words, “yaoi” was generated only through imitation and repetition, and the concept was clarified. That’s what I think.
Of course, not everything that is imitated/repeated is yaoi. However, the “imitation” is a crucial requirement that makes the “yaoi” the “yaoi,” and there is no doubt that it has enhanced itself as a clearer concept through the endless repetition of the mirroring process. So, if “yaoi” is established by reflecting oneself in the mirror, what is the core of “yaoi” in the unexplored place reflected in the mirror?
According to Marino Sato, a shoujo manga artist friend of the author who practices yaoi in her doujinshi activities, “True yaoi lies in the heart of a maiden who creates smoke where there is no fire, and that is why maidens are so crazy about the wholesome worlds of Cap Tsubasa, Gin Eiden, and Chinkan that they turn them obscene.”
“Cap Tsubasa” refers to the TV anime Captain Tsubasa, “Gin Eiden” refers to Yoshiki Tanaka’s space opera novel The Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and “Chinkan” refers to Kaiji Kawaguchi’s manga The Silent Service (Chinmoku no Kantai), all of which are now considered “yaoi”.
However, in my opinion (I don’t know about Cap Tsubasa), I don’t think Legend of the Galactic Heroes or The Silent Service are truly wholesome. It’s not that there is no fire, but rather it is concealed. In Yoshiki Tanaka’s early works, Ryusei Kouro (Meteor Passage), we can see a hint of this hidden JUNE nature, and in The Silent Service, there is a strange sexiness despite the all-male world, and in Kaiji Kawaguchi’s previous work, Actor there were many quite naughty depictions.
In the end, yaoi is all about the girls’ secret fantasies of forbidden sexual love between boys, and through this psychologically elaborate double and triple manipulation, the girls reveal what they have repressed. In other words, just as libido repressed in the depths of the unconscious had to be transformed into a dream in disguise and repeatedly expressed in order to pass through numerous censorship mechanisms and become conscious, yaoi must also be a means of expressing something repressed in the unconscious of young girls. This is why it had to be imitated/repeated.
However, just as dreams are a fleeting flow on top of the enormous stock of the human unconscious, the dreams of the maidens called “yaoi” may also be an unfinished freedom, burdened with an enormous amount of oppression that can’t be released. In order for maidens to awaken from their dreams and face their own reality, however, they must continue to dream these tremendous dreams over and over again for thousands of nights. For that is the paradox of dreams.
This portion essay is available both in the back of Fictional Opera, as well as on Azusa Noa’s website.