![]() There’s a lot to unpack in the way these two women interact, and little details of these interactions show Tsurutani’s keen eye for detail. ![]() The human center of BL Metamorphosis is the relationship between Urara and Ichinoi. These moments make the Japan of Tsurutani’s comics come alive, and the result is a gentle reminder of the human center of the work. Unlike a lot of comics I’ve recently read, BL Metamorphosis makes me feel like it happens in a specific place rather than a generic city-space drawn with computers. Tsurutani lavashes detail on the most unlikely places - the bookstore where Urara works, a cafe where they meet, a bridge where they exchange contact information. For every panel that looks a little under-cooked at the beginning of the book, there are twice as many detailed scenes of domestic Japan, full of house plants, stepping stones, crumpled sheets, and boxes of books. But BL Metamorphosis flowers in the middle and comes alive during the last third of the collection. For the first few pages, I was ready to be disappointed. Likewise, her figure drawing is competent but not exciting. Her line is thin and delicate, and initially, her characters sometimes feel a bit wispy. Throughout the book, Tsurutani’s art is both sturdy and complementary to the main themes. When the elder woman decides to not get it wrapped in paper (something done in Japan to shield the work from prying eyes, a practice often used for BL manga) Urara is stunned - who is this elderly lady who is so brazen with her purchases? This small moment expands into something larger over time, and out of this chance encounter, an unlikely friendship blossoms. When Ichinoi walks into a bookstore to cool off from the summer heat and inadvertently purchases a BL comic, Urara takes an interest. The two women in question are Yuki Inoichi, a septuagenarian widow who teaches calligraphy in her home, and Urara Sayama, a teenage bookstore clerk and high school girl who happens to be into BL comics. I give you all the backstory about manga because it’s the bedrock on which BL Metamorphosis is built - the comic isn’t Boys Love, but it’s about two women of vastly different ages who come to build a meaningful personal connection through the medium of Boys Love comics. Manga publisher Seven Seas has recently dipped its toes in the water with a handful of series, including Our Dining Table and the classic The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese, and has recently published a comic that is about Boys Love, but not Boys Love at all – BL Metamorphosis by Kaori Tsurutani. Like American romance novels, these comics can range from chaste to explicitly pornographic, although most of them fall in the middle somewhere with various shades of intensity. Publishers like the mostly-defunct DMP popularized the Boys Love subgenre in the United States, and now publishers like Viz Manga (through its SuBLime imprint) are the major touch-point for most fans. In a country that is more socially conservative than the United States, these books are often looked down on, and their readers call themselves fujoshi (a word that is literally translated as “rotten girl”), a reclaimed insult from the early 2000s. The vast majority of these books are written by women. Boys Love comics are a romance subgenre of gay male relationships written from a female gaze and consumed by female readers. ![]() Rather than thinking about Japanese comics as a subgenre, it probably makes more sense to think about them like the comics of other nations.Īnd, just like European comics come in a variety of genres and styles, so do the comics from Japan - and one of the most controversial and derided is the genre of Boys Love (sometimes referred to as yaoi or BL in the United States). Because of the high volume of sales and continued growth of the manga market, there’s been an explosion in the variety of available titles to English-language readers. In 2017, Viz Media was 23% of the total US graphic novel market, selling numbers that would make corporate comics green with envy. The truth is that manga, alongside the collective output of Scholastic Books, is comics, at least when you consider things from a market and sales perspective. Manga gets its own section at the library, gets its own shelves at the bookstore, and, as the saying goes, has its own set of adherents. ![]() The popular notion of manga in the United States is that it’s a subgenre of comics. ![]()
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