Welcome to Guest Review Wednesday!  Today we have another exciting review and another new Okazu Guest Reviewer, Jason L. As you may remember, I have been reading and reviewing the Torikaebaya manga series by Saitou Chiho. Tomorrow I will be reviewing the final volume and today we have a discussion of the source material, how wonderful is that? 
Before I had the mic to Jason, I want to mention that this book, while available in print, is absurdly expensive generally, so if you want to read it, I recommend you go to your local library and ask for an Interlibrary Loan of it from another library that has it. If you have never done ILL before, no worries, the Reader’s Services desk will help you, just nab the ISBNs, author, year, publisher from this link and they’ll have all the info they need to find you a copy to read. 

So please give your attention to Jason – and buckle in, it’s going to be a bumpy couple of days!

Upon my first viewing of Maria-sama ga Miteru season 4, I was intrigued by the play, Torikaebaya Monogatari, put on between the joint student councils at the school festival. So I did what I always do, and went in search of a copy of it in English. I discovered that it had only been translated once, originally in 1978 as Rosette Willig’s dissertation, and then released with some modifications in 1983 under the title of The Changelings: A Japanese Court Tale by Stanford University Press.  It took several years to find an affordable copy but I finally laid my hands on one in January and it has felt like I brought, if ever so small, a piece of Yumi’s world into my own life, something quite precious to me.

The Changelings tells the story of two half-siblings, the born-as-a-girl Chunagon who chooses to lead his childhood and young adult life as a man and the born-as-a-boy Naishi no Kami who leads her life as a woman. Other than their parents, no one is aware of their biological genders. Both are thought to be extraordinary in beauty and talent. Chunagon becomes an ever more prominent member at the Emperor’s court. Their father however, refuses the Emperor’s entreaties for Naishi no Kami to be introduced at court. He knows that the Emperor will insist on taking her as his wife thereby uncovering her biological sex. As their story unfolds, what has been a melancholy treatise on gender nonconformity to this point, goes somewhat off the rails and into quite upsetting territory. I was not expecting this given the comedic version done on Marimite.

One of Chunagon’s friends/rivals, Saisho, forces his way into both siblings’ lives with disastrous consequences. Chunagon has married Yon no Kimi with whom he shares a bond but no intimacy. Saisho enters their home and rapes Yon no Kimi ultimately resulting in a pregnancy that nearly destroys her marriage to Chunagon. Following this, Saisho rapes Chunagon, having discovered his secret. Chunagon becomes pregnant and Saisho forces Chunagon to hide in his rapist’s country home, to deliver their child in secret. With the beloved Chunagon now missing at court, his sister, Naishi no Kami, leaves in search of him. Upon being reunited, the two siblings decide to switch places so that their biological sex will match their social roles. This is kept hidden from Saisho, who is now ostracized  by society for his relationship with Yon no Kimi and by the new Chunagon (the former Naishi no Kami). Unfortunately the author spends what feels like endless scenes on what can only be described as whining by Saisho, for whom I struggled to have any empathy. And still the sexual violence does not end, but is furthered by other characters now that the leads’ roles have been switched.

So, clearly this is not the comedy that Marimite presents, but they were not alone in this interpretation of the Torikaebaya monogatari. The sexual violence by powerful males that drives the plot forward has often been played as erotic comedy in many productions of this work. There is, in fact, a routine parallel made to many of Shakespeare’s gender swapping comedies, as Willig notes in her commentary. But nothing could be further from the truth. Mistaking The Changelings for comedy says more about the people encountering, performing, and reviewing the work over the years than it says about the story itself or the pain the characters experience.

And yet as a tragedy, there could have been value in telling such harrowing experiences if done with a grander purpose in mind. However, the author chooses to reconcile these tragedies by marrying off all the characters who are now newly in gender conforming roles. This is done as if none of the violence really had any lasting consequences. Even the new Chunagon marries Saisho off to the younger sister of his second wife. Any historical validity to such an ending is insignificant to me as a modern reader wishing that there was some greater moral purpose for the story.

Making my disappointment in this ending worse, the first third of the story was delicate and empathetic in its handling of the characters’ gender identities. Initially, the author seemed sensitive to the emotional toll and the social stakes of the gender switch. Both Chunagon and Naishi no Kami frequently worried about being discovered and wished to either live in seclusion or leave the world completely, reminding me that the high rates of depression and suicide within the LGBTQI+ community is not new to our society, a powerful message from a 900 year old text. Complementing my initial impressions was Willig’s decision to use the characters’ preferred pronouns throughout, with the female-born trans-male Chunagon being referred to with masculine pronouns and the reverse for Naishi no Kami. In the original language, gendered pronouns are not used as they are in English and so it was Willig, in her translation, that honored the characters’ self-identities with her pronoun choices, a brave decision in the 1980s translation community.

So then I am left with complex feelings.  The book is an important tangible connection for me with Maria-sama ga Miteru, and yet, that too treated it as a comedy, which it most certainly is not. The prose itself is mediocre at best, the translation readable but not artistic, sort of like a middling YA novel. But all my initial confusion over whether it was a comedy or a tragedy, and the weak writing, would not have mattered if the story rose to the potential it displayed early on. Unfortunately, without any comeuppance to the three men who commit rape, or some unambiguous moral judgment rendered by the author, I simply cannot recommend this book. I am left uncertain as to its value for others. However, when I see it on my shelf, I still feel as though I have somehow materialized a piece of my favorite anime into existence in the real world. For me, that might be enough.

Ratings:

Writing: 4 (serviceable and mostly clear if uninspiring)
Story: 5 (beautiful poetry exchanged between characters, deeply moving emotional exploration of trans lives in the beginning, but unacceptable resolution and no final moral judgment)
Characters: 8 (We care about the main characters and hurt alongside them)
Service: 2 (there is little to no textual description of the sexual acts themselves, beware that most sexual encounters in the story are overt rapes)

Overall: 5 (if the conclusion had been morally stronger I would have gladly overlooked the poor prose quality)

Erica here: Wow. What a fantastic review, Jason. When I end up saying about 80% of the same things all over again tomorrow, I’ll make sure people know you said it first. ^_^ Thank you so very much for this review!