Takeuchi Sachiko is a lesbian comic artist in Japan. She has detailed some of her life as a lesbian and her experiences in the LGBT Tokyo community for DaVinci, a mainstream women’s magazine. These experiences were gathered in the two volumes Honey x Honey and Honey x Honey Deluxe. After she and her lover split, Sachiko started seeing a transgender friend Kai, who ultimately underwent surgery to full transition to being a man in Otoko ni Naritai! Sachiko and Kai are still together, and now she’s explaining her other secret life to the utterly “normal” women who read DaVinci magazine. Because, you see, Sachiko is a fujoshi　(腐女子.)

Fujoshi are, commonly speaking, female otaku. As Sachiko points out in Kusare Fujoshi! In Deep (くされ女子! In Deep) there’s more to it than just being a a fan of Boy’s Love, although that seems to be the major commonality. She also explains to her audience – by way of two fellow fujoshi Mai and Shiori-sempai – that there are lesbians who are fujoshi and even men, gay and straight, who are fujoshi.

At some point Mai hits on what I think may be one of the key factors of being fujoshi vs being otaku. Fujoshi, Mai says, love men. Not that they necessarily have to love them in the flesh, but that they love the idea of men and, by extension, love romance and sex between these idealized images. On the other side of the aisle, you can pretty much say the same for otaku – they may or may might not love real women, but love their idealized idea of women. I personally have always considered myself otaku as opposed to fujoshi, so that kind of fits.

Kusare Joshi explores some of the various facets of being a fujoshi. Host bars; cosplay; sexual titillation when reading BL and how it can be a shared sexual experience between women; what moe means to a fujoshi and even the differences between real gay men and Boy’s Love stories. This section contained what is perhaps my favorite scene. When her gay guy friends learn of her interest, they hound her asking if she is moeru over them – and insist she “Say it! Say it!” That bit had me laughing out loud.

As I said in my review of Honey x Honey, Takeuchi’s art is simplistic but it fits her message well. Her story is meant to be an introduction to a “lifestyle” that her audience thinks they know nothing about and considers alien, perhaps gross. Her straightforward autographical style takes the sting out of even the most pointed commentary (she points, for instance, out the unfairness of the fact that women who get all hot and bothered over guys having sex are “fujoshi”….but the guys who do the same over women having sex are considered perverted.) Or when she briefly touches a few times on Yuri and finds that most (especially straight) fujoshi reject it as being disgusting.

Also, because her book is an autobiography it carries the weight of verisimilitude – these are real people, doing things for real. And, she assures us once more in the Afterword – having a hell of a fun time doing them!

This book is an insight on the side of the store I almost never find myself on, including the secret of what, exactly, is kept inside those suitcases that fujoshi drag behind themselves.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 0 Lesbian  -5
Loser Fangirl – 10

Overall – 8

Many, many thanks to George R. for offering up this book for review! George, you can shop for me in Tokyo anytime! :-)

I’m out of the office for the next few days with limited computer access. I’ll do my best to approve comments, but it might be some time before I reply to anything. If I don’t approve your comment or reply to it I am either away from the computer, do not have computer access or am ignoring you. Pick whichever works best for you. ^_^

I’ll pick up with the news reports next week. Thanks for your patience!

No promises on a review today, but I’m going to try. Instead, I’m starting your morning off with some random clean-up. :-)

First up, announcing the winner of the Jormungand, Volume 2, manga giveaway: Milz, a winner is you!

And the “winner” of the El Cazador manga contest: Emma! I promise to send along something that doesn’t suck as well as the manga that does, so you can have something for you to chew on, along with your dog!

Please email me here at anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com and *please* use the subject line: Okazu contest. Send me your shipping address and things will arrive as if by magic, eventually.

I also have a DVD giveaway going on at the Yuricon Mailing List that has a few days to go, do drop by and take a look!

Secondly and rather significantly for me, today I start a gig at Noah Berlatsky’s Hooded Utilitarian, a blog associated with The Comics Journal. (which, along with Journalista, you should read regularly because they are smart, entertaining, and about the comics and manga industries.) I’ll be doing a column on the first Sunday of every month – amazingly, I have my posts planned through October. I hope you drop by and post some positive feedback to “comment offset” the inevitable negativity. My column is called Overthinking Things and my obligatory wankerish self-introductory post is up.

“Comment Offset” – lol

I like it.

I don’t really have time in my life for another writing gig, but Noah’s argument was very compelling – write whatever you want, I really don’t care. Oh, well, who could refuse that?

Thank you all for all your support – emotional, monetary, humor, everything – and for your cheerful participation in my ass contests! I adore all of you, I really do. You make it all so worth every minute of every day to do this.

When I reviewed the anime for To Aru Kagaku no Railgun I said that the overall impression I had of it was that it was “entertaining.” This holds true for Volume 1 of the To Aru Kagaku no Railgun manga as well.

The main thing that made the anime so watchable is maintained in the manga – the characters are all people I’d have over for lunch. Mikoto might be one of the seven most powerful people in the city, but she likes cute pajamas and stuffed frogs and is a very down-to-earth person. Saten and Uiharu are not wallowing in their lack of skill, they are living within their limitations. Do they wish they had more – of course. I wish I had more energy, more time, more money. Does it depress them – of course it does! But they aren’t wallowing in it, as we see others do.

And then there’s Kuroko. She’s manic, undisciplined, a little crazy. She’s an ojousama at a powerful school, she’s got a high level of skill – and she’s nice. She’s a hard-working member of Judgement. She’s kind to those who are powerless, and a good friend to people she could easily treat like dirt and get away with it. She’s in a hopeless, pointless lust for Mikoto and despite the fact that it’s played for laughs, there’s no reason to think that her feelings aren’t legitimate.

There is nothing about this manga that is not the same as in the anime – plot, character, everything. So basically all my impressions of the anime are the same for the manga. The *only* thing that disappointed me about the manga is that it is *exactly the same* as the anime. We enter the manga in the middle of the Graviton case and head right into the Level Upper situation. It was a bit rushed, but it makes me hope that maybe later volumes will branch out into something new, if only because the manga is moving so fast.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 4
Service – 3

Overall – 7

I’ll keep an eye out for more of this – it’s enjoyable enough to keep reading even if it goes nowhere new.

No Yuri today – I have to be in NYC to do some stuff today, and while I’m there, I’m meeting Rica Takashima to visit the Center for Book Arts and take in their exhibit of Garo manga magazine.

Garo is, if you will excuse my mixing and matching of memes, the Dadism phase of manga. It focused on breaking the boundaries, and socio-political commentary which, as you know, every single generation of young artists does and thinks they are unique and groundbreaking. :-) (In many ways every generation is unique and groundbreaking – except the part where they think “no one has ever done this before” and are self-righteous and angry about things. lol.)

For most US fans, names that will be most recognizable from Garo is Yoshihiro Tatsumi, creator of A Drifting Life and  Usamaru Furuya, creator of Short Cuts. 


I’ll be doing a write up of the exhibit for another website, I’ll let you know when it goes up. 


Can I just tell you how amazing it is to be alive right now? We have the best of all possible worlds – the past and present are as accessible to us as we want them to be, no matter how obscure our interests. And we have an opportunity to create the future. It’s pretty spectacular.

Thank you Center for Book Arts – and every Library in the world that celebrates the printed word and image!