Archive for the Queer Fiction Category


The Night Of Baba Yaga

January 26th, 2025

Bright red book cover, with white letter than read The Night of Baba Yaga, Akira Otani. On the lower portion, a blood-stained girl with yellow whites of her eyes and red irises, stares at us as if looking over a wall.by Matt Marcus, Staff Writer

CW: Rape (both attempted and implied), incest, violence, gore, misogyny, transphobia

The Night of the Baba Yaga came on my radar by way of a skeet from the Read Japanese Literature podcast as a part of Pride Month. A queer author’s English debut about an ass-kicking bodyguard and her charge, a yakuza princess? Sounds like a bloody good time! I just had one major concern: in the seedy male-dominated world of organized crime, how much will sexual menace play a role in the story for our protagonists?

Turns out the answer is a lot!

It begins right away too. Our POV character Yoriko Shindo is kidnapped off the street by a gang of goons working for a local high-level boss Genzo Naiki and is immediately forced to strip to “prove” that she’s a woman. (Genzo made sure to add a crack about trans women here for good measure.) Already the vibes are rancid, and it does not get any better from there. Put more succinctly, in the 116 pages of this book, the phrase “raped to death” was used three times.

This all kicks off because Genzo is in need of a bodyguard for his 18-year-old daughter, however he is too psychotically protective of her “virtue” to trust any of his men to do the job. Luckily for him, Shindo just happened to pick a fight with some of his men that night. After being subdued, she is pressed into service on the threat of…well, you know. Bad stuff.

Shindo is, of course, a social castoff with a strange background. She’s half-foreign, was raised by her grandparents, which included bizarre (and, to be honest, abusive) training that made her a formidable fighter. She isn’t just capable of throwing fisticuffs—she relishes the thrill of it. She’s quippy and feisty. We are supposed to think that she’s cool, but she’s a little too cool.

Our yakuza princess in question, Shoko, has had her life completely controlled by her father. Her mother ran off with one of Genzo’s subordinates some ten years prior, and while the boss continues to hunt for his absent spouse, he has groomed Shoko to be something of a direct replacement. (Do we find out that this is more literal than we’d like? Yes, yes we do.) 

Now, what could have salvaged this story is the rapport between Shindo and Shoko. This is a classic pairing: a rough-and-tumble low-class scrapper and an uptight, sheltered girl who cannot escape her circumstances. Of course they are going to clash at first, but eventually emotional walls will come down, trust will be built, and eventually love will bloom.

That isn’t what we get here. The story barely spares any words on building their relationship. Shoko hates Shindo’s guts on sight, and they share maybe two scenes together before a turning point, where Shoko saves Shindo from being gang raped by a group of Genzo’s men. After that, Shoko can no longer hold her steely façade in front of Shindo, but at no point I would say that they emotionally bonded at all.

There is one specter lurking in the background of the story: an associate of Genzo’s who is described as a complete pervert for torture, particularly of the sexual kind. The first of two twists in this book is that this man is Shoko’s fiancé. None of this makes sense considering how protective and possessive Genzo is of his daughter, but fuck it, we need a Big Bad, so why not this guy? Shindo, out of some sense of duty, decides that she can’t let Shoko be married off to this pervert, so they end up running off together, much like Genzo’s wife and henchman had done years prior. (Oh, and in the process Shindo gets to repay the favor by saving Shoko from being raped by her father too. Symmetry!)

The last section of the book is where most of the queer themes show up, as the two begin living life together under false personas. Their bond turns into something of an “honor-bound” queer platonic relationship with a little bit of Gender thrown in. To be honest, it wasn’t well seeded prior to the end of the book, and the series of vignettes we do get are pretty scant. It is the only element of the book that isn’t heavy-handed.

The second twist to the story is one that I will not spoil, but my reaction to it was less “oh, that’s neat!” and more “oh, ok.” The ending tries to wrap the story with a dramatic showdown, but it feels under-baked.

The one lone bright spot for me were the fight scenes, particularly the first one. They were all properly visceral and well-choreographed. With the title and Shindo’s love of dogs, I was expecting a certain amount of John Wick influence, but I was pleasantly surprised it comes through strongest when Shindo is breaking bones.

Sam Bett is credited with the translation, and I think overall he did a good job of it. There is one line of dialogue that I found particularly groan-worthy (hint: it includes the phrase “thunder thighs”), but I assume that the source material carries most of the blame for it.

All in all, this is very much a novella that really badly wanted to be an exploitation film. If you are looking for a grimy crime family story with a dash of queerness, then you should let this Baba Yaga haunt you for an evening or two.

Rating:

Overall – 6 For the number of severed sex organs presented to us for our trouble

As a shoutout, I read this book through The Japan Foundation via the Libby iOS app. There isn’t any yuri manga available in the catalogue at this time of writing, but there are queer-themed books and such that may be of interest. Best part is that it’s free for those in the US and Canada, so long as you have a library card.

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.





Plain Bad Heroines written by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman

July 17th, 2022

In 1902, at a boarding school for young women in Rhode Island., a book is making an indelible impact upon both the student body and the school headmistress, leading to a series of tragedies. In 2022, the same book – is having an equivalently huge impact on the stars of a movie about those tragedies. In Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth creates a meta-novel about a meta-novel, full of gothic horror, women in love and the memeification of fear and desire.

Brookhants (pronounced, Brookhaunts, we are assured early on) is a school on the property of a man who was deeply, obsessively, interested in the occult. The grounds, the buildings, the flora and fauna of Brookhants are saturated with the occult. But  the occult is just the gold lame draped over this story. Under the turban and giant earrings, is a psychological thriller about social media in 1902 and 2022. The girls at Brookhants share their obsessions through songs and rhyme and images, and promises, the young women of the 21st century share Instagram photos and memes, images and promises. What ties these two threads together is a book that was a huge hit in 1901, The Story of Mary Maclane, one girls’ diary of desire for other girls and desire to be released from a boring life. Both this book – which is a real book – and the “author” of the novel are ever present in the narrative. They will be there with us, every step.

This story begins with a tragic sapphic love; two young women who die a horrible death together instead of living horrible lives apart. These deaths bring about more deaths, and the separation of an adult lesbian couple who had, until this tragedy, managed to find joy together….they hoped.  A hundred years later, a movie about these stories is being filmed as a kind of true-horror story, with real, imagined and staged mysteries that keep the two leads – a famous up-comingstar and the daughter of a B-movie has been – and the woman who is credited with writing the book about the book, in a state of high anxiety, until they find each other and redeem both the film, themselves and each other. The several levels of meta-novel lean heavily on one another. If you were, for instance, to pretend that memes don’t have power, this book probably would have no power over you. But…you’d have to pretend, because we know for a fact that memes do have power. ^_^

What this book does right is the slow-burn of the obsessive thoughts and behaviors that creep in and out of the pages until, unbidden, they come to your own mind in a similar situation….the perfect meme, even if that meme is a bit destructive, like invoking Bloody Mary on Halloween.  Even though the book is not entirely happy, if you’re fond of gothic romance – the penny dreadfuls of the turn of last century – you’ll probably enjoy this. Certainly, Sara Lautman’s illustrations remind us exactly how we should be reading this story – late at night, with a candle or lamp for atmospheric lighting, maybe on a stormy, cold, dank day.  Whether from the cold or the fear, or the quiet longings of our own history, doesn’t matter – we should be shivering.

Despite the many tragedies of the story, it does have what I consider to be a happy ending. The happy ending is tied up in the existence of a three-person relationship that exists in a space that isn’t one thing or another, yet.  Where the girls and women of 1902 were not given the space to determine what they might be to one another, the happy ending is that the three of 2022 will have time and freedom to figure it out for themselves…

Ratings:

Art – Atmospheric
Story – A LOT of story
Characters – Fascinating and deeply flawed, like people
Service – Yes, actually. But I can’t tell you what it is or I’d ruin it
Lesbian – Several different kinds of sapphic relationships, spanning a century.

Overall – Complex, overwrought, a very good read that will stick with me for a long while

Listening to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast over the past several months I find I do not actually enjoy that much historical fiction. As I mentioned when LHMP interviewed me last month, I do tend to prefer contemporary fiction that becomes historical over time. The historical part being just one layer of this novel gave it depth, rather than being a lesson on “the time period I researched” as so much historical fiction feels to me. And the contemporary side of the story is cemented in it’s time and place with any number of cultural touchpoints that will disappear and become historical footnotes, for a doubly historical piece any day now. ^_^





Speaking of Fanfic…I’ve Published a Kindle Novel

August 17th, 2021

This weekend I wrapped reading Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology. It was a really fun read and I highly recommend it. One of the stories is, to readers of Okazu, instantly recognizable as a fanfic on a series we have been enjoying for a good 20 years.  It was so obviously a fanfic, that it put me in mind of a fanfic I had started some 20 years ago as well, that grew into an original novella and I had never done a damn thing with. It took me 14 years to write the story. I started it in the late 1990s and kept putting it aside. It came with me to 4 jobs that I can think of, where I occasionally pulled it out and wrote another paragraph or two. I had thought it would work for a particular publication, but by the time I finished it, that publication had moved on and wanted something different than what I wanted for the story.

A few years ago, on a lark, I created a cover for it – a cover, it turned out, that had a typo. D’oh ^_^

This week I dragged it out, gave it a dust off and found I didn’t hate it. So while I was thinking about fanfic, I put it up on Kindle. It’s not a magnum opus, it’s a fanfic that outgrew it’s skin. (This is a pun and about as funny as puns usually are.) Here’s the synopsis:

Claudia Moreno was a good soldier, but the military saw her as a problem to be disappeared. Now she has a second chance as an Investigator for A/CINet and she’s determined to make her life work.

On her first solo case, she finds herself caught up in security for the most powerful corporation in the worlds; and its beautiful, charismatic leader, Lyrin Hayasu. Who is infiltrating this mysterious Artificial/Created Intelligence’s network…? Can Claudia save Lyrin from the intruder? And, can she save herself from Lyrin?

It’s a hardboiled-ish, science fictiony, cyberpunkesque, lesbian story. A/CINet Case File: An Inside Job is available for $2.99 on Kindle.I hope you’ll read it and, if you find some interesting bits in it, drop a review.

 





A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian

July 13th, 2020

Last summer ,I broadened my horizons by reading a lesbian romance novel, Courtney Milan’s Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure. It was an entertaining caper story about superfluous women who teamed up to take revenge on a horrible man.

A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian is now the second superfluous women team up to take down a horrible man lesbian novel I’ve read recently and, as a result, I think this deserves a sub-genre of it’s own. I’m open to suggestions as to what we can call it. ^_^

Alice Stapleton is the daughter of a well-placed, and chronically abusive clergical father in England during some unnamed 18th-century-ish period, or maybe early 19th, it’s really hard to tell. She’s been rescued from a life of misery by a woman who knows the terrible secret in her past, and who whisked her away. But now, sundered from her family, Alice has nothing to do and nowhere to be. Worse, her benefactor has unwittingly puts her into the path of the man who harmed her.

Luckily for Alice, former criminal, now maid, Molly knows exactly that type of man and throws in with Alice to take him down. As they grow closer, Molly and Alice share their secrets, find love and desire in each others’ arms…and take down the rat bastard who ruined Alice’s life.

This book is a quick read and an amusing one, nothing here is designed to make an impression. Summer reading, vacation reading – not that any of us are taking vacations this year. If you’d like a cheap, fun read, this makes a nice investment of $1.99 on Kindle.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

Sometimes we all need a cheerful “lesbians get revenge on a terrible man” story.  ^_^

Now, what are we going to call this sub-genre of superfluous women getting revenge on terrible men?  I propose Lesbian R&R (Romance & Revenge.) Let’s have your suggestions in the comments!





Network Effect by Martha Wells

May 17th, 2020

Imagine, for a moment, a story in which an non-gendered lead character’s gender was never an issue, in which pansexuality and polyromantic relationships existed and none of that made any difference and had nothing to do whatsoever with the story. Imagine, instead, that the story was about a self-aware rogue bodyguard cyborg who was a raging pop culture geek and had severe social awkwardness in a variety of dangerous and complicated situations that involved alien contamination, space colonization and computer hacking. Just imagine that.

Well, you don’t have to, because Martha Wells has imagined it for you in the Murderbot series. I mentioned All Systems Red back in an overview of Queer Friendly Science Fiction I’d been reading in 2018, but have never reviewed one this series, specifically. There are a lot of reasons why I have not done more than mention it, but today I want to entice you all to read the series if you have not yet done so.

In All Systems Red, we meet an organic-tech construct, a contract bodyguard that calls itself Murderbot. Murderbot prefers watching media to being with its human clients, who treat it like a robot or its corporate owners who treat it like equipment.  I will spoil nothing, but Murderbot’s story continues in Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy at the end of which Murderbot’s circumstances are vastly different than they were in the first novel.

Which brings me to Network Effect, the newest entry. In Network Effect, Murderbot is kidnapped and asked to do the right, most dangerous thing, for the right reasons by an entity Murderbot has a complicated relationship with. It is a rollicking action tale and would be worth reading on its own, but as part of this specific continuum is breathtaking. What makes Network Effect worthy of an Okazu review are key characters around Murderbot. Dr. Mensah, a main player in earlier novels is in a polyromantic familial relationship. That’s it. That relationship exists. People in it show affection and caring to one another. Two of our main female supports are in a partnership. None of this has anything to do with the plot per se, although the relationships are relevant to what happens and why. Like any relationship might be. Murderbot is uninterested in being gendered and ultimately finds “it” more comfortable, presumably to keep a hold onto it’s not-humanity, in which it finds comfort.

If you had asked me, I would have assumed the series would end at the finale of the 4th book, but Wells has skillfully set up a scenario in which she can continue to plausibly write Murderbot for as long as she desires, and has provided room for spin-offs and sequels that would be wholly organic. Pun intended.

Since the first four books are novellas, they make quick reading and although this book is a full-length novel, I had to keep my reading paced or I would have blown through it quickly. More than ever, the action was very visually evocative. In places I felt that this book was being written for the movie it will hopefully one day become. (With flashbacks to fill in the earlier books). For once, that really worked.

This book is not “lesbians in space,” its “well, yes there are lesbians in space, but there’s an actual story that involve them and not just some YA coming out schtick in space or vague mentions of lesbian-ish relationships.”*

Ratings:

Overall – 9

For action filled action, a non-gendered dorktastic protagonist, and alien worlds with queers in space, Martha Wells’ Murderbot is among the best, along with Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. We are in a renaissance of queer sci-fi and I, for one, am loving it.

*I’m still looking at you Melissa Scott.