Boys Love Manga and Beyond

Hagio, on the other hand, did set her two early shōnen’ai narratives in German boarding schools. And yet she credits the 1964 French film Les amitiés particulières (These Special Friendships), first shown in Japan in 1970, as the inspiration for The Heart of Thomas, which she had begun working on before “November Gymnasium

Funny later that same year, another rock-themed work, Minegishi Hiromi’s single-episode manga “Crossroads” (Jūjika), crossed both racial and sexual barriers by featuring a male homosexual relationship between two young men, one white and one black (figure 3.1).18 While both of these manga works

While Tezuka is well-known for his innovative graphic techniques that advanced the plot and evoked emotive responses in readers, the internal psychology of female characters was of little interest to Tezuka but became a central element in the shōjo manga of the 1970s

Building on the jojō-ga aesthetic sense, Takahashi and other artists prior to the 1970s incorporated close-ups of characters’ faces with wide, sparkling eyes that revealed characters’ “inner psychology,” encouraging readers to identify with them

Art scholar and curator Mizuki Takahashi has argued, however, that Tezuka’s influence on the development of shōjo manga in the postwar era was “secondary” to that of the jojō-ga (lyrical illustrations) of the 1920s and 1930s,

In strict terms of its contemporary definition, boys love refers to material that is produced by a girl or woman artist or writer for the readership or viewership of other girls or women. How, then, can images produced by a Taisho/early Showa-era male commercial artist have significance in this context?

Ironically, in the period directly preceding Japan’s opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, the love expressed by older men for male youths was the closest exemplar of the spirituality and equality that underlay Western notions of “romantic love.”

While sharing with earlier shōnen’ai and tanbi stories an obsession with tragedy and unhappy endings, JUNE also developed more explicit sexual scenarios between the characters. It

In the 1970s, the creation of shōjo manga was taken over by a new generation known as the Fabulous Year 24 Group (Hana no nijūyo’nen-gumi), or just the Year 24 Group, as most of them were born around the year Showa 24, that is, 1949. In English, they might more fittingly be called the “Fabulous Forty-Niners.”

Noting that such images could also be featured in girls’ magazines, such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ friend), Hartley suggests that it was precisely the absence of women in the frame of these pictures—and hence their homoerotic charge—that may have attracted girl readers