By Shaenon K. Garrity
These days, for reasons best left unmentioned, I'm reading a lot of New Wave science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Britain in the pages of Michael Moorcock's magazine
New Worlds, the New Wave was popularized in the U.S. by writer, editor, gadfly, and gadabout Harlan Ellison, who celebrated and sang the movement at length without ever explaining what it was. At one point he proclaimed that "each new wave is one man," at another that "The New Wave is as much myth as The Old Wave…It's all bullshit, kiddies, and let's hear no more about it."
Generally, it was SF that was challenging, literary, artsy-fartsy, political. S for "speculative" rather than "science." Sex scenes a plus. Sometimes it just seemed to mean stories and writers Harlan Ellison liked. At any rate, it was out to revolutionize science fiction, and, although in those days the Internet consisted of four university Honeywell computers, lo, nerds across America didn't need to be plugged in to have long, heated arguments on whether the New Wave was the end of everything. It just took longer.
A cynical soul would posit that, for all the lofty ideals of the New Wave, and all the ink spilled for those ideals (each story in Ellison's landmark
Dangerous Visions anthologies has its own foreword
and afterword), it was two other things that really changed science fiction during this period: the startlingly persistent fandom of the short-lived TV series
Star Trek, and, around the time the New Wave was dying, the premeire of
Star Wars. From these seeds did modern fandom spring. Even in literary SF,
Star Trek and
Star Wars have probably had more long-term impact than anything in
Dangerous Visions, thus lending credence to the theory in Ellison's story "The Deathbird" that our world is a Gnostic hell crafted specifically to torment Harlan Ellison.
(Warren Ellis must have had Ellison's highbrow ballyhoo in mind when he coined "The New Mainstream" to promote a certain school of comics largely written and drawn by folks who hung out on Ellison's online fora. Ellison inspiring Ellis; there's a tortured pun there, isn't there? The son birthing the father. Join me and we will rule the galaxy together. You see what I mean? If I'd quoted "Riders of the Purple Wage" you'd have no idea what I was talking about, and it won a Hugo.)
The New Wave was closely tied to the rise of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, and one of the things it did accomplish was helping to turn the literary SF world into less of a boys' club. Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, and other influential women writers played major roles in the American New Wave. A lacuna is a fancy way of saying "gap," and when invoked by literary critics it usually means a kind of absence that calls attention to itself. The New Wave called attention to what you didn't see in science fiction, and the scarcity of female voices (previously rare or hidden behind reassuringly androgynous pen names—and don't think it doesn't still happen, Harry Potter fans) was one of those things.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, in a country white nerds were shortly to discover and claim as Paradise, there was a new wave going on in comics. The 1970s was a golden age of manga, and some of the most thoughtful, innovative, and visually gorgeous work was done by a loose gang of young women known as the Year 24 Group or the Forty-Niners, because many of them had been born in 1949 (Showa 24 on the traditional Japanese calendar). Before this, manga, even girls' manga, had been drawn mostly by men. There was a lacuna there too.
Science fiction was far from the only genre revolutionized by the Forty-Niners, but some great SF manga came out of the group, especially from roommates Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya. Takemiya's
To Terra and
Andromeda Stories have been translated into English by Vertical; Viz published Hagio's
A, A' and "They Were Eleven" far too long ago. These manga touch on some of the same themes that interested the New Wave writers on the other side of the Pacific: gender and sexuality, questions of identity, efforts to portray the innerspace of the human mind, left-wing fantasies of a sensitive individual struggling against a rigid, conformist society. There was a time, it's easy to forget now, when manga was political. College students read the alt-manga magazine
Garo and went to protests chanting the name of comic-book ninja Kamui. Shojo manga explored feminist ideas and blurred gender lines. Hagio's "They Were Eleven" is an action story about teen space cadets, but the American work it most closely resembles is Ursula LeGuin's feminist SF novel
The Left Hand of Darkness.
But a cynical soul (and I am) would point out that manga did not, for the most part, continue in this direction. The 1970s gave way to the 1980s, and with the 1980s came the age of the otaku. Manga became dominated by its fandom. It turned candy-colored, consumer-oriented, dazzlingly commercial. Underground manga gave way to
doujinshi, fan comics paying tribute to popular properties like
Macross,
Saint Seiya, and, yes,
Star Wars. (You can see the
Star Wars influence creeping in as early as Takemiya's
To Terra, at the point where suddenly her spaceships change from vague Kubrickian Curvy Blobs of the Future to intensely detailed Millennium Falcon pastiches.)
The
doujinshi scene was and remains dominated by female fans, not a few of whom have springboarded to professional manga careers (sometimes, as in the case of the manga superteam CLAMP, without substantially changing their fan-circle structure or nerdy-girl subject matter).
Doujinshi can be about anything, but are most often about hot guys in homoerotic situations. The term
yaoi, applied in the U.S. to pretty much all gay smut manga for girls, came out of the
doujinshi scene.
Shonen Ai or Boys' Love or BL is the more mainstream/professional side. It's a sizeable chunk of the manga industry, bigger when you consider how fanservice for fangirls seeps into even mainstream boys' manga. There's a reason why, in the opening pages of
Naruto, Naruto and his hot, brooding male classmate Sasuke accidentally kiss.
Naruto is currently the biggest damn comic in America.
The funny thing is that homoeroticism got into shojo manga in the first place through Hagio and Takemiya, in their respective manga "The November Gymnasium" and
Song of the Wind and Trees (neither available in English). Both manga are romances involving beautiful boys at private all-boys' schools, still a popular setting for both
yaoi and mainstream shojo manga. Hagio's science fiction manga also explored homosexuality, androgyny, and sex roles. In "They Were Eleven," one of the male space cadets is revealed to be a hermaphrodite, a member of a race of aliens who choose a sex in adulthood. Only one in five is allowed to become male, so the society can maintain its tradition of harems for the men, and teenage Frol wants to prove himself worthy of manhood to escape life in some old man's harem. In
A, A', the hero Mori falls for a girl of the rare Unicorn race, then, later, for a male Unicorn. Hagio turns gender divisions fluid so she can explore what "male" and "female" mean, to individuals and to society.
But what ultimately got the fans going was the prospect of hot guys in close quarters, and at some point the sociopolitical angle got tossed by the wayside. It's remarkable how many
yaoi, and at this point I've read far more than my share, take place in an apolitical universe where male homosexuality is just the norm, or at least divorced from any social context, and women don't seem to exist at all. We looped around to being lacunas again. But the men were still hot, so
yaoi thrived and spread and made its way around the world, and then we had Fumi Yoshinaga.
Yoshinaga's
Antique Bakery is, to fans of Boys' Love, something on the level of a sacred text. First published in the nerdy-girl magazine
Wings, the same magazine that introduced the world to CLAMP, it's an episodic, four-volume dramedy about the all-male staff of a bakery. Only one of the men is openly gay, and the overt guy-on-guy action is limited, but all the men are very handsome and sharing a hot kitchen and covered in pastry batter. (One thinks immediately of the recent episode of "30 Rock" in which Jon Hamm's character reveals that he's Liz Lemon's perfect man, first by looking like Jon Hamm and then by saying, "Sorry I smell like frosting, but I just can't stop baking.") It's definitely of the
yaoi tradition, but you don't have to be a fan of
yaoi to love it. It's smart. It's witty. It's too good to be what it is.
Yoshinaga's other work is similar—smart, sexy, suspiciously good—and I just finished Volume 1 of
Ōoku, one of her most recent manga and her most ambitious.
Ōoku is science fiction. Well, speculative fiction, let's say. It takes place in an alternate universe in which, during Japan's isolated feudal period, an unknown plague kills off three-quarters of the nation's men in each generation. A female-dominated society quickly arises and men become the sex class, treasured for their rarity but, if they survive to adolescence, either traded into marriage or put to work in brothels. Very few women can afford husbands, so it's a symbol of the shogun's power that she supposedly keeps a harem of 3,000 beautiful young men. All of them drawn by Fumi Yoshinaga.
This is, from a fangirl's perspective, the most brilliant plot imaginable. It's perfect in its
yaoi audacity. Once the story moves inside the harem, as it inevitably must, it comprises page after page of handsome men interacting in a sexually-charged atmosphere where there's not much to do but bitch and look hot. It's better than a boys' school. But it also moves farther away from the Boys' Love genre than, say,
Antique Bakery.
Ōoku doesn't take place in the standard vaguely-defined all-male
yaoi world; it's a society, described in convincing detail, where women outnumber and overpower men. Whereas most
yaoi provides a comforting escape from the reality of male/female, gay/straight relations,
Ōoku challenges gender issues head-on. It's more of a callback to the work of the Forty-Niners. And the work of the New Wave.
After an opening storyline told from the viewpoint of a young man who joins the shogun's harem, the perspective switches to that of the new shogun, Yoshimune, who arrives at the palace determined to sweep out the old ways. In the process she discovers what most of Japan has forgotten: their society was not always run by women, and the outside world, seldom encountered as long as Japan keeps its ports closed, is still a man's world. What tips her off are the lacunas, the things unseen or unmentioned: the lack of female titles for positions of power, the veils hiding the shogun from visiting Dutch traders, the unexplained traditions that assume male is better than female when everyone knows the opposite to be true.
The harem stuff is sexy fun, and ain't nothing wrong with that, but it looks like
Ōoku is going to go deeper, to talk about why women live this way and men live that way, and to force the characters to make choices about the way their society runs. When the shogun learns that the one surviving record of the change is entitled Chronicle of a Dying Day, it's hard not to think of Joanna Russ's story "When It Changed," about a planet that loses its men, first published in
Dangerous Visions: "Our ancestors' journals are one long cry of pain." But the women in Russ's story come to prefer their way of life and are horrified when men return to their world. In the end, the narrator pleads, "
Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don't change."
Change is inevitable, and I think Yoshinaga's solution will be different. It's not the 1970s, here or in Japan.
Ōoku takes a little of everything that's happened in shojo manga over the past forty years, knots it together, and plunges forward. Everyone else had better hurry if they want to keep up. If each new wave is one man, this time Yoshinaga is the man to beat.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
