Rated H: Hardcore Anime
Sex is a part of life and, in Japan, a part of pop culture. But manga and anime know how to add variety and keep things fresh: by lacing sex with humor, with horror, and with old-fashioned sentimentality.
I’m thinking of two artworks, neither of which I could show here for fear of running afoul of “community standards.” The first is a 1990 Japanese manga by Mitsuhiko Yoshida, an eight-page story titled Hajimete no Homonsha (The First-time Visitor).1 We see a girl going to the door of her home; the doorbell has rung, and she assumes that it’s her father. Instead, it’s a rhinoceros, and he begins chasing her through a surreal landscape to a garden at the top of a giant screw. We next see the girl apologize to the rhino for running away. She sheds her clothes and begins, let’s say, sexually servicing herself with the rhino’s horn. This scene is, of course, a dream, and at this point we cut away to the girl’s parents. They look at the girl’s drawing of a rhino, and quickly pick up on the phallic message hidden within. The father asks if the girl has had her first menstrual period yet, and, sure enough, the last panel shows a dark spot on the sleeping girl’s underpants.
Shocking? Bear in mind that Japan is a country where everyone for centuries has been literally (and unavoidably) in everyone else’s business, and that when a girl started menstruating, the tradition once was for family and friends to celebrate with a dinner featuring red beans and rice.2 Not exactly subtle, but a perfectly logical legacy of an agricultural people who needed to track both human and natural fertility.3 Classic works from Japan’s graphic arts heritage can be equally graphic. The second work of art I am thinking of is by the nineteenth-century master printmaker Hokusai, whose most famous work is the cycle of prints called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Yet he too has a sexy side.
Hokusai, who popularized the term manga, created one print in 1814 of a mature woman pearl diver,4 although she’s taken time out from her work to be sexually serviced by two octopuses. And every available bit of blank space on the page is filled with either the drawing or line after line of writing, much of it the woman’s orgasmic “AAAAAAA.”
Is this some kind of joke, or some sick aberration? Actually it’s neither. Erotic art has a lengthy history in Japan, and was known classically as shunga (literally, “spring pictures”). In modern Japanese pop culture, erotica is known as hentai (literally, abnormal or perverted), by the letter H, or an attempt to pronounce the letter, etchi. Some of these works were part of “pillow books” (manuals illustrating a variety of sexual positions). Some were social satires, in which a third party—sometimes a miniature person—commented on the amorous follies that they were witnessing. Others were illustrations (probably glamorized) of life in the brothels that were legal at the time. Occasionally such a picture would show a threesome, and pictures of men seducing young boys, while less common, did exist.
This is not to say that Japanese culture is wide open and uncensored; at least, not here at the turn of the millennium. It’s just that given the legacy of shunga, legends of human sexual dalliances with demons and others not of this earth (from the Kojiki on up to the infamous anime series Urotsukidoji), and a body of erotic literature going back a thousand years to The Tale of Genji, Japanese culture has certainly made room for the sexual side of life. It’s embraced that side more openly at some times than at others, but the Japanese know it would be foolish to deny sexuality altogether.
The basic attitude toward sex was—and to an extent still is—that the act itself is not as important as the consequences. Two folktales illustrate this. Both center on Buddhist monks having sex—something forbidden by the Buddha, who enjoined his followers not to live an unchaste life. In these stories, the monks break that particular vow, but are not directly punished for breaking it. After all, according to the Buddhist doctrine of karma, each event has its own causes and its consequences, none of which can be avoided. Also, both stories are part of a larger body of tales in which monks have sex with women (when available), but usually with the only available outlet: boy acolytes.
The first story is from the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Times Now Past), a collection dating to about 1100. It’s the story of a monk who was a wise man and a brilliant scholar. However, he had no family and no noble patron, and lived a very poor life in a temple in northern Kyoto. Every month he traveled to the mountain sanctuary at Kurama to pray for help in making ends meet. He went to Kurama month after month for years.
Once, during the ninth month of the year,5 he had left Kurama and was at the outskirts of Kyoto when a good-looking boy of about sixteen started walking with him. The monk asked the boy what he was doing. “My master and I quarreled ten days ago and I left him,” the boy replied. “My parents are dead. Please take me with you.”
The monk agreed, saying, “Don’t blame me for whatever happens. I live a rather dull life.”
All that day and the next, the monk found himself increasingly attracted to the youth, who refused to speak any further about himself or his family. He was so pretty, however, that, on their second evening together, the monk began to fondle the youth, as he had done to other temple acolytes. However, he quickly realized that this youth was not like the other young boys, and was in fact a girl.
“So what if I am a girl?” the youth asked. “Will you send me away?”
“I can’t keep you here if you’re a girl. What would people say? What would the Buddha say?”
“Just treat me the same as you would a boy. I promise that nobody will ever see me as anything but a boy.”
The monk’s desire for the beautiful youth had been growing and growing. At the same time, he knew that keeping a girl in the temple was a bad idea. Still, in spite of his misgivings and precautions, he could not help being human, and eventually he and the girl became lovers. The monk had never been happier in his life.
Several months later, however, the youth stopped eating. She told the monk that she was pregnant. This distressed the monk; he knew the neighbors were bound to find out. But the youth simply smiled and said, “Don’t say anything to anyone. Act as if nothing has happened. And when the time comes, keep quiet.”
Finally came the day when the youth complained of pain “down there.” It was time for the baby to be born. The youth told the monk to spread a mat in a shed. The youth cried in pain, and the monk cried in sympathy, but finally the youth gave birth. Her cloak covered every part of her, so the monk could not see a thing. After the birth, the youth lay down to nurse the baby, pulling the cloak over herself. As she did so, the size of the bundle under the cloak shrank. The monk pulled back the cloak. There was no youth, and there was no baby. What there was, however, was a large rock made of solid gold. In this way had the monk’s prayers at Kurama been answered. And, although he missed his lover with all of his heart, he chipped pieces of gold off of the rock a little at a time and sold them, and thus was he able to live in comfort for the rest of his days.6 This story presents a pattern that recurs in anime and manga, as well as in Japanese legends: having sex with a supernatural being is very different from having sex with a human. The monk, who “could not help being a man” (Royall Tyler’s phrase), had sex with boys and thought nothing of it; apparently, neither did other monks, who presumably were also having sex with their acolytes. Having sex with a girl was more problematic, and the monk knew it, since it violated one of the Five Precepts of his faith.7 However, once again, he could not help himself, which was exactly what the “youth” counted on. The monk’s devotion was repaid, first by physical and emotional gifts, then by gold.
Supernatural bedfellows continue to be seen in anime, and are quite a diverse lot. They include Lum, the alien girl of Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura (1981), who’s so full of electricity that her boyfriend Ataru has to wear an insulated rubber suit to go to bed with her. Another is Chihaya, the effeminate “angel” sent to Earth to observe human behavior in Earthian (1989). In the series Chihaya sleeps with his partner-angel, but also lusts after an angel turned human rock singer, and a cybernetic “angel” developed by a mad scientist. All three of the objects of his affection are male, but he is never censured for this. Miko Mido, the sexual ninja in the La Blue Girl (1992) series of H-anime, falls into this category as well, by virtue of her father having been a demon. And the anime Doomed Megalopolis (1991) has several non-human close encounters, including Yukari (raped by a demon) and Keiko (a miko, or Shinto priestess, who defeats the demon by becoming Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, and offering herself to the demon).
The Third Sex—Futanari
There’s a unique sub-genre of pornographic anime and manga featuring futanari—hermaphroditic characters with pronounced breasts, rounded feminine hips, long hair, and both male and female genitals. Unlike the “she-males” who tend to be feminized males, futanari are phallic females. These characters usually have feminine names and traits, and the stories tend to hit specific plot-points that suggest that it’s designed to meet the specific needs of a specific audience.
The stories are, more often than not, dojinshi created by amateurs. This doesn’t mean that they’re amateurish; much of the artwork is of professional quality. Again, the variety of stories is created by using humor (including parodies of mainstream manga), horror, or romantic sentimentality. However, almost all of the characters are principally female in appearance, with long hair, curvaceous figures, and huge erections. I think that this is for a reason, and it points to the audience that gave rise to futa stories.
One manga, titled Futagami by Balloon Club, focuses on a futanari named Megami (a very loaded name, since “gami” can be a variant of “kami” and is written with the same Chinese character as “spirit” or “god”). In this story, Megami and other futa live on a university campus in a secluded futa-only residence called “Angel Dorm”; later, it’s revealed to be a “safe house,” designed by another faculty futa who knew that the hermaphrodites were likely to get carried away by their own sexuality and designed the dorm to be a prison if necessary. This in fact happens when Megami declares herself the prophetess of a cult of pleasure and encourages everyone in the safe house to indulge themselves to the fullest with each other. The story ends with the exterior of the dorm, which seems ordinary but contains a sexual obsession that has crossed into an orgy of madness.
In another story, Kopipe1 by A-ta Kawaraya, body parts literally appear regardless of the subject’s original gender and age. Capricious changes of nature are a comedy of errors, even if they don’t seem funny to the people undergoing these changes.
A third story, written by Chunrouzan and titled “Sex Education,” offers the outrageous thesis that girls are being turned into futa by the Japanese government, in response to some unnamed crisis. One of the most elaborate variations on this sub-theme is the multi-volume dojinshi Dulce Report by Behind Moon. The transformation of male or female characters into futa takes place in a backstory that’s a mishmash of genetic mutation, crop circles, and something called Project Eden. This seems meant to evoke The X-Files television series but serves mainly as a backdrop for two Japanese adolescent futa, Momoe and Aoi, who both started the story as a male and a female respectively, and their declarations of love and orgasm. A typical aspect of the futa sub-genre: the more futa sex one has, the larger one’s erection gets. Three feet is not an uncommon length.
At one point, a character in Dulce Report converses with a disembodied, possibly alien, voice. On the page, she seems to be addressing her erection as “Master.” Believe it or not, this is a significant clue to understanding the entire sub-genre.
Despite living in a culture that provides a context in which family, friends, and strangers can see each other partially undressed if not naked, I imagine that adolescence is still a trying time for any Japanese youth going through it. Parts of one’s body, which have behaved predictably for a lifetime, suddenly seem to have a will of their own. Although the male suffers more than the female from this kind of physical capriciousness, there has to be some comfort for the boys in the belief that females suffer the same kinds of problems—if only in media. So young Japanese males (of whatever age, whether or not they’re old enough legally to read these manga), who find their penises suddenly acting as if with a mind of their own, can at least take comfort in the mediated suggestion that girls have the same or similar problems. In adolescence both genders can be hormonally pulled toward questionable (which is to say, incestuous and/or same-sex) behavior but are also told to avoid these behaviors if they want to fit into society. This, after all, is the purpose of socialization and the particular genius of pop culture media. Futanari pornography is a minor sub-genre in numbers only; its function is as orthodox as mainstream anime and manga.
This is an aspect of Japanese pop culture that needs further research and consideration. It’s also an area that cannot possibly be illustrated in a book for a general audience.
1. Pronounced “ko-pi-pe,” as in “copy/paste”—a Japanese slang term based on English Word processing commands. It’s a disparaging term for block-copied text.
Enough of the non-human (for now). Human sexual relations are complicated enough as they are, as shown in this story from the Uji Shui Monogatari (A Later Collection of Uji Tales), dating from the early thirteenth century.8 This is the story of a monk named Zoyo, who didn’t even try to live an ascetic life. There always seemed to be a party in his quarters. Salesmen of anything and everything sought him out, since he paid the asking price without question. Zoyo was very much involved with earthly pleasures.
This included pleasures of the flesh. One time he saw a young boy dancing at a festival, and quickly fell in love with him. He repeatedly asked the dancer to become a monk. At first the boy refused, saying “I’d rather stay as I am for awhile.” Ultimately, however, he agreed, becoming Zoyo’s acolyte and bed partner.
One day in the following spring, Zoyo asked the boy to try on his old dancing costume. The clothes still fit him perfectly, and Zoyo asked the boy to perform the hashirite dance. But the boy had forgotten all the steps to that dance. He tried a few steps of the katasawara dance instead. As he awkwardly did so, Zoyo let out a howl of anguish. He realized that, by hounding the boy into becoming an acolyte instead of a dancer, he had lost that which attracted him in the first place. “Why did I ever make a monk of you?” he lamented.
By now the boy was crying too. “I told you to wait!”9 The story of Zoyo is another case in which a monk has sex with a young boy, but that in itself isn’t the problem. Zoyo forced the boy to change from one kind of life to another, and in doing so lost the very love he was trying to save. He may even have kept the boy on as a sex partner after that realization, but surely any joy in the encounter was now tinged with sadness.
In the 1590s the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi granted an audience to a Portuguese Jesuit monk named Coelho, and asked several revealing questions about Christian behavior.10 Sex, or specifically monogamy, was a contentious issue; it was not unusual for upper-class Japanese men to turn to concubines, or even to young boys, as sex partners over and above their wives. The Jesuits could not condone these practices, while the Japanese elite found monogamy an alien concept. (The lower classes, as was the case elsewhere around the world, were seldom polygamous, simply because they couldn’t afford it.)
Of course, Buddhist monks traditionally practiced celibacy, and some still do, though in modern times most sects have interpreted the precept not to live an unchaste life to allow for monogamous marriage. Other monks were less scrupulous: the case of Ikkyu Sojun (1394–1481) comes to mind. Ikkyu was of the extreme position of some old Zen masters that, having experienced enlightenment, they became laws unto themselves. At least Ikkyu wasn’t entirely self-indulgent; he left behind some wonderfully autobiographical verse, especially poems celebrating his love affair (begun when he was in his seventies) with Mori, a blind prostitute more than fifty years his junior. In any event, celibacy has seldom been a realistic option in Japan, for the clergy or anyone else.
We could discuss the issue of sex in the pop cultures of Japan and the United States for days, and still never reach a conclusion, but one point I want to make is that the quantity of sexual content (or absence thereof) is not a reasonable yardstick for rating a culture. Some conservative American politicians think that there is a virtue in eliminating sex from pop culture altogether. They blame a host of social ills on too much frankness. Actually, if anything, we’re far less frank than Japan, in whose pop culture nudity and sex are much more common, yet whose crime rate is microscopic compared to that of the United States. Pop culture in the United States is coy about sex, alluding more often than showing, and some of this coyness crosses the line into sleazy suggestion. It could be argued that the smutty jokes of a Married . . . With Children or a radio drive-time shock-jock like Howard Stern would do our children more harm than the flat-out and funny frontal nudity of a Ranma 1/2.
Having said that, there is an entire sexual subgenre of anime in which you get the old in-out, but usually quite a bit more besides. Japanese pornographer Oniroku Dan, who specialized in sadomasochistic bondage stories, said that a storyteller can’t just keep repeating the same story over and over again: “Ordinary sex episodes would be too repetitive. Like (pornographic) photographers, manga artists must pander to the market by coming up with sensational subject matter.”11 The very fact that the public wants to see something a bit different the next time has pushed almost all Japanese pornographers, including producers of H-anime, to be more creative, keep up the interest level, and produce porno that isn’t just porno.
Variation One: Humor
How does an author or artist or animator provide variety? With humor, for one thing, as shunga prints have done for centuries. There are a couple of delightful hentai OAVs that are parodies of the 1990 sword-and-sorcery OAV series Record of Lodoss War.12 At the end of that series, we see the human knight Parn and the elf Deedlit ride off together, presumably to begin the ultimate mixed marriage. But what if it really happened? The 1995 Elven Bride series of OAVs tries to answer that question.
The first tape starts at the wedding; an odd wedding, since no guests have shown up. There are prejudicial feelings about this marriage from both the human and the non-human families. The newlyweds, however, believe that acceptance will come in time; they’re more focused on the honeymoon. But when it comes down to it, they can’t do it. Human and elfin physiology doesn’t quite match up, but is Kenji, the newlywed hubby, discouraged? No; he undertakes a heroic quest for the ultimate lubricant. His bride, Milfa, stays home and does housewifely things, even though the village children taunt her, she is charged triple price for food—when she’s allowed to buy food at all—and suffers other discriminatory indignities.
Kenji succeeds at his quest, even though he has to journey to Ygdrassil, the world-tree of Norse mythology, and has a brief romantic encounter with a harpy. However, he does it to obtain the sought-after lubricant, so in a sense he wasn’t being unfaithful.13 Meanwhile, Milfa has been enduring the taunts of the townspeople when one of them, whose cart is pulled by a two-headed hydra, loses control. The hydra rampages through town and is about to trample some children when Milfa magically saves them. At this moment, Kenji returns and subdues the hydra. That evening, with the hydra parked in the garage (!), the couple finds that the children have secretly but contritely left gifts of food on their doorstep. They recognized Milfa’s selfless spirit in protecting them at the risk of her own life. So, between acceptance into the community and the arrival of the lubricant (supplemented by a couple of alternate positions), this story definitely has a happy ending.
The second episode in the set shows that there are still some problems in the bedroom, and Milfa is recommended to a gynecologist. This doctor happens to be a bit of a pervert, but before he can work his will on Milfa, she’s rescued not only by Kenji and a helpful female member of his family, but also by the other patients in the doctor’s waiting room. And, given that the other women range from hobbits to werewolves and all are magical to some extent, this is one group of patients you don’t want to upset. Sisterhood is indeed powerful.
Milfa, however, apparently is not. Milfa is an elf, a magical being, but chooses not to act like one. Yes, Deedlit, her model, is victimized and almost sacrificed during the OAV series, but why wouldn’t Milfa magically strike back at the townspeople who discriminated against her or the doctor who tried to molest her? Two reasons come to mind. One is the desire to paint Milfa as the stereotypical submissive virginal Japanese female. But this works only up to a point; she does use her magic in order to rescue the children from the hydra. This points to the second reason: wa. Keiji and Milfa have settled down to live in this village, and the village serves as a second family. Preserving harmony is more important than magically zapping someone to punish a real or perceived slight. Milfa suffers in silence, believing that the villagers’ attitudes can—and ultimately will—change.
The 1994 anime Venus 5 is nothing less than a pornographic parody of Sailor Moon. Earth is falling prey to the Inma, a race of demonic beings led by a very impressive hermaphrodite. Once again, as in Sailor Moon (or a dozen other crime/alien-fighting science-team shows), five schoolgirls are needed to save the day. They’re superpowered, but don’t know it yet. The one who has to round them up and instruct them is a cat. Unlike Sailor Moon’s Luna, the cat in question here is a filthy (in every sense of that word) old tomcat. The girls are revealed by glowing astrological signs. Similar signs appeared in Sailor Moon on the foreheads of the Sailors in the “third eye” location, but in Venus 5 they appear on rather more intimate parts of the anatomy: a good excuse for a shower scene. In any event, just as having seen Record of Lodoss War made the Elven Bride tapes funnier, Venus 5 is funny to the extent that the viewer notes the Sailor Moon jokes.
The Third Eye
Here again we owe a tip of the hat to Dr. Osamu Tezuka, and in this case, his 1974 manga series Mitsume ga Toru (The Three-Eyed One), about a student from an alien race who has a third eye in his forehead, in the spot defined in esoteric yoga as the sixth chakra, the seat of enlightenment. If the third eye is covered, he’s a drooling idiot; when the eye is exposed, he’s an evil genius.
Since then, there have been countless manga and anime examples of third eyes, both literal (3x3 Eyes) and symbolic (such as the crescent on Luna’s forehead and the tiaras of the Sailor Senshi in Sailor Moon). Belldandy and her sisters from Kosuke Fujishima’s Oh My Goddess! have markings resembling third eyes, denoting their status as systems operators for the heavenly computer Ygdrassil. In the Tenchi Muyo universe, Jurai Princess Sasami has such a mark on her forehead, denoting her connection to the guiding spirit Tsunami, who revived Sasami after a fatal accident. And in Please Save My Earth, Mokuren has four dots on her forehead in the shape of a diamond; this symbolizes her powers as a Kiches of the goddess Sarjalin and her ability to commune with plants and animals. Mokuren is reborn as Alice Sakaguchi, but Alice is reluctant to face this until a school field trip to Kyoto. When she faints, the dots appear on her forehead, and all the plants in the park burst into unseasonable bloom.
The Frantic, Frustrated, and Female (1994) tapes don’t have to resort to parody for humor; just to absurdity. The stories all revolve around the plight of one girl who, regardless of sexual stimulation, is unable to reach orgasm. Another girl takes this as a personal challenge: she, the motorcycle-riding lesbian she loves, the lesbian’s two sidekicks, and even the original girl’s landlady launch into extended—but ultimately futile—sex sessions. The whole thing is built on twin foundations of sex and humor, since not only the story but the subtitles and the non-realistic character design are part of the humorous intent of the series.
The humor continues in the third F3 installment, when a wandering perverted ghost discovers the group. It possesses first the girls (causing them to grow penises), then their sex toys, before it is exorcised. But this installment brings us to the next variation.
Variation Two: Horror
Another popular context for hentai is horror. Series such as Angel of Darkness, La Blue Girl, and Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend invert the long-standing Western formula of using horror to express sexual anxiety. Gothic literature, notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula, often carries a sexual subtext to its horrors. Cinema as far back as the silent era (especially The Phantom of the Opera) has employed the sexual device of having the monster attack the heroine when she is either asleep or preparing for bed. In the modern era, Hollywood became more explicit, so that mad slasher films such as the Friday the Thirteenth series seem to require that the teenaged victims have sex before they can be graphically slaughtered.
H-anime movies based on horror invert the Hollywood formula by making horror the subtext of a sexually explicit story. Anime such as the Angel of Darkness (1995) series are heavy with the old conventions of the Gothic style: isolated houses—old or new—with subterranean lairs, nocturnal thunderstorms, and grotesque otherworldly beings. Of course, they’re also heavy with sex of various kinds.14 However, unlike Hollywood teens, anime characters are not always automatically doomed to be sliced-and-diced just because they have sex.
The La Blue Girl (1992) series is perhaps the best example of this more charitable attitude toward sexuality and horror. The series revolves around two sisters, Miko and Miyu. Not only are they inheritors of the traditions of a clan of sexual ninja, their father was a demon. This relationship slightly complicates their sexuality; Miyu, for example, avoids becoming sexually aroused during a full moon (as revealed in the fourth OAV) because if she gets aroused but does not reach orgasm, she turns into a werewolf. Demonic or not, the viewer is meant to cheer the sisters on as they battle rival ninja clans, demons, extraterrestrials, and whatever hazards the scriptwriters put in their way. Sex for them is (usually) joyful, and does not bring down cosmic retribution from Freddy Kruger or Jason.
Urotsukidoji is undoubtedly the most extreme example of the sex/horror approach, to say nothing of the extent to which a story will give rise to sequel after sequel. Between 1989 and 1995 no fewer than thirteen OAVs were made in this series, originally based on a manga by Toshio Maeda, leading Helen McCarthy to complain about “film-makers [who] milk a cash cow long after it’s dead on its feet.”15 What’s noteworthy about the Urotsukidoji films is not their capitalism but their conservatism. This may seem an odd word to use about a film that shows women (and men) being raped and then torn to bloody bits by phallic tentacles, but the choice is deliberate. We need to remember that popular culture, to be popular, must necessarily be based on the beliefs of the majority. No story was ever popular and avant garde at the same time. The Urotsukidoji series navigates this dilemma by showing all kinds of sexual activity, but punishing only those whose activities are too far out of the mainstream. If a high-school athlete cavorts with three girls at once, they are all doomed. The illicit affair of a servant and master actually triggers the great 1923 Tokyo earthquake in this anime. However, the naïve adolescent fumbling of two teenagers trying to understand sex is tolerated. This is understood as a necessary part of life, even a rite of passage, that does not deserve the death penalty.
Variation Three: Sentimentality
The early anime Etude isn’t humorous, isn’t horrific, isn’t even a fantasy; but neither can you call it pornographic in the traditional sense. There are two sex scenes that take up a small part of this forty-five-minute OAV about a brief love affair between a musician and a motorcyclist. And, more importantly, Etude represents a third style of H-storytelling: the sentimental. While Western pornography is usually “down and dirty,” some hentai are highly sentimental, even romantic. Some manga rapes have stopped dead in their tracks because the rapist has been moved by the victim’s tears. The most famous hentai anime OAV series of them all gained a significant fan following precisely because of its sentimental storytelling.
Cream Lemon—The Ami Nonomura Story
In 1984 the Fairy Dust and Soeishinsha companies began a series of sexually oriented OAVs that still resonate in the Japanese video market. The name Cream Lemon became synonymous with sexual matters handled with taste and talent.16 The identification was so complete that, just as Jell-O and Xerox became generic nouns for an entire class of products, sexually oriented fan-fiction is now called “lemon.” The first Cream Lemon releases told the tale of Ami Nonomura, and are regarded as classics of their kind. The following may read more like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel than a letter to Penthouse Forum, but it demonstrates how sexual storytelling can avoid redundancy and provide the character development valued by the anime audience.17 In the first installment of the series, “Be My Baby,” Ami Nonomura lives with her mother and older brother, Hiroshi. When Hiroshi and Ami were younger, they played “doctor.” Hiroshi is still attracted to his sister, and Ami also finds herself drawn to her brother, now that she too is older. In fact, she begins to have sexual fantasies about him, though she could never let anyone know this, incest being taboo. Nevertheless, her attraction for him grows so strong that, while their mother is gone one day, they wind up making love. Unfortunately, mother comes home early and knocks on Ami’s bedroom door at the worst possible moment.
In “Ami Again!” Hiroshi has been forbidden by their mother from ever seeing Ami again. Ami’s friends Satomi and Kyoko take her to a disco to cheer her up. She has too much to drink and winds up dancing with the local “wolf,” the rich and good-looking Kono. He takes Ami home and makes love to her. However, she cries out “Brother! I love you!” during the act, mistaking him for Hiroshi in her drunken state.
Ami doesn’t remember any of this the next day. Kono picks her up as she’s walking home from school and essentially blackmails her into going to a “love hotel” with him. (Kono’s ego can’t let him believe that Ami would prefer her brother, at least not when she is sober.) After they finish their tryst, Kono compares himself to her brother. She gets upset, slaps him and walks out. She tries to get home through the falling snow, but collapses in a phone booth in despair. Satomi and Kyoko comfort her, and tell her at least her first time was with her brother, whom she loves. The second episode ends with Ami walking alone to school. She meets a puppy on the way; the puppy licks Ami’s hand, making her feel less alone.
In the third installment Ami has tried to forget her brother, but she just can’t. Everything changes when the phone rings. Hiroshi asks to meet her at a coffee shop. Ami is nearly breathless with excitement, but Hiroshi tells her that they cannot see each other, ever again, then runs away without an explanation.
Ami goes to see Kono. She doesn’t like him, but it doesn’t matter anymore. He welcomes her, of course, and makes love to her in the bath. But Ami still can’t forget how she feels about Hiroshi.
A sleazy manager/photographer starts taking pictures of Ami waiting for her train, then takes her to a bar and explains how big a star she could become. (Kono happens to be at the bar and witnesses what’s happening.) Ami becomes quite good at modeling and works very hard to learn how to dance and sing. The recording session goes well, and Ami is thrilled when her manager hands her a cassette of the session while driving her home in his car. Unfortunately, the manager takes her to a love hotel, rather than taking her home. When he tries to kiss her, she runs down the hall to the exit, out the doorway into the rain. There, in his sports car waiting at the curb, is Kono. He takes her back to his place, and tries to kiss her. Ami tries to slap him, just as she had done before, but this time he catches her hand . . . The next morning, he lets her out on the roadside, and drives off into the rising sun.18
The final Ami OAV, Tabidachi—Ami Shusho (Departure—Ami Final Chapter) begins with Ami as a singer and model. Kyoko and Satomi want to take Ami to Hokkaido for her seventeenth birthday.
Kono finds himself increasingly drawn to Ami, despite the seemingly endless stream of girls who clamor for his attention. Ami is the only girl he knows who doesn’t want to be with him. He actually starts to care for her.
Ami is back home watching her video on TV. The girl on stage performing seems like someone else. Ami decides to quit. Her new manager encourages her to take some time off to think it over more carefully. Ami has also decided to quit seeing Kono. She knows that he only wants her for her body. She goes to him to tell him her decision, and he almost convinces her that he really does love her. However, another girl shows up, and Kono tells her that Ami’s just a flower delivery girl. Ami runs out of the room, crying.
The next day, Ami finds a letter in the mailbox from her father in London, addressed only to her mother. Her mother isn’t home and, after staring at the letter, Ami opens it. Her father is suggesting that he and her mother get divorced. He’s suggesting that he take Ami, and that her mother take Hiroshi, just like before they were married! In a very convenient twist of fate, her “parents” were both single parents when they married; she and Hiroshi do not share a blood relationship at all, so it’s no longer a question of incest.
The next morning Ami asks her mother (to whom she is also no longer related by blood, thus putting the animosity between them into a new context) if she could talk to her. Her mother refuses. Ami takes a cab to the station so that she won’t be late meeting Kyoko and Satomi. Halfway there, though, she suddenly comes to a decision: she tells the driver that she’s changed her mind, and would like to go to the airport. She buys a ticket to London with her mother’s credit card, and she flies off to meet Hiroshi. . . .
The very first sex act in this series—Ami and her brother playing “doctor”—is discomfiting to watch, coming dangerously close to child pornography. Yet it sets up the rest of the series, establishing the relationship between Ami and Hiroshi. They apparently remain devoted to each other as they get older. We don’t know if Hiroshi behaved himself when he was away, but Ami fights off the advances of her manager and tries to fight off Kono when her mind isn’t clouded by either alcohol or despair.
More important than what happens to Ami sexually is the fact that nothing happens to change our opinion of her. Even when she does things that would be considered dubious at best, such as going out drinking at age sixteen or sleeping with Kono to bolster her self-worth, she’s never shown as anything but a nice girl caught in a rotten situation. We want her life to get better, even if it means getting together with her stepbrother in a sort-of incestuous relationship.
There are many sort-of relationships in anime that pose problems for some Western readers. The next chapter looks at one of the more problematic: the sort-of gay relationship.
1. Mitsuhiko Yoshida, “Hajimete no Homonsha,” in Manga, Comic Strip Books from Japan, ed. Kyoichi Tsuzuki and Alfred Birnbaum (London: Saunders & Williams, 1991), 35-43.
2. Kittredge Cherry, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987), 109.
3. Here’s another case in which the East and the West don’t quite meet. In the first scene of Mamoru Oshii’s stunning feature Ghost in the Shell, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow, we overhear audio traffic being monitored in the electronically enhanced brain of Major Motoko Kusanagi, a secret government agent. At one point an assistant comments on the amount of static in the signal. In the English dub she blames “a loose wire.” In the original manga and anime, however, the Major says that she’s having her period. The change in the English version is completely pointless. The distributors who dubbed the sword-and-sorcery comedy Slayers into English didn’t feel that they had to change references to “that time of the month” when teenage terror Lina Inverse suddenly loses her magical powers.
4. Despite the graphic subject matter, this particular Hokusai print was shown on cable television, on the series Mad Men. The print was mounted sideways on a wall but was recognizable to those familiar with it.
5. According to the Chinese calendar, the lunar new year begins sometime between January 21 and February 21, with the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius. The ninth month would be roughly the month of October.
6. Royall Tyler, Japanese Tales (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 221–23.
7. Do not steal, do not kill, do not lie, do not drink to excess, do not live an unchaste life.
8. Uji is an old resort city between the two ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara.
9. Tyler, Japanese Tales, 220–21.
10. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 145.
11. Quoted in Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 365.
12. First came the thirteen OAV episodes in 1990 that inspired these parodies; then, in 1998, came the twenty-six-week series called Record of Lodoss War: Legend of the Heroic Knight.
13. This tolerance is the sort of concept that doesn’t travel well across the Pacific and may be one of the hardest challenges to the moral order of a gaijin. I once asked a Japanese college student about the ronin hero of Joji Akiyama’s long-running manga, Haguregumo (Floating Clouds). This man, living near the end of the Tokugawa period, was married, with children, but persisted in chasing almost any female he saw. The student told me that he was still a good husband because afterward, he always came home to the family. Bornoff notes that “a comparatively marked degree of indifference to flings with prostitutes remains (to this day); they are too fleeting to endanger a relationship” (Bornoff, Pink Samurai, 461).
14. The subgenre of sex in pop culture has its own sub-subgenre: sadomasochism and bondage. I consider bondage anime to be an offshoot of the Gothic Horror genre, since many of the trappings overlap (dungeon settings, torture devices, imprisonment, and the infliction of pain). Even the burning of a woman with hot wax from a melting candle—a technique seen a lot in such works in Japan—has a certain Gothic flavor to it.
15. Helen McCarthy, The Anime Movie Guide (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1996),- 264.
16. In fact, some of the major names in anime—both artists and voice actors—have dabbledin hentai at one time or another in their careers (naturally it seldom if ever shows up on their resumes). One artist who has crossed over is Hiroyuki Utatane. The creator of the Count Down manga and anime, featuring the ravenous transsexual Jun Nakamura, recently found mainstream success with the manga Seraphic Feather.
17. The following synopsis is a condensed version of the Ami Nonomura Shrine webpage by Dave Endresak, currently off the web.
18. The “music video special” titled Ami Image: White Shadow shows what happens after Ami is discovered and made into an idol. The special is actually a combination of clips from the first three parts of the story plus original animation, set to music from the series, as well as new vocals for the image video.