Author’s note: The characters mentioned in this essay are not an indication of whom I ship.
It was around middle school that I began to believe friends who quarreled would eventually put their grievances behind them—a belief I picked up from a few shōnen manga and anime I was consuming then. However fiercely the characters fought, they always made up in the end. In real life, though, fearlessly going head-to-head has left me with friends I have had no contact with since.
We can roughly divide the protagonists of serialized manga with a coherent main storyline—excluding standalone short works—into those who grow and those who do not. The latter include Kintarō Zeniya in Zeniya-kun no Koi wa Kane Shidai, Seishuu Handa in Handa-kun, and the familiar Sakamoto and Kusuo Saiki, among others; the former appear in the vast majority of serialized manga. Works such as Hanamachi Oni and Joōbachi stage “encounters whose purpose is never to meet again,” making their protagonists grow through absolute loss. By contrast, anime and manga typically aimed at boys often handle relationships through a narrative that moves from “going separate ways” to “reaching the same destination by different roads.”
This narrative structure contains several important elements:
First, there must be a shared starting point: a common background, time spent together, and so on.
Second, at a certain age—almost invariably the “adolescent” years, chiefly between fourteen and eighteen—growth and a clearer sense of personal aspirations give rise to conflict.
Third, once they are more mature, the characters reach a “reconciliation” from a higher standpoint. “Reconciliation” here does not necessarily mean “making up” or “reaching agreement.” It means being able to understand each other, respect each other’s decisions, and each be at ease in their own place.
Let me illustrate this briefly with SaruMi—Saruhiko Fushimi and Misaki Yata—in K.
Their prequel was officially titled Lost Small World. The main story spans roughly the period from their meeting to their parting. The small world is the starting point of their friendship; once it is lost, the novel moves toward an ending in which they go their separate ways, leading into the beginning of the story that follows.
“Small World” has two meanings. On the emotional level, it is the exclusive world formed by Fushimi and Yata’s mutual appreciation. Both grew up without parental love or a stable circle of friends, which provided the initial basis for their friendship. The second meaning emerges in relation to the “big world” outside: theirs is a world as narrow as a well, yet with a dazzling sky overhead, a world that knows nothing of impossibility. When they first move in together, Yata tells Fushimi, “I just feel like there’s nothing we can’t do together.” The airship the two of them (Aya: “I’d like to get a mention too.”) pursue seems to be a metaphor for some immense, imagined thing within the realm of possibility. This “shared starting point” encompasses both their time together and their sense of trust in themselves. By contrast, after entering the world of the “Kings,” they gradually become aware of finitude through the Sword of Damocles and the Kings’ power. Losing their small world means not only the end of their friendship but also the collapse of the world they constructed for themselves and believed in.
The conflict begins after they join the Red Clan. From their time together there until Fushimi’s departure, their small world is gradually coming apart. The Red Clan richly rewards Yata’s enthusiasm, sense of belonging to a team, and loyalty, whereas Fushimi is solitary by nature and has little to do with groups; there is no place in the Red Clan for him to put his technical talents to use, either. The death of his father, Niki, the appearance of the Blue King Munakata, tensions within the Red Clan, and the problems in the two friends’ personalities are merely fuses. The two are fundamentally different, which means things cannot work out for both of them within the Red Clan. We can see this at the end of K’s second season as well, when Yata tells Fushimi, “If you can go this far for the Blue King, that means the Blue King is your true king.”
To return to K’s central theme: it seeks to interpret the concept of “family.”
Blue Clan: order, reason, justice, “Our righteous cause is unclouded.”
Red Clan: fervor, team spirit, a martial spirit, “No blood! No bone! No ash!”
Fushimi and Yata belong with these two different clans respectively. Their conflict, set off in successive explosions by a series of fuses and mistaken for something accidental, gradually reveals itself as they grow. In the end they acknowledge each other, each is at ease in their own place, and they become friends again.
To branch off for a moment, there is much else in K worth discussing. Take its interpretation of “family”: although K and CLANNAD share this theme, they present entirely different ideas. Through signature colors, K creates seven distinct communities of temperament and culture. CLANNAD places greater emphasis on bonds of emotional attachment, focusing its narrative on individuals from different family backgrounds who play different roles within the intimate family unit. Another question is why “red,” “blue,” and “green” carry their traditional, stubbornly persistent meanings. An account of the metaphorical mechanisms behind color symbolism would, however, be another enormous subject.
Back to the topic at hand: we can offer a whole series of similar examples, such as Takasugi and Gintoki in Gintama, and JOY3—the trio they form with Katsura. Their shared starting point is being “Shoyo Yoshida’s pupils” and fighting in the Jōi cause. After the sword ban, Takasugi, with his warrior temperament, chooses “destruction,” while Gintoki chooses “protection.” The battle between Takasugi and Gintoki—TakaGin—looks back over their past: “The other is like a failed version of oneself.” In response to Gintoki’s decision to kill Shoyo, what Takasugi actually implies is that, in Gintoki’s place, he might have made the same choice; neither of them could have averted the outcome then. But the decision was not in his hands. He could neither save their teacher nor bear Gintoki’s pain in his stead. Speaking of Takasugi, Gintoki also declares, “I’m the one who will kill him, and I’m the one who will protect him.” Killing rests on his present position; “protection,” on their former comradeship. Faced with a common enemy, they will fight side by side, yet neither will yield an inch on his own position.
The same holds for SasuNaru—Sasuke and Naruto—in Naruto, RinHaru—Rin and Haruka—in Free!, and others.
Each seeking the road each believes to be right, and the possibility of understanding one another.
Of course, we can also offer plenty of counterexamples: OdaZai—Oda and Dazai—in Bungo Stray Dogs, for instance, or Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion. Shock at the finality of death can make someone grow up almost overnight. The question is, given how many emotional relationships end in disillusionment, why do so many anime and manga aimed primarily at boys choose precisely this kind of narrative, full of upheaval yet not damaging? Or is it only by choosing such a narrative that a work can legitimately be classified as “shōnen manga,” rather than seinen, josei, or something else?
A parallel to this typical narrative of “going separate ways” and “reaching the same destination by different roads” is the classic rule of shōjo manga told from a female perspective (a small number are told from a male perspective): the heroine will always end up with the first man she liked. So much so that the upset in Daytime Shooting Star, where the second male lead wins out, was enough to earn the manga a place in history. (Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea is somewhat different: it has no principal narrator.)
In reviews of No Longer Heroine, readers complain that it should be called not “Heroine Disqualified,” the literal meaning of its title, but “The Whole Cast Disqualified.” “Heroine disqualified” means “losing the qualifications to be the heroine.” The expression “the whole cast disqualified” was probably coined through a misunderstanding of Renjian shige, the Chinese title of No Longer Human. (The Japanese ningen means “human”; in his retranslation, Lin Shaohua used Ren de shige, meaning “disqualification as a human being”—“losing the qualifications to be human.”) Setting aside the question of what the words mean, readers are actually taking “disqualification” to mean “losing their original selves”: in the course of falling in love, everyone loses principles and qualities that once mattered greatly to them. No Longer Heroine is unquestionably a dangerous shōjo manga. It destroys many things from which readers hope to draw comfort, however insubstantial those things may be. Dreams, for example: the second female lead goes abroad on an exchange to pursue her dreams, while the male lead and heroine sneak around sleeping together back home. Typical shōjo manga, such as Kiss Him, Not Me, Rainbow Days, and Wolf Girl and Black Prince, usually end with waiting and reunion. Or tolerance and altruism: the male lead is an extreme egoist. He has sex with the second female lead while keeping the heroine tied to him; once he understands his own feelings, he breaks up with the second female lead without hesitation. It is amid this distrust that she changes from the model good girl into someone who debases herself and hooks up indiscriminately. For my part, I recommend this as an excellent work not to be missed: through outrageous facial expressions and the protagonist’s continual self-examination and self-belittlement, it boldly exposes the deep-rooted failings of people in love. But for most readers longing for romantic comfort, reading a work like this is sheer misery. Hanamachi Oni and Joōbachi differ from it in that they interpret a commercial ethos and geisha culture; there is little in them that runs counter to their audience’s expectations.
Shōjo manga’s attachment to first love and shōnen manga’s similar treatment of “reaching the same destination by different roads” probably have similar psychological motivations. Perhaps feelings of trust and love remain central to the shaping of values among a readership composed chiefly of adolescents, so whatever runs counter to them is considered “disqualified.” Perhaps it is because of the peculiar nature of “adolescence”: in that world there is no puzzlement over what comes after completion, no inevitable disillusionment—just as, when we use the term “adolescent writing,” we are always looking back from outside adolescence. Or perhaps it is the Zeigarnik effect and people’s need to answer themselves: as readers watch others go through the whole process of recovering “what they originally held dear,” they also heal themselves. They need these all-round happy endings to spur themselves on.
In high school, I once helped a friend put together a collection of his essays. In one of them, he wrote:
If I become a parent someday, I too will encourage my children to read or watch a few shōnen series while they are young. Even if that groundless feeling of trust has long since turned to ashes, revisiting the works of our youth and hearing words like “change,” “possibility,” “protection,” “friendship,” and “romance” will still stir nostalgia and an admiring envy.
Perhaps that is why we love stories about young people.
Behind the Scenes for This Issue: Chair: Jingxi; signboard mascot illustrator: Scalmeser; coordination, layout, and posting: Taixuan.
Editor’s note: Ah, it’s good to be young. (Definitely.)