Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
First, a plot summary of JK Haru Is a Sex Worker in Another World, published in Japanese by Hayakawa in 2017 (hereafter Haru).1
In the real world, Haru is the slutty high-school girl type—not exactly ordinary, but hardly exceptional either.2 She is casual about sexual relationships and has done compensated dating. A traffic accident sends her and her classmate Chiba—an unpopular otaku with adolescent delusions of grandeur—to another world where men rank far above women. There, Haru has few options: she can only become a prostitute. Chiba, meanwhile, becomes a hero endowed with cheat abilities. Haru has to serve all sorts of men, including Chiba, whom she used to look down on, and endure physical and psychological abuse. When Shequraso, the kind, elegant prostitute she admires, is lured in by the army’s sweet talk and dies from the abuse she suffers, Haru goes berserk and kills the soldiers who abused her. It turns out that Haru has monstrously powerful combat abilities. At the end of the story, however, she chooses to stay at the brothel, keep working, and preserve her everyday life.
1 The Basic Structure of Otaku-Pandering Works
Virtually all Japanese works that pander to otaku (male-oriented works) share a basic structure: they fulfill the desires of the protagonist (= the reader) while denying that he has them. Their male leads are generally the herbivore type, unassertive in matters of sex and romance. All sorts of circumstances beyond his control bring the protagonist into contact with beautiful girls; all sorts of further circumstances beyond his control get him involved with them. He complains, “I’m so unlucky!” while maintaining his ties to all these female characters.
To encourage readers to identify with him, this kind of male lead tends to insist on things like “I’m just an ordinary high-school student you could find anywhere.”
The female characters in these works, meanwhile, are mostly what E. M. Forster called flat characters. In fact, his explanation of the concept could describe the female characters in most light novels directly:
The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.”3
Replace Mr. Micawber with “Mr. Long Aotian,” “Mr. Shido,” or “Mr. Touma,” and nothing feels out of place.4 Or perhaps changing “I never will desert” to “I’ll always love” would be a little better. Most of the female characters in these works seem to lead lives that revolve not around the sun, but around the male lead.
2 The Horror of the Ordinary High-School Boy
The most important thing about Haru is its critique of this structure. Here we need to pay attention to Chiba. On the one hand, he has many of the traits of an ordinary male lead transported to another world, including the most important one: access to cheats. Unlike Haru, Chiba has what we might call smooth sailing in the other world. He quickly becomes a hero, and female characters pursue him. Before being transported, he too was an ordinary high-school student who, like many other isekai male leads, was bullied in class.
On the other hand, Chiba assesses himself from the position of a male protagonist. Again, like many isekai male leads, he knows anime well, sees himself as the protagonist of an isekai anime, and gives himself a grandiose nickname. He treats being transported to another world as a game.
In a typical isekai light novel, this kind of male lead is portrayed positively, and the women all like him. That is because the so-called female characters in a typical isekai light novel are merely flat characters. The entire novel can be seen as the male lead’s monologue. Put simply, there is no “other” in this kind of novel.
Haru does the opposite: there is a male lead, but no narration by him. Chiba has no first-person narration of his own. His every move is portrayed through the women around him.
Chiba can just about count as the male lead, but he has no first-person voice. What does that mean? Or, to put the question more simply, how is this different from his having one?
Here is a simple analogy: a male lead with first-person narration is describing his own jerk-off session, so he can dress up his sexual fantasies. Without it, someone else is watching you jerk off and telling the story.
As Chiba assesses himself from his position as an anime protagonist, what does the heroine, as an other, see?
This guy is Chiba, the poster boy for scumbags everywhere.
Haru really does find Chiba disgusting. She is not a tsundere whose lips say no while her body says yes: her body says no even more emphatically.
What are these supposedly ordinary high-school boys like? In Haru’s eyes, Chiba is ugly, has cheat abilities but little drive to better himself, and quickly picks up the other world’s vices.
At first, Chiba is still acting out what looks like an anime script. He rejects the nun who pursues him and declares that the heroine is his one true love. But once she rejects him, he behaves no differently from the brutes who visit the brothel. He even complains that the nun pursuing him is not sexy enough. Strip away the mask of the supposedly “kind, ordinary high-school boy,” and what is Chiba? Human scum. Here we have the very “herbivorous dinosaurs” Tsunehiro Uno mocks: a bunch of men with intense desires who deny having them. Just what will they do when those desires cannot be satisfied? Chiba is a satire not only of isekai male leads, but also of their readers.
3 The God’s Impotence
The god of the other world appears twice in the novel, impotent both times. This god can be read as a satire on the authors of otaku-pandering light novels. He is arbitrary, dictatorial, and utterly unreliable. He also plainly could not care less about Haru’s fate.
For the typical light-novel author, characters like Haru do not exist in the first place. No wonder they do not care whether such women live or die.
Do not forget that the god is Haru’s first customer (just as the author is the first to get off on his own novel). That is also when Haru is at her most rational: uninterested in the god’s arbitrary arrangements, she demands to return to her original world. But the god refuses.
4 Other Worlds and Other Deserts
What is the other world to Haru? A world of extreme “male superiority and female inferiority.” (This can be read as a criticism = definition, not just of this novel but of light-novel other worlds as a whole.) We must understand this in a broader context. The other world permits no female characters except flat ones. Haru’s characterization is clearly set against that of the ordinary female characters in other worlds. The typical heroine in such worlds has a few defining traits: (1) she loves only the male lead; (2) she is sexually innocent—or, if she is not, she has other traits that fit male fantasies. Haru, a girl who has already done compensated dating, undoubtedly falls outside this fantasy. (Though at the level of content, the novel does add other fantasies.) The other world that Chiba treats as a game is almost synonymous with a nightmare for Haru. Even as Haru rejects this world, her behavior—pretending to enjoy herself, for instance—shows just how ridiculous these “herbivorous dinosaurs’” desires are.
It is never women who are enthralled by the phallus, but men themselves.
Haru enters the other world as a kind of character it excludes—or perhaps “a voice” would be better, since she narrates in the first person. In that voice, the other world (this fantasy) collapses. It is no longer an alluring stage, but an androcentric desert saturated with (fascist) military imagery. Do not forget the novel’s descriptions of the army’s perverse behavior, or the militarization of the male lead himself. Its brutal depiction of the army is an important narrative strand that is easily overlooked. As Ryota Fukushima has pointed out, Japan’s anime-centered popular culture, from Space Battleship Yamato and Gundam through Evangelion, has always tended to aestheticize military power. There are light novels depicting the Self-Defense Forces, too; works such as Maoyu go further, attempting to recast war in terms of “enlightenment.” Other worlds themselves can hardly escape this lineage. But this novel also shows us what armies are really like.
5 They Are Both Worse!
The chief blemish in Haru is that the heroine’s experience with the army makes her feel that life in the brothel is not as bad as she had thought. This is, of course, self-deception. The right course is to stick to her original choice: not to choose among these options, but to demand different ones. When Haru first meets the god, she simply demands to go back, rejecting everything about this world. Where she later goes wrong is in accepting male superiority and female inferiority as the premise. Even with her immense fighting power, she still chooses to work in the brothel, hoping to change this hierarchy through the brothel. It is as if Woolf had demanded “a room of one’s own” just to do housework in it every day (rather than write).
When we face the choice between being a prostitute in a brothel and being a prostitute for the army, we must say it loud: They are both worse. This is just a false choice.
Editor’s note: Gouzi puts it plainly and clearly. Faced with false options, we should not choose among them, but demand different ones.