Public Enema No. 1

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

Inside BADI Magazine - Short Stories

Japanese gay magazine BADI ran from the late 1990s to 2019. The magazine would include a range of content, including original written content like short stories and manga. Many notable bara artists including Gengoroh Tagame, Inuyoshi, Hikaru Taku were serialized in this magazine.

My Brother’s Husband is a short manga series by Gengoroh Tagame, published monthly from 2014 to 2017. It’s not a long read you can get through the whole thing basically an afternoon, and it’s not a challenging read either if you’re aware that homophobia exists and you’re okay with seeing a big gay dude’s nipples. I want to make sure I’m describing this in a way that creates as short an on-ramp as possible. I don’t think you should shy from checking this out and I don’t think I’m going to give you a run-down that means you don’t need to read it after reading me.

I really enjoyed this series and I think that many people I know would benefit from reading it. I think that if you’re a casual fan of queer media or of the normal pop-culture reflections I do on much less prestigious work, then you might think that something with the weight of My Brother’s Husband is not for you, and I also think you could benefit from reading it. Get some roughage in your media diet.

There’s your pre-fold introduction: I think you should consider reading My Brother’s Husband with nothing more than my recommendation that you’ll probably get something out of it, and that I think it is very good.

Content Warning: The manga is about real queer life in Japan of its time, which means you’re going to encounter homophobia and if you think that’s a reason other people shouldn’t read this, you should jump in a lake.

Spoiler Warning: I’m not going to explain the details of the plot, but I am going to mention the kinds of events in the plot. For example, this series is about and discusses homophobia, which, again, if you think that’s a reason other people shouldn’t read it, you should jump in a lake.

My Brother’s Husband is a modern-day drama story about a guy called Yaichi who has a daughter and had a wife and had a twin brother, and now he doesn’t have either. In the aftermath of the loss of his brother, into his life arrives his brother’s husband (oh, the title), one Mike Flanagan, who is on first impression, most notably, a foreigner (Canadian) and a man, as husbands often are. This puts Yaichi’s two conflicting impulses immediately at odds with one another; on the one hand, it’s very impolite to not support and give comfort to a family member, on the other hand, gays are icky. Yaichi isn’t Explicitly Homophobic at Mike, but there’s time spent on his inner life and how he raises his daughter Kana that show he’s not thought this stuff out, it’s not very caring, and it is, in many cases, built off an immediate want to repel the queer man from his life.

What follows is the story of Mike and Yaichi navigating a relationship made around an aching absence, and having to learn to accommodate that as best they can. They’re both grieving someone, in two very different ways, and it’s very hard for them to feel they’re getting the whole of an emotional state they can use. Yaichi is resentful at his brother for keeping a partner out of his life like this, but also at his brother for being a big queery queer who queered so hard he had to move to another country to get the government involved in it, and Mike is left looking at the face of the love of his life who occasionally gives him that look when he’s too tangibly gay.

You know the look.

This is this is a manga of such quality that I feel a little ill-equipped to describe it. I think that I can talk about laser beams and teleporting swords in a way that puts respect on them, because what matters to you matters and that literally is enough. Being enjoyable isn’t the opposite of being good, after all. That’s why I normally stay in the space of talking about comics, anime, and animated media, with only occasional excursions into film and TV (and usually to comment that prestige TV is kinda piss). Ultimately the drive behind that is that I think that when it comes to pulp media I want to make sure people don’t think that there’s no reason to respect or consider them.

My Brother’s Husband is nothing like that. I don’t need to defend it to you or to elevate its text. It’s just an incredible mature, thoughtful drama about two men and a girl and the complicated spaces of relationships where you have to make choices about which of your impulses you respect.

It is also overwhelmingly and constantly sad.

It’s kind of expected, it’s a manga about someone grieving the loss of a life partner but that doesn’t really do enough to make clear how there are ways of being sad this manga examines that many people might not even realise exist.

Robyn Boylorn describes in the autoethnographic work Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience the idea of blackgirlness. That is, there is a way of being and a way of being regarded in the world that is not about being a girl and being black, but about being a girl and black. That there are social constructions of girlness, social constructions of blackness, and then, in a space connected to both but not belonging to either, there are social constructions of blackgirlness. I have no such art to coin sch a term here, but the way that Mike grieves and shares his life with Yaichi and Kana brings to mind this concept. It is not just that Mike is gay, and Mike is grieving, Mike is having to do Gay Grieving. There are social constrctions around how a person should grieve and how he, specifically, should grieve, and these factors press around him to stop him from unpacking his grief easily or safely.

He has come to Japan to meet his husband’s twin, and that means meeting a family member he doesn’t know who is or is not able to safely interact with his gayness or his grief, and he is doing it in a country with different mores to those which he’s familiar, and he’s doing it into a culture, Japan, that is notoriously socially oppressive about the other. This isn’t to say Canada is the land of flowing rainbows and unicorn jello, but Mike’s from Canada, he knows how to be gay from Canada.

There’s this idea in Japanese culture that you might have heard expressed as an inability to read the air and it’s not uncommon for Westerners interacting with Japanese culture for any protracted period of time to develop a negative attitude towards the idea. It’s not just ‘read the room’ or ‘get the vibe,’ but rather that reading the air brings with it assumptions not just about the correct way to solve problems in a social setting, but that it shouldn’t be anyone’s job to do that. It can create solutions to problems that would, if say, I did them to you, seem passive aggressive, or insulting, as opposed to directly telling you. It’s often built around a huge number of social cues based on other social cues so as to make sure you don’t have to be humiliated by being told in a polite way that you screwed up. Ostensibly, it is a cultural practice for seemingly preventing problems before they happen.

That’s a really interesting thing when you’re talking about say the regulations of how people shoes should be at a workplace, but it’s very different when you’re talking about whether or not queer people should be able to have lives where they are expressing who they are freely in a way that they can find one another. It’s one thing to want to make sure people in the workplace are getting along before they go out binge drinking together, it’s another thing entirely when it means constructing a country-sized closet. There is a thread of the conversation in My Brother’s Husband about how you can forever lose connections because you can’t admit the connections are there and that this is both a homophobic thing and a Japanese thing and a Japanese homophobic thing.

It is an ache of a book.

Typically speaking, I try to shy away from what I would describe as prestige queer media.

Part of this is because I think that the world we live in is one where much of that more tragic, self-serious, prestige media is already going to be venerated by a system built around it. Queer tragedy, queer horror, occasionally queer romance tinged with the threat of becoming the other, these are the media forms that prestige is willing to tolerate, and they will often do so while making what is ultimately also, a really good piece of media that I don’t need to do anything to support. Mostly I would just be showing up to go, I enjoyed this or I didn’t enjoy this and I wouldn’t really have a useful input on why someone else would like it, when I’m just another white queer from not-the-Imperial-seat. This is also why for all that I’m fascinated by it, I’m probably never going to write a single word about The Good Doctor.

I try to focus on queer media I find fun or indulgent, becase those are the kinds of queer media I’m used to being seen as unserious and not worthy of respect or consideration or review or cultural connectivity. My personal take is that pop media you engage with because you enjoy it is itself just as worthy of engagement and attention as anything else, and uncovering and deciphering what about it means something to you is valuable as a tool for understanding you.

I cannot escape the fact that My Brother’s Husband is a piece of media that feels beyond my ability to conveniently describe and very important. I’m not the kind of queer guy that it’s representing. Really, I’m more like Yaichi – someone with a lot of panicked reactions in my head to queerness because of a childhood of oppression and a disconnect from my own queer cultural framework. I don’t even like the kinds of men’s bodies represented here, though god damn if it’s not obviously being made by someone who likes them and is not worried about sharing that.

I liked it so much.

I think you’d like it too.

I think if you didn’t like it, you’d probably have a really interesting reason for it.

Unless you’re just homophobic, in which case, as above, you should go jump in a lake.

i'm well aware of the history of the word and i'm also aware that there's much more to it than what you're implying here, and i'm also aware that it's not never used in "japanese fanspaces." for one, here's Gengoroh Tagame speaking on his own complex opinion of the word:

and that's just one creator. i follow japanese artists who do call their work bara, and others who'd prefer that term not be applied to their work, and in those cases i'm aware of i try to avoid it.