Embracing Yaoi Manga

Youka Nitta

By Margaret O'Connell
April 1, 2006

Embracing Love is an acclaimed yaoi (male/male romance) manga series about Kyosuke Iwaki and Yoji Katou, two actors from the heterosexual adult film industry. The two end up falling for each other in real life when they have to do a scene together to audition for a more artistic, though explicit, film about two male porn stars who fall in love. The film is such a success that it gets turned into a TV series starring Iwaki and Katou, enabling them both to cross over from porn into more mainstream acting and modeling jobs.

Katou, who had developed strong feelings for his former professional arch-rival Iwaki beginning with their initial bedroom screen test, seizes the opportunity provided by the months-long filming of the TV series to try to win over his less impulsive co-star. The more uptight Iwaki is also attracted to Katou. However, Iwaki is uncomfortable with his new public image as half of a trendy gay couple, and initially suspects that Katou is only trying to turn their on-stage romance into reality in an attempt to get publicity and advance his own career.

I had the opportunity to interview Youka Nitta, the creator of Embracing Love, during the first annual New York Comic-Con in February under the auspices of Be Beautiful (www.BeBeautifulManga.com), her English-language publisher. The interview took place in Ms. Nitta's hotel suite on Saturday, February 25, with the assistance of her English translator, Emi Chiusano. (Ms. Chiusano also acted as the resident yaoi historian on the New York Comic-Con yaoi panel held later that day.) Also present was Be Beautiful publisher Masumi Homma O'Donnell.

Sequential Tart: Did you work on other kinds of manga earlier in your career, either professionally or in doujinshi [self-published fan-created comics], or was yaoi always the genre you were most interested in?

Emi Chiusano for Youka Nitta: Yes, she did a few other things.

ST: Other types of manga?

YN: Yes.

ST: In Embracing Love, when the public finds out about Iwaki and Katou's romance, it turns out that their fans like the idea of the two of them being a couple. I know this is fiction, but do you think something like this could happen in real life in Japan today without damaging the actors' careers?

YN: There have been actual actors where it was found out they were gay and if they just kept doing their job well enough, they kept getting work.

ST: Do you think Japanese attitudes toward homosexuality have really changed dramatically in the last ten years or so, as seems to be suggested by the story in Volume 2 involving Kikuchi, the actor who was trying to make a comeback [after being involved in a gay scandal ten years earlier]?

EC: It's fictional. [laughs]

ST: Okay... [EC translates]

EC for YN: She's not talking about general attitudes of the general public society, but in Japan years ago if an actor or one of these � not really actors, in Japan they don't usually just act, they do a variety of things. But if these people had, say, a scandal with a woman, that would be enough to ruin their career. But nowadays it doesn't seem to happen that way anymore.

ST: Is it still standard in yaoi being produced now for one character to always be seme [top] and the other uke [bottom]? You said at the end of Volume 2 that a lot of fans objected to the idea of Iwaki ever being seme, and your answer was that it was vital to the development of the story. Could you expand on why?

EC for YN: She personally isn't too concerned. She doesn't worry that much about who's going to be doing what, since they're both men. She doesn't think that one person has to be uke all the time. Some people like Iwaki to be passive and like him to be pretty. These people don't want Iwaki to become too masculine. Then on the other hand, about the same number of fans want Iwaki to be masculine.

ST: It makes perfect sense to me the way it is, but my impression was that traditionally it was almost always handled so that one person was seme all the time and the other was uke. So that's not true?

EC: That's one of those things from American fansites that made these, quote, yaoi canons or rules or something that were written by the wrong person who's read [just] a handful of stuff. And yes, most people prefer one to be uke and one to be seme and most stories are written that way. But it's not necessarily a standard or a rule and there's a lot of stuff out there right now that's also reversible � put it that way.

ST: Okay.

EC: And she's one of those people who likes to try switching people around now and then.

ST: Embracing Love is one of the few yaoi manga translated into English so far in which penises are actually shown as anything besides blank spaces or glowing cones of light. I was wondering if this is because of recent changes in the Japanese censorship laws. If so, how and when did those changes happen?

EC: They [the first few volumes of the series] came out like nine years ago in Japan.

ST: Oh � the copyright [in the Be Beautiful English-language edition] is 2000.

EC: Well, in Japan it was written in 1997. Do you want me to still ask that question? Recent meaning how recent?

ST: Well, whenever this happened, because in most of the earlier stuff there's just nothing there and people [who see it for the first time in English] are always commenting on how weird that is. I'm sure it sounds stupid to someone who's familiar with the actual Japanese situation.

YN: Rules have actually gotten stricter over the last few years.

ST: Really?

EC for YN: Publishers have their own standards. So hers is pretty much on the edge of what's allowable.

ST: So the idea that up until sometime in the '90's it was illegal to show penises is another myth?

EC: Mm-hmm.

ST: There are a lot of inaccurate websites out there, apparently.

EC: Yeah, I complain about it a lot, but no one listens to me.

ST: How did you get started as a manga-ka [manga artist] and how did you end up working for Biblos [possibly the best-known Japanese publisher of yaoi magazines]?

EC for YN: She was writing doujinshi already and Biblos actually asked her to start writing original manga for them, and then she learned to write originals by writing for Biblos.

ST: Would you say that you work faster and publish installments of Embracing Love on a more regular basis than a lot of other manga-ka whose work appears in yaoi magazines? In the comments from Japanese readers that were quoted in the Afterthoughts to Volume 2, it said that some of them were surprised that you could write new episodes so fast. They were even worried that you'd run out of ideas if you kept producing stories at such a fast pace.

EC for YN: She thinks she does draw fast, faster than most other people. But there are differences between each manga-ka, so there are some that may be much slower and others that are faster. Some fans worry that if she writes too many stories too quickly, she'll run out of ideas or storylines, but if she's out of ideas, then to her it means that the story has ended. Right now she still has more stories that haven't ended yet.

ST: Great. One of the things I really liked about Embracing Love was that there's so much humor and everyday life mixed in with it. I really liked what you did with their respective families, especially when Iwaki went back to his parents' house after his mother died.

EC for YN: She's very happy you liked it.

ST: I was really cracking up at that scene where his brother shows up at the railway station to see them off and just stands there pretending he's not there.

YN: That type of personality is pretty common among Japanese men. They can't express their emotions very easily, so they kind of.... That's a typical personality for old-time Japanese men � maybe not the younger ones now.

ST: I also liked how Katou does do stupid things and act like an airheaded kid, but he really does seem to understand Iwaki quite well, and he's the one who sees that he and his brother are too much alike and that's one reason they don't get along.

EC for YN: When she hears about what you thought about the story and things, that makes her feel really great about having written the story, like it was worth writing it. [Laughter] It gives her energy when she hears you got a lot out of her story, so that keeps her going.

ST: Oh, great. I hope she keeps going for a long time, because this is my favorite series so far from Be Beautiful.

Masumi Homma O'Donnell: I'm so glad to hear that, Margaret!

EC: It gets better and better, I think. You have to keep following it. [Laughter] It's up to volume 11 now [in Japan].

ST: Wow.

EC for YN: She's continuing the series, and she'd like to keep continuing it without its becoming repetitious and boring. If there's going to be an end, she wants it to be a good ending.

ST: Is she working on this [Embracing Love] and her other series that's coming out from Be Beautiful soon at the same time?

EC: Yes, The Sound of My Voice � she's [still] doing that one, too. [Extended discussion of The Sound of My Voice in Japanese between YN and EC]

EC: I edited The Sound of My Voice [for Be Beautiful]. Volume 1 is kind of an explanation of a Japanese seiyuu, the voice actor world, which is very very different from how it operates in the U.S. and it's not even very well known in Japan. She's been to many recordings for her drama CDs [audio dramas on CD based on manga series] and saw these people working � she did extensive interviews and researched about it. So Volume 1 is mostly the background, so not much happens, 'cause it's all background. But then again it has all these terms that are part of the terminology that's really used in the voice actor industry. So when I was doing the translation checks there were so many mistakes because the translator didn't know all these little slang terms and I had to correct them all. [Laughter] Volume 2 is like � well, that one builds. That's where all the relationships really start to get good, so you have to keep reading that one, too. [Laughter]

ST: Did she research the adult film industry for Embracing Love, as well?

EC for YN: [Laughter] She didn't actually go see them filming, but she did buy books and things about it. She has the other series about the hosts, the host club series [When a Man Loves a Man] � if she could pay money and go to these places [adult film studios] and look at it she would, but as far as porn videos, it's hard to get to actually see it, so... [Laughter]

ST: I'm sure. But by Volume 2 of Embracing Love, they're both supposed to be just regular actors and models, right?

EC: Uh-huh.

ST: Because there was something in the introduction to Volume 3 that sort of made that ambiguous, about how Iwaki was getting too worn out from having sex with Katou too much and this was having an effect on his ability to do his job.

YN: Yeah, work meaning his regular acting job. He was tired.

ST: Yeah, I figured that out eventually.

YN: He was fatigued.

ST: Okay, well, I guess that about covers it. Thank you very much, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. I really enjoy your books.

YN [in English]: Thank you.

MHO'D: I'm so glad! It's getting better and better each volume.