Mori Mari’s 1961 novella “Koibitotachi no mori” (“A Lovers’ Forest”) is the first story of a trilogy she wrote about passionate and doomed love affairs between older men and beautiful young boys.1 Mari’s work is invariably cited by Japanese scholars as the antecedent of a genre of manga and popular novels written by women for women about male-male love that began to emerge in the 1970s and remains extremely popular today.2 While there are many terms to refer to the manga and fiction that followed Mari’s lead (and many debates over generic classifications), for brevity’s sake I use the term yaoi here to refer to the whole genre. Yaoi is an ironically self-deprecating acronym that is said to mean “no climax” (yama nashi), “no punch line” (ochi nashi), and “no meaning” (imi nashi).3 Crucially, the term is used interchangeably as a signifier both for the genre of male-male comics written by and for women, and for the women themselves. Thus to write or read yaoi is also to be “a yaoi girl.” In the early 1990s, the slippage this suggests between what you read and who you are sparked an intense and still ongoing debate over sexuality and identity that I discuss in the latter half of this essay. But first I would like to turn to Mari’s early work to make some preliminary observations about the kind of psychic function this genre may be serving and how it is related to the question of literary style.
A Japanese Electra and Her Queer Progeny
By Keith Vincent, 2007
