MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND vol. 2, second manga by a gay man about overcoming eww-ick homophobia

MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND, volume 2
GENGOROH TAGAME (trans. Anne Ishii)
Pantheon Books
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The concluding volume in the story of Yaichi, his daughter Kana, and how their meeting Mike Flanagan--Yaichi's brother-in-law--changes their lives and perceptions of acceptance of homosexuality in their contemporary Japanese culture.

As Mike continues his journey of discovery concerning Ryoji's past, Yaichi gradually comes to understand that being gay is just another way of being human. And that, in many ways, remains a radical concept in Japan even today. In the meantime, the bond between Mike and young Kana grows ever stronger, and yet he is going to have to return to Canada soon--a fact that fills them both with impending heartbreak. But not before more than a few revelations come to light.


SECOND VOLUME IN SERIES BEGUN IN MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND vol. 1

My Review: Yaichi's gay twin, Ryuji, married Canadian bear Mike after emigrating to escape his repressive, hidebound culture. He promised, swore!, he would have his twin—his only remaining family—know Mike as his husband. Then, as is the way with sworn promises, Ryuji died. Mike, to make his dearly beloved husband's promise come true, visits Yaichi and his daughter Kana in their home.

We pick up the story in medias res, this being a two-volume omnibus edition of the manga. Yaichi, a lovely man (for legal purposes), has his most acute attack of the collywobbles yet. Mike mentions that it's possible Kana will be a lesbian. These two pages made me laugh so hard I almost choked:

Poor Yaichi! What's a traditional Japanese father to think? My daughter with a woman?! HEEELLLP!!!!

The rest of the story is Yaichi coming to value and care for Mike, whose love for his brother is strong. They've lost so much, they've got to come to peace with each other. Mike has no problem with this, since he's been out a long time; Yaichi finds himself saddened that he didn't try harder to connect with Ryuji while he was alive because now he can't. All while being a divorced custodial dad to a little girl. Who has fallen utterly in love with her big Canadian bear-uncle.

A very telling scene comes when Mike goes to Kana's school, to be met with hostility and suspicion. It's really amusing at first because Mike doesn't see it, but it becomes a major Thing between Yaichi and his inner demons. It provides Yaichi with a chance to work through what he thinks about Mike's gayness and what Japan as a whole thinks about gayness. The men resolve their desire to be close to each other over a look at Mike's photo album, including wedding pictures. Yaichi realizes how much he will miss Mike as he's about to leave, and Kana asks for a sworn promise that Mike will visit again, or she gets to come to Canada to visit Mike.

And now I venture into personal territory. My Young Gentleman Caller, Rob, is 34 (thirty-four) years younger than I am. We might as well be Canadian and Japanese, since I understand his culture about as well as he does mine. The Moon landing was 50 years ago. I remember it vividly. I had to YouTube footage for Rob, who had sort-of heard about it. His FATHER was born two years after it happened. So we both relate to the "...say what now?" moments between Yaichi and Mike.

We talked at some length about the way it feels to be so different from someone you care very much about, and how that puts strains on one's inner sense of peace and quiet. We both worry about the other's feelings being hurt when we're being our separate selves...we both worry about the way our beloved handles the need we have to be understood. Am I trying hard enough, too hard, do I even know what he means? And it was this manga that called that conversation into being.

If you don't read the series for any other reason, read it for that one. It is good enough to start a life-altering conversation between people too different to know where or how to begin to do that for themselves.

THAT's good storytelling!

Also! Extra! May the US be blessed with the live-action TV series! Here's a promo photo of the amazing casting:

MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND, manga by gay man about eww-ick homophobia

MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND
GENGOROH TAGAME (trans. Anne Ishii)
Pantheon Books
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Yaichi is a work-at-home suburban dad in contemporary Tokyo; formerly married to Natsuki, father to their young daughter, Kana. Their lives suddenly change with the arrival at their doorstep of a hulking, affable Canadian named Mike Flanagan, who declares himself the widower of Yaichi's estranged gay twin, Ryoji. Mike is on a quest to explore Ryoji's past, and the family reluctantly but dutifully takes him in. What follows is an unprecedented and heartbreaking look at the state of a largely still-closeted Japanese gay culture: how it's been affected by the West, and how the next generation can change the preconceptions about it and prejudices against it.

My Review: In my ongoing quest to retard the ossification of my brain, I made it my business to choose a graphic novel to read. I detest graphic novels. It's hard for me to follow the story, what there is of it, and I am routinely unimpressed by the artwork. I keep trying because there are occasions where the graphic format is the only one that can tell a particular story, and once in a while it's a pleasant discovery to learn that not everything in a given format is as tooth-grindingly annoying as I expect it to be.

The story is one I relate to. I've been Mike Flanagan, the Canadian bear whose dead husband's family he's meeting by his own insistence, in relationships. (Y'all shoulda seen the 24-year-old's father's face when he caught us kissing. And incidentally, Dad's a decade younger than I am, hot, and I would totally trade up.) (Just kidding about that last part, honey!) (It says here.) It's weird to see that experience told from this point of view, that is, the family that's being invaded by strangeness.

Oh my...poor Mike...hugging a straight man in a foreign country...Yaichi shouts at him to let go, of course, and everyone's thoroughly flustered and freaked. Yeah, this'll go well.

But it does, after the two men are joined by Yaichi's daughter Kana. She just wants to know why she never knew she had an uncle, why men can't get married in Japan, how Mike got so hairy...

...everything a kid wants to know, in short, about someone new in her life. Who was the wife, Kana wonders, and when Mike explains that there was no wife but there were two husbands Yaichi goes into a reverie about how he always wondered the same thing only about their sex life...and then Yaichi snaps out of it and reprimands himself for wondering such a crude thing when he wouldn't question a mixed marriage's sex life.

Yaichi's "acceptance" of his identical twin's sexual nature was, in fact, simply refusal to think about it or process it.

Now here's this big gaijin staying in his home, charming his daughter, making his ex-wife laugh and smile when she pays a visit, and generally going out of his way to be sweet and agreeable. Yaichi the orphan, now siblingless, is getting to grips with the cost of his absence of acceptance. By the end of this fat little volume, he's on a major journey into what his brother's husband has done to his future life.

Reading the manga way is weird for Westerners, or at any rate old ones like me. Back to front, right to left...and add in the graphic parts! Well, it was a read outside my comfort zone. The more alert among you will have noticed a favorable star rating atop the review's text. I liked the story of a man's journey from unquestioning homophobia to questioning discomfort through to earnest effort to understand and integrate The Other into his world. I wasn't comfortable with the format and I'm not a bit convinced that the story couldn't have been told another way, but the story itself is a good and timely one for 45's America as well as for Japan at any time.

I most certainly will not buy the book for $25 but checked out of the library it's a well-spent afternoon. I'd say graphically oriented consumers would do well to visit Yaichi, Kana, and Uncle Mike. They are good company and the world they find themselves working to understand and create is one I'd say is very, very important for us all to visit. Who knows, y'all might wanna set a spell.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, a classic SF novel coming to a TV near you

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Penguin Galaxy
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A human raised on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith has just arrived on planet Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while his own “psi” powers—including telepathy, clairvoyance, telekenesis, and teleportation—make him a type of messiah figure among humans. "Stranger in a Strange Land" grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a classic in a few short years. The story of the man from Mars who taught humankind grokking and water-sharing—and love—it is Robert A. Heinlein’s masterpiece.

My Review: I gave it 4 stars for memory's sake. Now the folks at Syfy are adapting it for TV! Amazing to me that, once considered too racy for publication unexpurgated, it's now a TV-able property. For all its many faults, I'm glad Society has caught up with Heinlein's libertarian 'tude towards sex.

I read this as a preteen SF hound. It wasn't a favorite of my older sister's, so she tossed her copy at me one day while I was hanging around her place with an airy "if you're bored, read this" and two days later I came up for air. I think the primary appeal for me was the unapologetic therefore un-prurient sexuality of it. I wasn't taken with the philosophical bits at that point.

I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus—or their chances of making the gal—or their own techniques in kissing—or maybe worry about jobs, or money, or will husband or papa or the neighbors catch on. Mike doesn’t have technique . . . but when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe . . . and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing you.

That makes a person's interest in intimacy make sense. It's not cheesy hyperbolic overwrought smutty silliness. It's direct and clear and a darn good roadmap for an innocent to follow when sex finally stops being theoretical.

But time marches on. By age 17 or so, I was a theatre fag and ever so impressed with Theories of Beauty and Paradigms of Truth. I loved this:

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.

Now, see? This is meat and drink to a kid in search of a way to integrate Art into his or her thoughtscape. It's both explanation and challenge, it takes aim at Artyness and fires bullets of Art to smash the Artful. Me likee.

But years have a bad habit of marching ever onward. Events occur that alter an individual's take on self, world, art; that also shatter Society's old consensus on ideas, attitudes, conventions:

Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s at least partly her own fault.

Uh. NO. And there's no room for argument. That's a categorical NO. As in not ever, in no way, at no time. That shit still flies around, as the Stanford Rapist case demonstrates. The little shit was laughing, LAUGHING, about what he'd done when he was caught; he got out of jail, not prison, in record time because "good behavior" somehow mattered; and he's had to register as a sex offender but still manages to live a full social life. Would you be seen dead near his morally degenerate, aesthetically repellent carcass? I know I wouldn't. And that is a very common attitude, I'm extremely happy to say, it's not as if there is no consequence to his action. Not enough by any means, don't get me wrong. He deserves to be under the prison for what he did to Amber Heard. But we're openly talking about it and many, many more people think my way than Heinlein's or the Stanford Rapist's about it.

I won't even go into Heinlein's anti-gay nature. It's not worth my time.

But can I dismiss the young boy's many positive take-aways because the old man sees what was once invisible to his youthful self? On balance, and after thinking about it for a few years, I conclude that I can't simply erase the good and useful lessons I myownself got from several readings of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. If I'd read it for the first time this year, I wouldn't even have finished it. I'd be furious at any number of things. But I didn't, and that balances out my modern sensibility's outrage.

Penguin, that stodgy old house of classics sheathed in orange, includes this book in a six-volume set of modern classics of SF. Their sales pitch is very effective:

Six of our greatest masterworks of science fiction and fantasy, in dazzling collector-worthy hardcover editions, and featuring a series introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, Penguin Galaxy represents a constellation of achievement in visionary fiction, lighting the way toward our knowledge of the universe, and of ourselves. From historical legends to mythic futures, monuments of world-building to mind-bending dystopias, these touchstones of human invention and storytelling ingenuity have transported millions of readers to distant realms, and will continue for generations to chart the frontiers of the imagination.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Dune by Frank Herbert
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer by William Gibson

All titles I'd agree are seminal in SF, and are well worth celebrating with handsome editions.

WICKED AUTUMN, first Max Tudor mystery with room to improve

WICKED AUTUMN
G.M. MAILLET Max Tudor #1
Minotaur Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.125* of five

The Publisher Says: What could be more dangerous than cozy village life in the English countryside?

Max Tudor has adapted well to his post as vicar of St. Edwold's in the idyllic village of Nether Monkslip. The quiet village seems the perfect home for Max, who has fled a harrowing past as an MI5 agent. Now he has found a measure of peace among urban escapees and yoga practitioners, artists and crafters and New Agers. But this new-found serenity is quickly shattered when the highly vocal and unpopular president of the Women's Institute turns up dead at the Harvest Fayre. The death looks like an accident, but Max's training as a former agent kicks in, and before long he suspects foul play.

Max has ministered to the community long enough to be familiar with the tangled alliances and animosities among the residents, but this tragedy surprises and confounds him. It is impossible to believe anyone in his lovely village capable of the crime, and yet given the victim, he must acknowledge that almost everyone had probably fantasized about killing Wanda Batton-Smythe.

As the investigation unfolds, Max becomes more intricately involved. Memories he'd rather not revisit are stirred, evoking the demons from the past which led him to Nether Monkslip. In 'Wicked Autumn', G.M. Malliet serves up an irresistible English village - deliciously skewered - a flawed but likeable protagonist, and a brilliantly modern version of the traditional drawing room mystery.

My Review: Sexy, haunted Maxen "Max" Tudor, former MI5 (domestic spying branch, think FBI not CIA, which any Bond fan knows is MI6) superagent and present-day Anglican priest and vicar of Nether Monkslip, revels in his obscure village's somewhat habitual somnolence, broken only by tempests in the teapot of the Women's Institute {think Junior League}. It's run ruthlessly by one Wanda Barton-Smythe, a harpy with no discernable good qualities except a fatal peanut allergy. Her murder unburies secrets and lies, causes no end of trouble for the allegedly retired Max because {naturally} the cops of Monkslip-super-Mare, the big town in the area, discover his past and rope him into the investigation. Who suspects the Vicar of working with the police, after all?

The village cast of crazies all walk through their days with Max, all spent at the Harvest Festival so ably and unpleasantly organised {oh dear, the Britishness of it all hath infected me} by the late Mrs. Barton-Smythe {B-S, get it? Know what I mean? She's a goer!...aaarrrggghhh it's happening again!}, only, well...let's be charitable towards all and say they're forgetful and leave out some details. Well, a LOT of details. Not all of them innocent.

Max solves the crime, brings the murdering swine to justice, and fills us in on his backstory by flashing back to the reason he decided to become a priest in the first place. He doesn't appear to be a pedophile, which is a nice change of pace. Wait, that's the Catholics...well, anyway, let's just go with the fact that his reasons for doing what he does now will either make you like him more, or strike you as silly. {I'm in Camp B.} He's given a couple of love interests, one of whom he clearly favors over the other, and the village is gifted with the usual suspects for a cozy Brit-stery: Nosy old schoolmarm, shop-lady with a troubled past, doctor who's better than he should be for such a small place, and so forth. Fans of cozy Brit-steries are urged to pre-order. It will fulfill your expectations ably.

My expectations, not so much. Competently written and plotted, the book misses out on every opportunity to surprise or jolt or do more than atmosphere-ize the deeply experienced cozy reader. Nether Monkslip is one of those towns that will, like Lumby, Washington, and its American cousins, always seem wrapped in a dense fog of Atmosphere and Sense of Place. That's fine, I want that, and even expect it from this genre; but PLEASE give me more than just that! St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple's homeplace, was a lot moer than just a swirling-point for Atmosphere, even though we saw it fairly seldom. Agatha Christie gave it some *oomph* and I want modern cozy-ers to do the same!


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And now for the obligatory grumble: When the reason for Wanda's death is revealed, her suddenly-revealed-to-be-gay son and his lover being greedy, it was such a cheap, long-telgraphed cop-out that I actually considered not reviewing the book at all. Really, Mme. Malliet? Couldn't think of ANYthing better than that? I don't think you tried hard enough, then.