Classmates and finding the humanity in clichés

Content Warning: discussion of grooming and student/teacher relationships, queerphobia

Spoilers for all of Classmates

In every way, Classmates is a straightforward high school love story. High school student Kusakabe Hikaru attends Tofuya Number One High School, an all-boys school mostly populated by low-achieving students, where “if you can write your name, you can get in.” He’s one of the ones that doesn’t care about school; his passion is music, and the rock band he plays guitar in has a minor following. He bleaches and perms his hair, smokes, and drinks. When he notices the more academically-inclined Sajo Rihito mouthing the words in the choral number his class is practicing instead of singing, he assumes it’s because Sajo doesn’t care about music. That impression changes when he stumbles on Sajo practicing alone in a classroom, and he impulsively offers to tutor Sajo. The two grow closer, and their connection turns to romance. 

In the afterword of the first volume of Classmates, Nakamura Asumiko wrote of her first BL series, “I wanted to go with something cliché, almost hackneyed.” It’s true, Classmates does indulge many of the standards of the genre. Kusakabe is a rocker with bleached hair who grows close to his buttoned-up, bespectacled classmate Sajo while practicing for a choral performance. That closeness turns to attraction and the two begin dating, much to the chagrin of Hara-sensei, their music teacher who carries a torch of his own for Rihito. Instead of using these clichés as shortcuts, however, Nakamura uses the reader’s familiarity to build a framework for a humanistic, multifaceted story about queer intimacy, connection, and joy.

The Joy of Touch

Classmates follows something of an unusual structure: the first three volumes cover Sajo and Kusakabe’s time together in school; the fourth, Hara and Sora, is about their teacher confronting his past; that is followed by O.B., which is made up of brief vignettes about a variety of characters; and the sixth, Blanc, takes place during Kusakabe and Sajo’s college years, when a rift forms around their decision to get married. The series is still running and another volume about Kusakabe and Sajo moving in together, Home, has come out in Japan but has yet to be officially translated in English.

Even as the story moves through established BL tropes for the first three volumes—dark hair and light hair, opposites attract, a gay teacher dealing with his own feelings for a student, an all-boys school setting, and a graduation marriage proposal—Nakamura’s gift for naturalism makes it feel fresh. Most striking is how Classmates depicts physical and emotional intimacy and how the two are linked, something sorely missing from the vast majority of romance of any orientation.

In most romance manga, touch between even established, longtime couples tends to be reserved for big moments. When they go on dates, they walk next to each other and sit side-by-side on benches or across from each other at a cafe. When they kiss, they stand upright, nothing touching but their lips, and these kisses tend to be few and far between. If sex figures into it, whether it’s an intentionally erotic manga or a love story where characters have reached that point, touch still tends to happen only in the context of sex, and casual intimate contact is nearly nonexistent.

Not so in Classmates. Nakamura cleverly interweaves the physical and emotional aspect of Kusakabe and Sajo’s relationship. Touch is sex, but it’s so much more: it’s connection, it’s comfort, it’s communication. In casual moments, Sajo and Kusakabe touch casually. At a restaurant with a friend, their legs press together under the table. They sit together at a kotatsu in comfortable silence as Sajo reads, their seats pulled up next to one another. Even in moments they aren’t physically touching, Nakamura often arranges the panels so the word balloons touch both of them—physically separated, but ineffably connected in a way that only the reader can see.

Touch offers comfort as well. When Sajo’s mother is in the hospital for a tumor, he describes all the ways it’s become hard to take care of himself alone in the house. Kusakabe expresses his own worry for Sajo, and Sajo rests his head on Kusakabe’s knee. It’s an emotionally vulnerable moment for Sajo, who is more withdrawn than the outspoken Kusakabe, but also more emotionally fragile, and it’s only when he’s able to open up that he is able to find comfort and rest in their contact. Kusakabe accompanies Sajo to Kyoto for Sajo’s entrance exam; the night before, Kusakabe gives Sajo a hickey and Sajo performs fellatio on Kusakabe. The hickey marks Kusakabe’s presence for Sajo, allowing him to symbolically stay by his side and prevent the crippling test anxiety that made Sajo fail his high school entrance exams three years ago, sticking him at a low-ranking school.

And when they’re separated, touch reconnects them. The vignettes in O.B. that focus on them, when Kusakabe comes to visit Sajo in Kyoto, hinge around sex. They’re pre- or post-coital, lying naked in their futon together. This isn’t because they’re oversexed, but because it’s woven into their daily lives, as essential to catching up as eating dinner together and talking about their lives. The more intense the reconnection, the more intense the sex. In Blanc, the two temporarily break their engagement, but come back together when Kusakabe cares for Sajo’s mother when her cancer recurs. This leads to a confrontation with Sajo’s homophobic father when she succumbs to pneumonia, and the two fully reconcile at her funeral. That night the two have sex, but not the laid-back, comfortable sex they’ve always been shown having before. There’s an urgency to it, as communicated in the haphazardly abandoned shoes in the entryway, the way Kusakabe pulls at Sajo’s tie, and even the way the lines of their bodies flow into one another. It’s a hot scene, only made hotter by the emotional context that Sajo and Kusakabe, after being separated for so long, are reaffirming their lives and how interconnected they are.

Touch can also be a marker of hierarchy; especially with the old (and ever-less-common after the 90s and 00s) framework of the dominant, masculine seme and the feminine, submissive uke. Nakamura gestures at this cliché at the end of the first arc of Classmates, when Kusakabe, who is the more confident and assertive of the two, tops Sajo when the two first have penetrative sex. However, that is far from the defining feature of their sex life; in fact, whenever the two are depicted having sex afterward, their positions make it ambiguous who is penetrating whom. In doing this, the story rejects a paradigm of rigidly fixed sexual roles, instead highlighting their relationship as being between equal partners.

Tragedy vs Reality

Classmates neither shrugs off questions of identity, nor does it wallow in the tragedy of being gay in a homophobic world. Mizoguchi Akiko, a BL scholar, praised it for how it examined Sajo and Kusakabe’s identities realistically, and Nakamura stated her intention to balance the exaggerated elements of BL with such matters. She does an excellent job here, resulting in a story that speaks frankly to queer identities in Japan without ever feeling like a clunky message manga designed to educate the reader, and how the boys’ identities can be a source of pain and alienation, they also find joy and community through them.

Sajo and Kusakabe come to their identities from very different places. Sajo realized he was gay as a child and hated himself for it. His mother tells Kusakabe how he withdrew from her, and he describes the guilt he felt in his own monologue. He frets about “turning” Kusakabe, that Kusakabe’s queerness stems from their relationship rather than something within himself. Hara even plays on that fear, whispering to Rihito that once they graduate and girls are in plentiful supply, Kusakabe will inevitably lose interest and return to heterosexuality. “He’s not like us,” he says.

And it’s true, it doesn’t seem that Kusakabe ever thought of himself as queer before dating Rihito. As an attractive musician with a following, albeit a minor one, he’s never had a shortage of girls to date. He’s had plenty of girlfriends, all of whom approached him first, and it’s implied that he’s had sex with at least a few of them. Kusakabe never had to struggle with internalized homophobia, but accepts his attraction to Rihito with the same lackadaisical attitude that he takes toward most things.

Being gay causes Rihito significant pain, but gayness itself is not inherently painful; in seeking a balance between BL tropes and real-life LGBT issues, Nakamura finds this nuance. In fact, as the story moves, it’s clear that it can be a source of great joy. It’s never stated outright how Kusakabe identifies, as a man who has dated women but found his soulmate in another man. However, his bandmate comments that while he never turned down the girls who asked him out, he also was never particularly upset when they dumped him for seeming uninterested. Knowing Rihito has allowed him to experience real love and connection, in a way he never would have if he had followed heteronormative society’s prescribed path. He has found himself in relationship with his queerness. Rihito, as well, becomes more able to accept himself and thus opens up to the world, reforging his relationship with his mother and making new friends in his pharmacology program who accept him.

Not that they never face homophobia again; the two still exist in a heteronormative world, which is especially highlighted in Blanc. When they graduate high school, Rihito and Kusakabe decide to get married once they turn 20, but now that they’ve reached that age, the reality of what that could mean for them sinks in and nearly tears them apart. Same-sex marriage is still illegal in most of Japan, despite popular support. Some couples choose to have one adopt the other so they can share a family register, but that makes them legally parent and child. However, as Kusakabe points out, laws are changing; if they went that route, they could close up a future route to being legally recognized as husbands. 

When Rihito goes out drinking with his friends, celebrating the start of their final year of college, one of the girls in his department announces that she’s engaged and will get married after she graduates. When Sajo wavers in the face of the institutional differences between what’s available to him and to heterosexual couples, Kusakabe returns his ring and flees. The only difference between what they have and what Sajo’s classmate has is the sexes of the people involved, but that makes an enormous difference in how they are treated institutionally. 

When tragedy strikes and Sajo’s mother passes away, the two rediscover what’s important to them: being there for one another. When Kusakabe, who had been caring for her with her husband working overseas and her son attending college in Kyoto, comes rushing in, he encounters Sajo’s father for the first time. Sajo’s father explodes, accusing Kusakabe of turning his own son into a “pervert,” mirroring Sajo’s worries earlier in the series. The idea of gay people “turning” others is not so much a BL trope as a false cultural narrative (and not just in Japan), but it’s still one that Nakamura confronts by turning it artfully in on itself while creating a clear image of why Sajo has struggled with self-hatred for so long. Sajo’s anxiety that he made Kusakabe gay parallels his father’s imputation against Kusakabe, and both are equally absurd.

But Classmates is not a story to wallow in sorrow. Sajo and Kusakabe reconcile and decide to hold a wedding ceremony, because the most important thing to them is not legal recognition but affirming in front of everyone they care about that they are “just two people who love each other.” Although the post-graduation stories have been more grounded, here, Nakamura dances around the clichés that she has structured her story around. By the time Blanc came out in 2020, it’s become increasingly common for BL series to end with weddings, even though legal same-sex marriage continues to elude Japan. They don’t always address the legal realities head-on, but Sajo and Kusakabe decide their joy and community is more important than official recognition.

Curiously, there are characters at the wedding who Kusakabe and Sajo barely know, or haven’t even met previously in the story. Koma, Hara’s fashion designer friend, gifts the grooms a pair of matching veils with floral headbands. Hibiki, a character from Sora and Hara, bakes their cake. It’s a bit fantastical, playing around with those clichés again, but it also draws on one of the most fundamental sources of queer joy: community. Even if the world has yet to accept them, Sajo and Kusakabe have surrounded themselves with people like them, and people who support them.

Cliché Clash

The downside to Nakamura’s approach in combining clichés with real-world issues is that some things that work in fiction simply do not in real life. Teacher-student relationships are as stock in BL romances as dark hair/light hair, particularly for secondary couples, but in reality, they contain an inherently harmful power imbalance, particularly when the student is a minor. As such, the series seriously stumbles when it comes to how it handles Hara-sensei.

Hara is predatory to Sajo. Full stop. He tries to kiss him once in a classroom, but Kusakabe stops him. He forces Sajo to take singing tests over and over and asks invasive questions about his sex life with Kusakabe. When Sajo faints at a restaurant, Hara takes him to a hotel and calls Kusakabe, telling him to come because he “can’t stay professional for long” before again trying to kiss a weeping Sajo. Yet, he is also something of a queer mentor. Kusakabe ends up coming to him to talk about their relationship, and at the conclusion of the first part, he tells them to kiss in front of him and that they better not break up.

Hara’s position in the narrative is as much as part of the framework of clichés as anything else. However, unlike one character having dark hair and the other having light hair, it is something that must be actively grappled with if it’s going to be examined under a realistic lens. Instead of taking the abuse that Hara subjected Rihito to seriously, Sora & Hara has him meeting and falling in love with a student, again, and then introduces another student-teacher relationship as well. The student, Sorano, even sets Hara up on a date with Sajo, even though it seems unlikely Sajo would be comfortable going out with a man who attempted to assault him like Hara did. Instead, Kusakabe’s suspicion is played as a joke.

It appears that Nakamura’s goal with Hara was to highlight the importance of the queer community, and the damage that lack thereof can do across generations. As a teen, Hara kissed his own music teacher, Arisaka; the next day, that teacher came in wearing a wedding ring, and transferred away shortly after. Arisaka figures prominently in Sora & Hara, and tells Hara how shortly after that, he divorced his wife. Arisaka married and fathered a child despite being gay, because that was what was expected of him. Hara is isolated from his community because of the pressures of work life, and sublimates his loneliness into attraction to a child. Unlike the younger generation, both Arisaka and Hara have not been able to find happiness within their community. And both of them find happiness… through pursuing a relationship with a student.

This muddling of the message makes for some awkward moments. Hara comes across as a serial predator, even if he refuses to formally date Sorano until he graduates and is of age. When the mother of the student Arisaka loves attacks him for dating her son, what’s supposed to be homophobia looks like perfectly justifiable anger that a teacher preyed on her child. Hara officiating Sajo and Kusakabe’s wedding seems outright absurd.

Had Hara had a different role at the start of the narrative, such inclusions would have been more believable. He could easily have had a mentorship role that didn’t involve him abusing his power against Sajo. Such mentorship relationships are important in many real-life queer people’s development, as previous generations help the youth navigate their queerness in a homophobic world and access community and support. However, that was the cliché that Nakamura drew on, and that proved to be the downfall of that arc.

Sing a song of truth

In one of the sweetest moments in Blanc, Kusakabe is talking to a producer about making a music video for a song he wrote about Sajo during their separation. The producer starts talking about what kind of girl he’d cast, until Kusakabe gently tells him that the song wasn’t written about a girl. After some awkward fumbling, the producer tells Kusakabe that he wants the music video to be representative of who Kusakabe is and his own ideas behind the song.

That scene is perfectly representative of what Classmates is trying to do. The producer walked into the situation carrying his own heteronormative expectations, bringing in the usual framework. When the context turned out different than he assumed, he chooses authenticity over convenient, stock ideas. Clichés and tropes aren’t always a bad thing, and can in fact be useful tools to set user expectations. Nakamura uses those tropes to find the realism in the space between. Classmates may operate largely within the standard framework of BL stories, but when faced with a choice between authenticity and artificiality, it chooses the former. The result is a story that shows many of those familiar story beats at their best, heightened with humanity and joy even in the face of hardship.