Tony Sun Prickett and Vrai Kaiser collaborated for this article
Shuzo Oshimi’s name is one that evokes a sense of dread in many circles. His most famous work, Flowers of Evil, is legendary for the rawness with which he depicts the most destructive parts of adolescence, centering as it does the toxic, coerced relationship between a boy who steals his crush’s underwear and the girl who caught him.
Oshimi’s work has not lost its raw power and interest in toxic relationships–almost all of his manga have a central relationship that at least starts off based on shared secrets, shame, and the threat of exposure. However, 2012’s Inside Mari marked a turning point: many of his later works explore the experiences of queer adolescents trying to escape from heteronormative, transphobic, and often misogynist ideas of how one should live. Inside Mari begins with a young man waking up in the body of a girl he’d been watching from afar and meeting the lesbian girl who was harboring a crush on her. The one-shot Waltz, published the year after Inside Mari was completed, centers on a girl who comes to feel possessive of her transfemme classmate as the only one who knows her identity. And Welcome Back Alice, his most recent work, stars a trio of characters each struggling to find an answer to what living a life without gendered expectations would mean, triggered by the return of their childhood friend shortly after their transition into an agender, trans feminine identity. All of these works are astonishing in the specificity with which they depict queer adolescence, with Oshimi clearly bringing his experience to them. If anything, they demand a reframing and reconsideration of much of his earlier work, showing us a new way of thinking about his depictions of women.
Oshimi’s work overwhelmingly focuses on adolescent sexuality; often the protagonists are insecure young men on the throes of adolescence, who meet a young woman that inspires in them both fear and desire–Oshimi self-deprecatingly refers to this in the afterword for Welcome Back, Alice as “[trying] to hook male readers by inflaming their libido.” But he goes on, “But I was never satisfied by just fulfilling their desires that way. I think the reason is that I myself felt something unsavory in those desires, and it ate at me that this wasn’t what I truly wanted.” The fan service heavy early moments of his works inevitably become bait-and-switches, evolving into stories that explore anxiety about sex, the gendered social expectations that come with it, and the violence that the characters wind up perpetrating against each other in an attempt to navigate these standards.
Inside Mari includes afterwords from Oshimi about his artistic process and personal connection to the material. These essays, split between comic and prose form, would become a staple of both Welcome Back, Alice and Blood on the Tracks. Oshimi is incredibly raw in these moments, musing over whether his desire to be a girl is authentic or born from a romanticization of the “other gender’s experience”; his decaying sense of self-image in relation to his sexuality; and the latent feelings of resentment for women born from growing up with an abusive mother. While it is counterproductive in criticism to automatically assume art is autobiographical, Oshimi not only invites but demands the connection to artist. His works become ones of catharsis—because his characters do, for all the harm they do to one another, come out of the story as adults capable of finding happiness. Even the women who seem terrifying and unknowable, such as the autobiographical mother of Blood on the Tracks, become humans with their own anguish.
Anime Feminist got an opportunity to interview Oshimi over email in November as part of Kodansha House, Kodansha’s pop-up event in New York City. This interview occurred shortly before his new manga Mabataki no Oto was unveiled, so we were not able to ask him about it.
Anime Feminist: Inside Mari is somewhat of a departure from your previous works. Characters like Saeki, Sawa, or Nora are often as terrifying as they are alluring to the protagonist, but Inside Mari steps directly into a girl’s shoes, empathizing with girls’ struggles to connect. How has your thought process about writing female characters changed over the years?
Shuzo Oshimi: I drew Inside Mari from 2012 to 2014, so it was something I worked on nearly a decade ago. At the time, I had a deep admiration for, but also a fear of, women. Those feelings weren’t so much directed at real-life women as they were toward the femininity within myself. Looking back on it now, Inside Mari feels like an attempt to understand and confront the femininity within me.
You have frequently used a device to externalize the protagonist from themself, whether it is Isao splitting in two and then having to deal with a pre-growth version of themself in Inside Mari or in Seiichii’s frequent conversations with aspects of himself in Blood on the Tracks. What draws you to that device of having the protagonist have to confront an external version of themself?
Perhaps I’m drawn to that because I want to depict characters undergoing change. To do so, they have to discover that their familiar sense of self is actually fragile and easy to shatter, along with the fact that what they believed to be “themselves” is an illusion. This feeling of self-fragmentation and dismantling is something I want to share with readers.
What did you want readers to understand from your end-of-volume essays?
The end-of-volume essays allow me to directly express personal matters. Even though I base the stories I create on my personal memories and thoughts, putting those directly into words allows me to explain the story in a more three-dimensional way. Personally, the story and end-of-volume essays complement each other. They’re also a way to let readers know that I want to draw personal stories, and I’m putting everything into these personal themes.
Many of the characters in both Inside Mari and Welcome Back, Alice could be described as “failing at gender,” whether it is Isao attempting to embody femininity in complex female social dynamics, Yori having to hide her sexuality to survive, Kei’s frustration with the gender binary, or Yohei and Yui’s sometimes toxic struggles to live up to gendered expectations in their sexual relationship. How did you think about representing the gendered restrictions that all these characters struggle with?
I feel that the term “gender” carries a great deal of significance in our social lives. I want to draw stories that explore issues of sexuality and sexual desire from an internal, personal perspective. I believe that sexuality has both a socially indoctrinated aspect and an internal, personal aspect to it. To see that as two conflicting sides between society and the individual feels dangerous to me. I feel as if these aspects are intricately intertwined as a single system—that perhaps, neither of these elements can be removed from this system. I don’t have a full understanding of my own sexuality, and I want to depict what I don’t know while it’s still unknown to me.
Welcome Back Alice’s themes of ‘stepping down from gender’ resonates deeply as an x-gender reader. Have trans readers in Japan written to you about your work?
Thank you. I’ve had transgender readers tell me that they feel a connection with that title. Personally speaking, I think what makes it unique is the fact that it tackles these themes within the shonen manga genre while being a personal story instead of one about societal conflict.
What aspect of your work are you most concerned with adaptations capturing correctly? Is there an artist or director you’d especially like to collaborate with?
I’m open to collaboration as long as the person I’m working with properly understands the work and doesn’t get fixated on superficial things. I don’t have anyone in particular I’d like to name.
You described reading many books of theory about gender and masculinity while thinking about Welcome Back Alice. Is there a writer or book that’s felt especially enlightening or true to your experience?
I haven’t read that many…and I already wrote about this in the final afterword to Welcome Back, Alice, but I was directly influenced by Masahiro Morioka’s Confessions of a Frigid Man. Besides that, and though it’s not directly related to things like gender, books on Jacques Lacan, such as Masaaki Mukai’s Introduction to Lacan, have been helpful in reflecting on myself. Also, I get the sense that the writer Nobuo Kojima is very similar to myself, and I regularly read his works.
A year out from finishing both Welcome Back Alice and Blood on the Tracks, do you feel that you understand yourself better?
I don’t know that I do. I may understand myself even less now. I feel as if there’s still so much more that I need to explore in order to extract the chaotic part of myself and turn it into manga.
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