Essays: No Conclusion

It came to me in a flash of pixels while reading Michelle Rogers' essay on mahou shoujo series. In the section wherein she talks about the Prince figure she notes that his relationship with the heroine "leads to knowledge of marriage and family as the ultimate conclusion and consummation of these feelings." And it hit me.

Yamanashi, ochinashi, iminashi. Shortened to the acronym YAOI. Translated: without climax, without conclusion, without content.

Like many I had, in the back of my mind, assumed that the climax, conclusion and content in question referred to plot. After all, in its acronym form the term refers to a story featuring lots of gratuitous male/male sex and nothing else. And, like many, I had spared a brief snicker over the irony of the term when climaxes, and lots of them, seemed to form the backbone of the genre (even in its more plot-full post acronym interpretation).

But, thought I suddenly, what if there's another layer? What if the climax, conclusion and content refer to something more socio-biological? What if it's a reference to...kids?

Rogers' felicitous wording made me think about what I know of Japanese family structure. Within the last handful of centuries, and during the Tokugawa period most especially, romantic love hasn't been a particular consideration in marriage--it usually isn't in any social system that employs arranged marriages. In terms of literary history, in fact, romantic love tends to accompany tragedy (a pretty global literary tradition, actually, but that's another essay). Even now a lot of the popular manga/anime authors, to speak of the genre I'm most familiar with, show a strong tendency to give their romantic plot threads a solid ending of marriage and children. Consider Usagi and Mamoru in Sailor Moon, Kaoru and Kenshin in Rurouni Kenshin, even the kids from the first and second seasons of Digimon.

Tying up the plot with a bow in such a fashion represents a major deviation from Japanese story-telling tradition, which we can observe everywhere from The Tale of Genji to traditional folktales like Urashima Tarou. Japanese story-telling does not favor the same kind of endings as Euro-American story-telling, a fact which tends to frustrate the life out of the less flexible critics/reviewers in this country who don't realize that the open-ended cut off that leaves plot threads dangling everywhere is how the story is supposed to end. I suspect this is why those pat romantic endings seem so afterthought-like--a few minutes of vision into the future tacked on to the real non-ending. I believe that kind of ending shows the authors' desire to contain the historically tragic and destructive theme of romantic love in the historically stable and predictable form of marriage and procreation--especially given that romantic love is no longer automatically contained by that tragic aspect or sidelined by tradition. If this urge supercedes the well established aesthetic of the open ending it must come from a pretty dominant cultural imperative. Translation: marriage and children are a really, really important thing for people to get around to.

Of course, if marriage with children expresses a sort of logical conclusion to romance, that leaves male/male romance rather up in the air. For two males to produce children (genetically their own, at least) requires either very advanced technological intervention or else an unusually generous female friend. So I'm inclined to think that the climax, conclusion and content in YAOI also refer to the fact that male/male romance simply doesn't fit well into the system Japanese authors (and possibly the Japanese cultural consensus as a whole) have evolved for romance in general. The original sense of YAOI, a purely sexual story, does not encompass the end of the romantic progression at all--only the middle.

So, to the motivations for writing YAOI or yaoi that get bandied about, I think I want to add another: escapism. For all the dismissive connotations of yamanashi, ochinashi, iminashi, it offers the opportunity to revel in romance and/or sex without the socio-biological conclusion of marriage/children. In fact, it demands the absence of that conclusion because a male/male pair won't support it without patently absurd plot-locutions. I imagine that the very dominance of the marriage/children conclusion, the fact that it is the assumed mode, makes such a romp-by-proxy pretty inviting.

I have yet to find any sources that indicate whether this train of thought calls in at the station or simply wrecks somewhere on the broken tracks of baseless speculation. At the moment it's only a hypothesis. I'll let you know if and when I find either backup or refutation.