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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Keiko Takemiya’s Poem of the Wind and Trees uses a romanticized European setting to shape early Boys Love aesthetics, positioning readers to identify with Western bishounen while exposing and critiquing racial otherness, racism, and power systems in BL’s formation.

Paper long abstract

Keiko Takemiya, with the creation of the manga series Poem of the Wind and Trees (1976-1884), revolutionized shoujo manga and helped create the genre of Boys Love. To better understand the visual and cultural histories of BL’s style, I analyze the Poem of the Wind and Trees’ construction of the Occident: the setting of the manga. I define the Occident as a fantasy world constructed by aestheticizing, romanticizing, and objectifying Western European objects, cultural values, and people as symbols of foreignness or difference instead of as things that come from specific cultural histories.

Utilizing Occidental ornamental visual elements, Takemiya encourages readers to identify and inhabit the subject position of these Occidental subjects. At the same time she critiques European culture’s racist constructions of otherness based on the binaries of ingroup/out-group, pure/impure, White/non-White. The readers of Poem of the Wind and Trees were meant to identify with European bishounen and therefore were complicit in creating a fantasy Occidental world. Simultaneously, these readers also embodied the illustrated subject position of a character like Serge (a young Roma boy) and the racist experiences he encountered in the manga’s 19th century upper-class French setting. These readers also embodied the illustrated subject position of a character like Serge and the experiences of racism, making legible and educating readers about the power systems of racial fantasy construction. How does this education work alongside contemporaneous women’s social justice movements? How does educating BL readers about power systems of racial fantasies relate to early undercurrents of mukokuseki, race, and the “going global” of BL?