It’s finally cooled down a bit here in Tokyo, and the Christmas decorations lining all the shopping centers and Mariah Carey blaring from every store’s loudspeaker do a wonderful job of reminding me of the upcoming holiday season.
…But maybe you’re the type of person who wishes the holiday cheer could hold off for a bit longer, and prefers to savor the time between Spooky Season and the lively-but-potentially-exhausting year-end festivities. In which case, Japan’s got you covered!
As we briefly touched upon in our Yaoi Day post, Japan has lots of “special” days throughout the year, based on wordplay that’s possible with the Japanese pronunciation of a given date — and November 29th is one of these days! In Japanese, 1-1-2-9 can be pronounced いいにく (ii-ni-ku), which is a homonym for 良い肉 (also pronounced iiniku), which means “good meat.” As such, 11/29 has been designated “Good Meat Day” in Japan.
Unfortunately, as far as special days in Japan go, Good Meat Day isn’t really that big of a deal — beyond some meat vendors having special offers, or meat lovers treating themselves to a delicious, protein-rich meal .
However, here at RentaBLog, we like to spice things up and take every opportunity to celebrate different aspects of Boys’ Love — and thus, I decided that on this day, we’d give the spotlight over to the beefy guys of BL, who make our hearts pound with their rippling muscles — the buffer, the better!
Hope you’ve saved room for a feast, because meat is on the menu tonight!!
There’s this huge store in Ikebukuro that’s floors and floors of anime and manga goods, even an exhibition space. Having moved to Tokyo recently, the first time I visited it isn’t that far back—so I very clearly remember the gorgeous artwork on the walls, advertising one particular BL manga that had recently released its first collected volume. I didn’t have time to stop and catch its name, but I did stare at the beautiful, realistic art, almost daydreaming every time I passed it by; then, I noticed that many other stores around Ikebukuro were advertising the exact same manga, so I knew it had to be a phenomenon in the making.
When I saw a manga named “The Monster & the Ghost” in my work assignments, I let out a squeal of excitement at its cover, like, “OH! IT’S THAT MANGA!!!”
And I’m obviously not the only one who’s been entranced by this work since. Both Japan and overseas, people seem to be buzzing about this story—so, what is it about?
A complaint I see frequently regarding BL manga is that it’s too short. Compared to shonen or shojo series, which can go on for tens (and sometimes hundreds) or volumes, BL is often kept to between one and three volumes, and only goes beyond that for extremely popular series. (Though, I’ve noticed this is changing a bit with the proliferation of digital publishing in the BL space, but that’s a tangent for another day.) I personally like this aspect of BL, however—it forces the artist to write a concise story that makes a big impact with as few pages as possible. And, in the case of today’s review subject, sometimes you come across a manga that fits a full coming of age story in as few as four chapters.
tapon’s Entwined in Red condenses a story about abuse, trauma, and shame into just over one hundred pages. Our main character, Asai, is a Very Good Boy whose entire personality and motto are heavily based on the idea that it’s best to live a “normal” life. Good in school, a wonderful son and big brother, and popular with all his female classmates, Asai seems like the perfect example of what a teenage boy should be. However, he’s harboring a secret—ever since elementary school, when he and some fellow classmates stumbled on a porn mag with women in full shibari, he’s been obsessed with the idea of beautiful red ropes marking pale skin. From his classmates’ exclamations of disgust, however, it was made clear that liking shibari isn’t “normal.”
Enter his beautiful classmate Rui. Consistently truant, to the point that most of his classmates only remember his existence through rumors about him being a player and son of a yakuza, Rui is a complete mystery to Asai. So when Rui is suggested as the pianist for their class choir contest (evidently a staple in Japanese middle and high schools), Asai is asked as the class rep to visit Rui’s apartment, tell him about the contest, and deliver some paperwork. What he walks in on, however is Rui in the middle of prostituting himself to an older man, his beautiful pale skin covered in red rope.
When Asai tries to chastise Rui for doing “stuff like that,” Rui gets annoyed and points out Asai got hard from seeing him all tied up, so what right does he have to act superior? When Rui tells Asai to take responsibility for constantly interrupting his time with his clients, Asai can’t resist the allure of these desires he’s been pushing down for half his life, and thus Asai’s squeaky clean image is tarnished—but in its stead starts the blossoming of a relationship tying him to Rui.
For those who’ve ever wondered why in the world we need two tagging systems, or what these two tagging systems are used for, I figured I’d do an explainer. I’ve noticed the community tags in particular seem under-utilized, and since they’re sincerely more helpful the more people actually use them, I was hoping I could “take a Selfish” and talk about why I think the community tags are important.
The few times I’ve had the joy of reading people’s opinions on Renta!, there’s been a continuing theme: the weird titles. Whether people find them annoying or funny, Renta!’s titles seem to have become an inseparable part of our branding within the BL fandom. So I thought I would talk about why Renta!’s titles sometimes look the way they do, why those changes occur, and the overall culture pressuring us to handle our titles this way.
First, I want to talk about the general manga titling culture in Japan as of late. As discerning eyes may have noticed, manga titles keep getting longer and longer and longer, and more and more… err… upfront (?) about the manga’s themes. “I Was A Struggling Office Worker But Now I’ve Been Reincarnated As The Rich Mean Villainess But I’ve Decided To Go Against My Fate!” etc. I’m sure we’ve all seen them. This is a naming dynamic I like to refer to as “hyper-meta titling,” and it’s been popular in Japan for the last five or so years. I’m not sure what initially caused this trend (that would be its own interesting rabbit hole, and perhaps a blog post for another day), but it means these titles are already quite long and weird in Japanese, and often get even longer and weirder during translation. You also see them semi-frequently in BL, in the direction of “I Met A Hot Guy At The Gym And Now We’re Friends With Benefits and I Want to Lick His Nipples” (not a real title… unfortunately), etc.
But those aren’t the titles I want to talk about with this post. Instead, I want to talk about adult content, SEO, and the pinch of an increasingly anti-porn culture in the West.
Damn. Sounds a lot less sexy now, huh?
For those who don’t work in fields that have a significant online presence and this is thus something you never have to think about (lucky you!), SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” You might hear your favorite influencers discussing it sometimes in terms of using the best words and phrases to get clicks—things that are currently trending, or are consistently popular. In the case of this blog, for instance, we’d want to include a lot of BL-, manga- and otaku-related phrases, keywords, full titles in a variety of spellings (English, romaji, and Japanese), etc. in order to help the right audience find our content.
However, in the past ten or so years and for a variety of reasons (some incredibly valid—we don’t want children stumbling across our content, obviously—and some a little… uh… less so), the overlords who have the most sway over the internet have cranked the breaks on SEO when it comes to adult content. Any words generally seen as sexual or pornographic in nature can get your site flagged and pushed pages and pages into the search results, even if your content is exactly what’s being sought out. The same has been happening with social media sites—I’m sure you all remember the Tumblr apocalypse where the site banned porn (and gave birth to the wonderful phrase “female-presenting nipples”) and subsequently lost half their users within the next few years. Twitter, too, has been recently cracking down and issuing shadow bans on adult content—i get hit with a “sensitive content” slap pretty frequently.
(But we keep trucking, because Twitter is all we have left… 🙃)
Renta! actually has entire lists of phrases we can’t use in our titles and synopses specifically because they’re incredibly damaging to SEO. Because I don’t want to severely damage the SEO for our blog, I’ll post a little image here:
However, as has already been established, Japanese artists and publishers as of late love being particularly blunt in their titles, particularly when it comes to porn. So a title like ZOMBIE HIDE SEX (ゾンビ・ハイド・セックス) has to become… Fooling Around While The Zombies Roam. My Love Story as a Slut with a Wet, Needy Hole (恋するビッチのとろ穴事情) becomes A Hole Craving to be Touched. Lost Virgin: how to sex (ロストバージン how to sex) becomes Lost And Undefiled: Lessons in Sensuality. The titles essentially have the same meaning, but using safe, clean words. Using “safe, clean words” can make it feel kind of bizarre, however…
We do our best to retain titles that still convey the Japanese (and the content of the manga itself) while also skirting the regulations on adult content for SEO (and, more recently as you may have read from the issues with DLsite, credit card companies).
And I know what you’re thinking. “But Ames…” you’re about to say with a furrowed brow. “You guys have TONS of stuff on your site that uses those words…” We do. And the answer is simple: those aren’t localized by us. While we also localize lots and lots of great content, we also host lots of content localized by our wonderful partners. (This is what the “Localized by:” tag on the product details means!)
On the one hand, we could take a page out of their book and translate the titles more literally, since there’s a possibility having any of those words on our site removes us from the running in the SEO race, so why not just go ham? But we hope that offsetting it at least a little with our own titles can help the anti-porn situation much of the West has gotten itself stuck in. Also, in line with all the other crack-downs on on adult content, having sexual words in the title makes it impossible to advertise the series in any big way. Womp womp.
Localizing content from a highly porn-positive culture like Japan (though, with strict censorship laws… the contradictions are confusing) for fairly anti-porn cultures in the West comes with a lot of strange, unexpected hurdles (and many an explanation to our JP staff on why we can and can’t do things the same way they’d be done in Japan). But, for us it’s worth it if we can continue bringing the wonderful content we love to an even wider audience. We hope to continue sharing lots more bizarre, silly, cute titles with you in the future, so I hope you all look forward to it!
What are some of your favorite silly Renta! titles? I’d love to hear them on the comments or on Twitter! 🤗
When I first heard whispers that the next Renta! fan letter campaign would center around THEYuo Yodogawa, I could hardly contain my excitement. My company would be serving as a bridge between international fans and one of my favorite BL mangaka in the game today?? Heck yeah!
In case you’re unfamiliar with the wildly popular Yodogawa-sensei, I’ll quickly share how I became a fan. Have you ever fallen in love at first sight with an art style? I believe that’s what I experienced upon laying eyes on Yuo Yodogawa’s art for the first time. Little did I know when I stumbled upon a chapter in the middle of a random manga and thought, “Huh, that art looks really nice!” that I would quickly be sucked into the Yodogawaverse — and I couldn’t be happier.
If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing a Yodogawa manga, I suppose the best way to describe their body of work would be as sexy, funny, and cute — but that doesn’t do it nearly enough justice, so I’ll just use this space to gush about a few of my favorite series from Yodogawa-sensei!
I hope you’ll join me in the Yodogawaverse, and discover some BL series that are both awe-inspiring and “aww”-worthy!
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