January 2025 – rentaBLog

On Twitter a while back, I remember seeing a complaint that there’s lots of BL with businessmen and older guys, and lots of BL with high schoolers, but where are all the college guys? And while plenty of people were kind enough to swoop in with their favorite college-centric BL recs, it still made me start thinking about what college BL I would personally recommend from Renta!’s catalogue. And what better time than now to make a rec post, as spring semester heads into full swing in the U.S.?

First, though, let’s talk a little about what college looks like in Japan to get a better understanding of some of the more common college tropes you might see in BL manga. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the fanfiction that puts Japanese characters in a super American college setting, with dorm parties and drinking and fraternities—the whole nine yards. (Always a fun and exciting AU scenario, up there with flower shop or coffee house.) Actually, though, college in Japan is pretty different in a lot of ways.

First, there’s no greek life. There also aren’t really dorms—at least, not in the on-campus sense like in the States. I stayed at a dorm that was eight train stops away from my school, and that seems to be the norm. College students generally live at home, stay in apartments (financed by their parents if they’re wealthy enough, or by themselves if not), or live in shared housing or general dormitories that aren’t associated with a particular school but instead house students from schools all around the city. The dorm then has a dorm head who usually takes care of management and maintenance, and a dorm mother who’s usually in charge of cooking and cleaning. This scenario is pretty common in manga: the main character moves into the dorm and has to rely on all the strange and exciting people they meet.

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In 2024, we had the honor of partnering with Irodori Comics, a company with the intention of connecting doujinshi fans around the world with Japanese creators. Since most localization companies work directly with publishers rather than artists, doujin works—particularly BL ones—were previously slipping by under the radar. Thankfully, Irodori is here to fill that gap!

So, you might be asking, what exactly is the difference between publishing licensed manga and doujinshi? Well, first we have to discuss what doujinshi is. In much of the west, the word “doujinshi” probably conjures up one of two things (if not both at the same time): porn and fanworks. In reality, doujinshi doesn’t have to be either of these things. It essentially means “similar interest booklet” and it’s most similar to the concept of a zine—a small, inexpensive, self-published book or pamphlet meant to share personal interests and opinions with like-minded people.

So essentially, doujinshi are just self-published books. Most commonly, doujinshi are comics or novels. But you can also have “doujin goods”—goods made by and for fans on a small, inexpensive scale. Doujinshi are best used as a space for creatives to share their ideas and stories and artwork with like-minded people without requiring approval and support from a publisher.

Publishing doujinshi and participating in events is also a wonderful way for newer artists to get their name out there if they aspire to a career in illustration, or as a writer or mangaka. In fact, many well-known published BL mangaka started out in doujinshi circles, often getting popular through their derivative works. But publishing doujinshi isn’t just for beginners awaiting their big-time debut—no, if you’ve read our J.GARDEN event reports, you’ll know some of the most famous mangaka still release new doujinshi and attend regularly, which is a testament to what an important part of the manga community and ecosystem these events are.

So, now that you know what doujinshi are and why they exists, what makes them so difficult to license overseas? For parody works, that should be obvious: no one is supposed to be profiting off derivative works (which is the only reason they’re allowed to exist in the first place—generally, fanwork creators in Japan price their works so the prices are just enough to cover the necessary expenses for production and/or printing). But why do so few companies release original doujinshi?

As I noted earlier, most localization companies work with publishers to license their releases. The publisher essentially works as the “agent” and “go-between” for these titles, and the publishing company generally holds the license, not the artist. For this reason, sometimes we even jump-scare artists when we announce their releases, because they had no idea their book would be getting an overseas release since everything was handled by the publisher’s sales department. (ごめんなさい…) So, to license doujinshi, most localizers would have to contract each artist one by one by one, which is unfortunately way too much licensing correspondence to do on a grand scale for most companies. Thankfully, sites like DLSite and Fanza have perhaps made tracking down and licensing doujinshi a bit easier, but a precedent for working directly with publishers has already been set.

So it’s exciting to get to work alongside Irodori and share all the wonderful doujinshi they license. Through Irodori, we’ve been able to obtain a variety of different types of content our users might like but that just didn’t exist in the catalogues of our other publishing partners (for instance, please look forward to some of our first actual geicomi!). Not to mention, the vast majority of Irodori’s releases are uncensored! (Which unfortunately makes it impossible to access their website in Japan without a VPN…)

All of that said…!! The BL Team has decided to showcase a handful of our favorite Irodori titles, so make sure to check them out down below!

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