New Years is the perfect time to look back on the last twelve months and think to yourself… “What was the best BL manga I read in 2023?” Best-of lists are common this time of year, so we wanted to get in on the action and make a list of our staff’s favorite BL titles a la Chill Chill’s BL Awards. However, our list is less a ranking of the absolute top popular titles as voted by our users (you can find that by checking the “best sellers” list), and more just us—as a team of BL fans—wanting to celebrate some of our favorite titles that were added to the Renta! site this year. (The 2024 Chill Chill BL Awards should be happening again in march, with people already discussing the nominees, so let’s look forward to that in the coming months!)
To make sure it wasn’t just our main blog team pushing our favs we’ve already talked about at length, we also invited Nan, Agedashi, Anne, and Snow from our Japanese side to share some of their favorite titles they got to work with this year!
For each category there’s a good mix of responses, showing just how varied BL fans are in their tastes. However, in the spirit of not making this post too ridiculously long, we’ll just highlight two or three staff comments for each and then list the rest of the choices below.
Perhaps it’s a bit late in the month for gift recommendations, but at least with Renta! you don’t have to worry about shipping! (Let’s give those overworked postal workers a break…) Since it’s that giving time of year, I figured why not make a nice list of recs for that BL fan in your life? Or, for yourself? Christmas is still a good time for self-care in the form of BL, surely.
So I decided to take our top ten categories and list my top three for each, and why I think they’re a great option for anyone who’s into those tropes.
To delve deeper into the history and evolution of BL, the Kadokawa Culture Museum in Saitama is hosting a well-curated exhibition, titled, “BL Evolution: From Pioneers to Global Phenomenon ―Tracing the 50 Year History and Impact of Boys’ Love through Manga, Literature, and Media”. Sou and I decided to brave the one-hour train ride from the Renta! office, to give you a detailed report on what’s up.
The museum, established by the publisher Kadokawa, permanently hosts the Manga and Light Novel Library on its first floor, as well as the impressive Bookshelf Theater on the fourth. Rainy day be damned, the modern shrine on the museum grounds was also worth a visit, especially to get a good-luck charm for keeping deadlines (surely, an invaluable must-have for every mangaka).
The exhibition divides the evolution of BL as a genre into three eras. Numbered hearts with arrows piercing through them point visitors each step of the route, and famous voice actor Toshiyuki Morikawa narrates parts of it in his mellifluous voice.
First comes the ‘June’ era. ‘June’ was a women’s magazine founded in 1978, which focused on stories of male-male romance. It fostered many BL authors who basically pioneered the depiction of homosexual love in manga, preceded in literature by the books of Mari Mori. A timeline of BL publications, anime productions, visual novels, drama CDs, etc. adorns a huge wall, tracing the long history of BL. Across from it, a glass case protects old ‘June’ magazines with covers by BL trailblazer Keiko Takemiya, manuscripts, drama CDs, and even albums by David Bowie or books by Herman Hesse, as a collection of not only artifacts from the history of BL, but also of the manifold media that influenced the genre in its infancy.
Speaking of the great Takemiya-sensei, her gorgeous art serves as the exhibition’s key visual. The exhibition also displays parts of her project Genga’(Dash), which is dedicated to the reproduction of original manga manuscripts. It is led by her, in collaboration with the International Manga Research Center of Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum (worth a visit, by the way!). Not gonna lie, seeing manuscripts from the ‘70s, reinvigorated in such a way, made my manga-loving heart giddy right off the bat.
And we were only starting. The exhibition then explains the ‘Yaoi era’. Most BL fans might already be aware, but a refresher never hurts: ‘yaoi’ is an acronym for the phrase “Yama nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi”, a.k.a. “no climax, no punch line, no meaning”. Essentially, it came to refer to manga fanfics (doujinshi), created just for the pleasure of creating itself, without a care for plot, development, art quality, and so on. The first usage of the term is said to be in a doujinshi published in 1979, followed then by the ‘yaoi boom’ of the later 1980s, characterized by the birth of “coupling”/”shipping” of male characters in major shonen manga. Apparently, the first manga to facilitate such a rise in shipping doujinshi was Captain Tsubasa, which the exhibition highlights through maps of Comiket throughout the years (Comic Market = Japan’s biggest convention which caters to doujinshi artists and fans alike), increasingly more and more overcome by Captain Tsubasa doujin artists. This section included everything that I love: a culture of independent artists creating for the fun of it, and shonen manga. Couldn’t ask for much more.
Subsequently, as yaoi culture expanded from Japan to the rest of the world, so did BL culture as a whole. That’s what the third and last section, ‘Blooming BL culture’ focuses on. From the early 1990s, BL manga and novel magazines were launched one after another, Kadokawa established its Ruby Bunko label for aesthetic BL novels, and more and more authors active in both BL and non-BL works made their debut. The exhibition also features examples of just how far broad the reach of BL has become, expanding into a transmedia franchise that’s recognized and followed by people all over the world (otherwise, Renta! and this blog wouldn’t exist!). In this finishing part of the exhibition, there are even posters and trailers of the movie adaptation of the manga “BL Metamorphosis”, about a young girl and old woman forging an unlikely friendship through their shared appreciation for BL. There’s also a huge wall displaying various BL (such as Tamekou-sensei’s ‘Lala’s Married Life’, Nagisa-sensei’s Kabukicho Bad Trip, Sorai-sensei’s Our Not-So-Lonely Planet Travel Guide), in a display of just how big and diverse the genre has evolved to be!
For anyone interested in visiting the exhibition, it’s on from May 20th to July 16th at the Kadokawa Culture Museum, in Saitama. The nearest station is Higashitokorozawa, accessible through the Musashino line. It’s definitely worth the train ride, even through the early June rain!
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