#all that being said. i think regardless of the author's intent reading yashiro as a closeted trans person is also valid

[benveydraws]

i can't love you in this skin

[pouletaulait]

I don’t mind the conversation either. I always enjoy having a discussion with people who have a different point of view and who are open to having a discussion, like you are, so I appreciate your reaction. My reblogg wasn’t intended as criticism, not at all. I just wanted to point out that personally I can’t quite see why this story would be distorted into something it’s not intended to be if we approach it under a romantic lens. Like I said, personally I think it’s intended to be a romance, albeit not a banal or a „simple“ one but you’re absolutely free to disagree. I understand realism as a fictional portrayal that’s intended to be realistic, in the sense that it attempts to portray a situation in a fashion that stays as close to a possible reality as possible and in which the author seeks to represent this portrayal in an objective manner. A romance, in this context, I understand to be an unrealistic, idealised portrayal of love/a relationship. (Do our understandings differ on this?) But like you pointed out in your original post (if I understand you correctly) what we deem realistic or unrealistic is ultimately influenced by our subjective perception of reality, which might explain why our opinions on this differ. It seems like I didn’t explain my view very clearly; There are many aspects of the manga that I do find realistic in it’s portrayal, such as the CSA, what I don’t find realistic, however, is the portrayal of love, the romance. I find it very idealised and romanticised for the most part (i.e the falling in love at first sight (I’ll get to that), Doumeki being Yashiro’s exact type, Doumeki happens to be impotent which allows Yashiro to develop feelings for him, the fact that Doumeki is completely accepting of everything Yashiro does regardless of how Yashiro treats him, the fact that Doumeki is still in love with Yashiro after he shot him the leg, maybe he even stayed in the Yakuza world just to be near him (although who knows why exactly he did that?) Idk maybe it’s just me but I find it very unrealistic. It’s this romantic idea of „there is this perfect person out there who accepts you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything to keep them happy, you can even shoot them in the leg and they’ll still love you, they’ll stick around no matter what it takes to be with you“. Idk, to me personally this doesn’t seem like the author seeks to portray a realistic relationship here and to me that’s what it boils down to when I’m saying that to me it reads like a romance (of course this is just my opinion, I don’t know anything about Sensei’s actual intentions)

What I meant by „she’s toying with the idea of idealized romance“ is the fact that most, but not everything ,about the romantic aspect is idealised, hence my example that Doumeki’s love doesn’t cure Yashiro’s trauma. Maybe „toying“ is not the most accurate expression to use in English in this case… but what I mean is that Sensei is ,like I said, employing many aspects of an idealised love, imo, but that she doesn’t fully „commit“ to it if you know what I mean; the way I see it she’s building it up to be this fantasy, this ideal of almighty love, but then she defies our expectation by creating a climax (Chapters 23-25) that’s the opposite of what you’d expect from a romance; instead of Doumeki’s love being the answer to all of Yashiro’s problems and them ending up together, it ends in a disaster (in the sense that Doumeki ends up hurting Yashiro deeply and that they part ways). So, I think she’s taking a more realistic approach in that sense but I think the story remains anchored in the idea of the ideal romance, because that seems to be its point of reference imo. If there was no idealised romance at the core of it (which to me seems evident in the exposition) there’d be no expectation to defy in the first place if you get what I’m saying. I hope I explained this in a somewhat understandable way… but maybe this is not making any sense to you since you seem to have a very different opinion on Yashiro’s feelings. Just to clarify: You don’t think he’s in love with Doumeki? Or do you think he doesn’t want to be in a committed relationship with him, or something else entirely? The way I see it, there certainly was an instant attraction to Doumeki on Yashiro’s side. I guess you could argue that it wasn’t „love“ but just sexual attraction, that’s certainly debatable, but the way I see it, he at least started developing feelings for Doumeki very quickly, hence his interference with Doumeki’s sister, his jealousy, etc. so, yes, the „falling in love at first sight“ part comes down to interpretation but personally I find it likely and my assumption is that he wants to be in a committed relationship with Doumeki (that’s purely my assumption based on my interpretation which obviously heavily influenced by the fact that I understand this to be a romance) Anyways, what I meant by problematic: If I’d look at this story as a entirely realistic portrayal of a relationship or love, I’d find a lot of aspects of it very problematic (how Doumeki is completely devoting himself to Yashiro, how he’s basically stalking him, how he keeps going after Yashiro despite him shooting him in the leg, etc.) That’s what I meant by I wouldn’t root for them to end up together if I’d look at this as a realistic portrayal. It wouldn’t be an irredeemable situation for me either but it’s just nothing that I’d be interested in reading, that’s my personal preference. I’m not opposed to realism in general but, like I said, in this specific case, it doesn’t make sense to me personally. Honestly, I don’t think our opinions on this are entirely different because I agree that Kou Yoneda sensei appears to be taking a quite realistic approach in many respects. I think where our opinions differ seems to me to be the point that you seem to regard this as a work of realism, while I think of it as a romance that challenges romantic ideals in some ways but that ultimately stays anchored in an idealised romanticism. But like I said I think I’ll only know for sure once the story’s been told in its entirety.

An example of novel that follows the literary realism tradition but is sometimes approached under romantic lens, and therefore distorted into something else entirely - maybe because of the (bad) movies adaptations? because of the marketing and the covers? I don’t know but I will link this no longer rebloggable post for you to check - is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

I read Lolita when I was seventeen, felt deeply discomforted but I liked the book, understood what it was doing with its narrator, but I have to add, before reading Lolita, I had already read Flaubert (Sentimental Education, didn’t finish Madame Bovary) and Émile Zola to name a few. I think that growing up I have read more books in this genre than others? I don’t know considering that back then I had to read a lot classics for school.

But long story short, I think something similar maybe it’s occurring with Saezuru. To be clear, I am not saying that you have to read it in a certain way, please I don’t really want to even imply that. Read it for yourself and your pleasure first. What I am saying is that, like Lolita, to me Saezuru makes total sense if we assume that it is written with a realistic intention and therefore not exactly bound by the rules of romantic novels that tend to present more positive and idealized views. After all manga are divided into demographics more than their genre, so authors draw very different stories. I still want these characters to find happiness! But I also want to be able to buy the eventual resolution and therefore I appreciate that the development of the story feels organic.

Anyway just a thought. Nakobov himself wrote (in Strong Opinions):

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me— I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.

As for marketing, if you check the link and think about Saezuru: the covers and merchandise vs the content of the chapters, vs the story as it’s told, the parallel with Lolita makes sense to me. The cover only has one imperative: to sell. But once you are alone with the story, you see that stylistic choices, tone, everything suggest that you read it in a critical way.

The way Yoneda Kou draws is also quite sober, discarding decorative details and paying attention more to frame and pov. The way she presents what happens is objective and detached, neutral I’d say, making us impartial observers most of the time, letting the actions speak without commentary being made. The dialogue is hard for our translators because it recreates the speech patterns of the various characters faithfully. And these characters are common yakuza that live harsh realities, the gritty social aspect of it is visible and part of the story, as well as social injustices and personal trauma, and keen and realistic attention to human behavior.

I guess all this clued me in to reading the story the way I do, and probably also why I chose it in the first place. Realism is the genre of fiction I am more read in, although I am expanding my horizons more and more.