Mizushiro Setona - After School Nightmare, vol. 01-04 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

This is possibly the oddest thing I've read all year, and I read Le Chevalier d'Eon this year.

Mashiro Ichijo has just been told that he needs to take a special after-school class in order to graduate. The classroom is in a basement that didn't previously exist, and instead of desks, the room is lined with canopy beds. It turns out that he will be entering a dream world and confronting his own worst nightmare. Several other classmates of his are in there as well, though they take different forms in the nightmare/dream world.

Mashiro's terrified that people will discover that his upper half is male, but his lower half is female, and things are further complicated when his male classmate Sou starts pursuing him romantically and when he's attracted to his female classmate Kureha as well.

As you might be able to tell from the premise, this series takes on questions of gender identity. I still can't tell if I like the politics or not; Mizushiro makes some assumptions that I keep wanting to question (why does liking Sou back mean identifying as female? what's so bad about being a woman? and I think the second is implied not only through Mashiro's fear of discovery, but also through the roles women have to play in the series so far and in the other Mizushiro series I've read). But the world is surreal and dreamy, edges bleeding together between the dream world and the real world, which seems less and less real as the series goes on.

Images that struck me: a girl so cut off that she shows up in the dream world as a body with a hole through her head and her chest instead of a face and a heart. Someone who manifests as long snaky arms, constantly grabbing and holding and winding around people. Empty desks and lockers at the school.

And the art is absolutely gorgeous; I mean to buy these just so I can have the color pages that GoComi includes.

Recommended for anyone who likes the strange and subtly creepy, particularly with a massive dose of gender identity issues.

Comments

[the_rck]

A friend of mine who's a psychologist who specializes in gender and sexuality issues (for example, working with intersexed children and their families) told me that, at a conference he'd attended, a Japanese colleague floored people by quoting statistics about transexuality in Japan. From what my friend could recall, the statistics were very nearly the opposite of what's found in the U.S.

In the U.S., MTF transexuality is more common and more commonly talked about than FTM. In Japan, according to the Japanese psychologist, it is the opposite. Most Japanese transexuals are FTM, and FTM transexuals receive a lot more general social support and acceptance (that being relative, of coures) than the rarer MTF transexuals.

I suspect that the statistics struck my friend particularly strongly because he's FTM.

(Note: I've done no research at all to see if any of this is accurate, so it should be taken with plenty of salt.)

[oyceter]

Oh that's really interesting. I wonder if there's any research connecting that with the whole creation of "shoujo" as a means for girls and women to escape the daughter-wife-mother role. I vaguely remember a lot of themes of escaping from being female in scholarship on yaoi and BL (some of it I buy, some of it I don't).

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I don't know how good your Japanese is, but the Japanese Wikipedia article on yaoi is really interesting. Apparently one of the biggest early theories on the phenomenon was that its fans were all FtM (though that's been abandoned now). I thought that was an interesting leap to make, as I don't think there was ever a similar theory for slash.

[oyceter]

Ehhhh. I suspect it will be hard for me to go through Japanese academese...

[jiawen]

Let me know if you're interested in info about TS/TG folks in Taiwan...

[oyceter]

Always!

[jiawen]

It'd be good to first look at my page about transgender issues, especially the Asian-specific section. See also the Chinese version of that page.

Dr. Fang Ronghuang, probably the most famous SRS surgeon in Taiwan, did a study that showed that FTM transsexual people far outnumbered MTF transsexual people in Taiwan. My experience agrees with that, but I also think that overall trends like that are a result of confirmation bias. The actual numbers are, I think, probably about equal.

[oyceter]

Awesome, thanks for the links!