There was a big crowd, and despite Tagame’s near-total association with stereotypically “macho” characters, half of it was female. (The text is literally bound inside the Japanese wrapping called an obi.) Sitting alongside the other members of the book’s production team, Anne Ishii and Graham Kolbeins, he deadpanned that his interest was “purely for scholarly purposes, as a comics historian,” but his admiration for these stories, which he places in the artistic tradition of Pasolini, de Sade, Yukio Mishima and Lolita, was unmistakable. They were celebrating the arrival of The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, his first English-language collection, which bears a striking amount of prestige and care: released by the influential comics/art publisher PictureBox, introduced by Edmund White, designed by Kidd himself. He wanted to read the stories of “erotic antagonism” in English to know, as he writes, “what the heck all these characters are saying (yelling, moaning, pleading, instructing, ordering)…”Įarlier this month, Kidd sat on a spotlight panel for Tagame at the annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival, where his literary fixation was a featured guest. Buying whichever volumes could pass through customs, Kidd tried several times to contact their creator, this Gengoroh Tagame, but there was no response. The sadomasochistic tortures visited upon them recalled the classical style and stark grace of traditional woodblock prints, or Robert Mapplethorpe. A few looked hairy enough to make Wolverine seem like an alopecia patient.
The male figures were muscular or chubby or somewhere in between. He was on a tour of gay Tokyo given by his friend Donald Richie, the late film critic and ex-pat memoirist, but these comics were different from the homoerotic manga most familiar to North America, yaoi or “boys’ love,” melodramatic tales of beautiful, intermittently androgynous youths, predominantly drawn by and for women. During a trip to Japan in the summer of 2001, the renowned book designer Chip Kidd found himself captivated by some meticulously drawn bondage porn.
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