Kimi Rito’s The History of Hentai Manga is something that is not common in general – an academic text aimed for wider audience on the topic of adult materials which does not approach the topic from what I’ll call a sex-negative perspective. On more than a few occasions I’ve accounted works on sex work and pornography which are sex (and sex worker)-negative, or try to take a neutral perspective and end up on a somewhat patronizing point of view. Certainly, I haven’t encountered any which cover the medium from an art-history standpoint. Kimi Rito’s work does provide what I’d almost call a more art-history point of view – not in the form I’d have chosen, but still an interesting form nonetheless.
Rito’s text has a subtitle titled “An Expressionist Examination of Eromanga,” and that subtitle isn’t just there for alliteration. Rather than taking a holistic point of view of the artform’s history, it focuses on several artistic techniques and uses of imagery that are common to the artform, along with some of the issues that eromanga has faced as a medium. In the former case, we have a discussion of how the evolution of female breasts has changed over time, the use of naughty tentacles, and the ahegao facial expression, among others. In the latter case, they get into the various forms censorship of the medium has taken over time and how artists have adjusted, and the spread of eromanga internationally, with a particular focus on the United States.
By stepping away from a larger history and putting some focus on particular topics, Rito’s History of Hentai Manga is able to go more in depth on particular shifts in the form. I found it particularly interesting how often a concept would be introduced in a seinen – or even shonen – work and then move over to hentai. For example, the concept of the “nipple after-image” as a shorthand for showing the movement of breasts during sex was introduced in a work by the creator of Gantz. There’s also a lot of discussion of how Kentaro Yabuki and Saki Hasemi introduce various hentai concepts into ToLoveRu: Darkness while still keeping it as an (ostensibly) Shonen series.
There are a few points in which the book gets a little frustrating. Because the book gives an atomistic history of hentai manga – focusing on the history of individual concepts rather than the whole – there’s an unintended loss of context. We only get a limited understanding of how the industry works in the course of the chapter on censorship, and discussion of what works are sold where, what differences there are between magazines sold in bookstores versus sold in convenience stores? Consequently, when we get into different censorship requirements based on where the magazine is sold, I don’t necessarily understand how this relates to how much that magazine sells, and what the impact is compared to Seinen works. For example, Aki Sora ran in a seinen magazine, and that is a series that has a pronounced focus on sex and sex scenes, with at least one scene per chapter, but because it’s in a seinen magazine genitals aren’t specifically shown. How does that compare to an eromanga magazine sold in a convenience store? ToLoveRu Darkness shifted from Weekly Shonen Jump to Jump Square, outside of being monthly, is that magazine similarly in convenience stores, or just in bookshops?
The other issue is that the perspective on some of these topics is very heteronormative with a particular focus on works targeted to male readers. While we do get an interview in the appendices of the book with several women readers of eromanga, we don’t get a discussion on works within the medium targeted at women versus targeted at men. Do works targeted for women handle censorship of genitals differently than those targeted at men? Are works targeted for women likely to use ahegao on male characters? We also have little to no discussion on Yaoi or even Yuri eromanga. Are there yaoi manga with tentacles? How has the depiction of female breasts changed over time in yuri manga? While those mediums in particular could support additional books on their own, having more coverage of those topics would have been very nice.
That said, I liked The History of Hentai Manga a lot – I feel like there is a companion book out there that we could have gotten that would have expanded on the material covered here, and if it existed, I would have bought it and read it – hopefully we’ll get it in the future. I would really appreciate more academic works like this from Fakku – either from Japanese authors like Rito, or American authors like Erika Friedman (an expert on the Yuri genre).
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