Tagare attributes the ostracism the LGTBIQ+ community continues to face to the average Japanese’s fear of what is different, expressed in the following popular adage: “Every nail that sticks out gets hammered in”. The study says that only 5% of Japanese know a homosexual, compared to percentages of over 60% in countries like Spain. The original idea for My Brother’s Husband came from a publisher, and Tagame accepted it after hearing the results of a global survey that found contemporary Japanese society’s unfamiliarity with homosexuality. More than Velázquez and Goya, he recalls, he was impressed at the Prado Museum by the work of José de Ribera, El Españoleto, a tenebrist master famous for his precious depictions of torture, martyrdom and penance. To set his tales of sexual dominance and submission to music, Tagame draws on Japanese folklore and often draws on poses from baroque religious painting in his compositions, which he discovered on a youth trip to Europe. Titles that could be translated as The Toy Man or The Slave Trainer earned him the title of Japanese master of gay erotic manga and drew comparisons to Western authors like Tom of Finland, the legendary Finnish artist who broke the stereotype in the middle of the effeminate gay of the last century by creating an image of burly, black leather-clad motorcyclists.Ĭover of the second volume in Spanish of ‘My Brother’s Husband’ Editorial Panini He began using his current alias in 1986 while developing a fantastical and lewd universe where non-consensual sex between giant, bearded, gladiator-like men covered in hair who closely resemble himself is common. Tagame was born in the city of Kamakura in 1964 and studied graphic design at Tama University of Fine Arts in Tokyo. Editorial PaniniĪll the culture that suits you awaits you here. Its four volumes are in public libraries across the archipelago and have been published in 12 languages, including Spanish, by May this year (Panini, 2019).Ĭover of the first volume in Spanish of “My Brother’s Husband”. and in 2018 it was adapted for television in an actor-led miniseries that public service NHK aired as “an entirely new family story”.
It received the Japan Media Art Festival Award, one of the highest official awards for the manga genre. Unlike all previous taggame literature, which was censored in Japan and modified in some countries, My Brother’s Husband was a huge bestseller when it was released in 2014. Yaichi’s nervous reactions to the most prosaic of situations are a compendium of homophobic prejudices that, aided by Kana’s innocence and Mike’s bonhomie, he gradually begins to unravel.
The protagonist of My Brother’s Husband is Yaichi, Kana’s single father, an average Japanese man, whose quiet routine takes a radical turn when Mike, a huge and delicate Canadian who speaks Japanese and introduces himself as a husband, arrives at his house with his recently deceased twin brother. The cover and some vignettes of My Brother’s Husband were presented in the exhibition along with works by Spanish artists or panels with athletes such as FC Barcelona defender Mapi León or the transgender fencer Fumino Sugiyama, who became the first trans man in Japan to become a civilian Gained status, issued union charter with his partner in 2015, setting historical precedent for future approval of same-sex marriage. Tagare was at the Spanish Embassy in Japan on June 6 to take part in a lecture organized in parallel with the Somos exhibition, which revisited the history of the LGTBIQ+ movement in Spain through culture or sport and also personalities from both countries such as the writer Federico García linked Lorca and Yukio Mishima or the cartoonists Nazario and Tagame himself. To date, only eight of Japan’s 47 prefectures issue certificates to LGTBI couples to facilitate housing or health procedures, but since they’re not binding, they’re a far cry from the rights of heterosexual marriages. Japan is the only country in the G-7 not to recognize it. With open-ended questions such as “Who was the wife and who was the husband?” Kana sets the didactic tone of a story that, like few other Japanese novels, has contributed to the discussion surrounding same-sex marriage in terms of its social and legal recognition. It’s called My Brother’s Husband (Editorial Panini, 2018) and through the eyes of Kana, a 10-year-old girl, shows what marriage between two men looks like without the filter of social prejudice. The most revolutionary work by Gengoroh Tagame, a Japanese manga artist famous for the clarity and extremeness of his homoerotic stories, has no sex scenes.