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"I approach these stories less in terms of realistic probability and more in terms of desires and fantasies…"
—Anne Allison,
Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (2000)
Incest, although it doesn't have whole magazines devoted to it like
yaoi and
lolicon, is a significant kink element in Japanese pornography and even all-ages romantic comedies. Popular manga and anime like
Marmalade Boy,
Fruits Basket and
Revolutionary Girl Utena insinuate relationships between, usually stepsiblings, but sometimes full siblings, and even parent-child relationships (usually mother-son) are occasionally alluded to.
This doesn't mean that incest is "accepted" in Japan; a google search for "Japan" "incest" turns up all kinds of bizarre stories, but it doesn't take much digging to figure out that most of these are uncritically regurgitated tall tales from the same handful of websites spreading stories of exotic foreign depravity. Parents bathing naked with very young children is not the same as child abuse; Japan has an abiding stereotype in the West as a country of sexual dysfunction, but real incest is not any more accepted in Japan than it is here.
On the other hand, there's clearly a market for stories of
fantasy incest. In Western pop culture, on the other hand, incest is one of the strongest taboos imaginable. In the sexual taboo-shattering of the late 1960s, science fiction writers presented visions of futures where incest was permissible, as in Theodore Sturgeon's 1967 short story
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?, John Brunner's
Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ursula K. LeGuin's
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Robert Heinlein's
Time Enough for Love (1973).
Such works had little lasting impact on pop culture, however, and the rising awareness of child abuse in the 1980s cast all incest in the darkest light imaginable. In America, the most popular incest-themed works of the '80s were
V.C. Andrews' trashy Gothic Flowers in the Attic novels, which softened the hero and heroine's (unwittingly) incestuous relationship with its childlike tone which always danced around the subject. The 1980 softcore film
The Blue Lagoon also starred unrealistically innocent protagonists (in this case noble savages, not sheltered rich kids) and took place in a sort of dream space (in this case an island, not an attic) where forbidden acts could take place without the harsh judgments of the outside world.
The unearthliness of the main characters of
Flowers in the Attic and
The Blue Lagoon, like the endogamous vampires in Matsuri Hino's
Vampire Knight, put incest less on the level of psychoanalysis and more on the level of fairy tales. The Japanese taste for incest fantasies could be attributed to Shinto mythology;
Izanagi and Izanami, the god and goddess who gave birth to the islands of Japan, were brother and sister. Then again, Zeus and Hera in Greek mythology were also brother and sister, and before we assume that incest is strictly a feature of polytheistic religions, there's even the incest between Lot and his daughters in the Book of Genesis. In all cultures, real incest involves uncomfortable power issues and squick factor, but theoretical incest is the stuff of myths. If the reality is Freud, the theory is Jung: forbidden magic and high drama.
In
shojo manga, incest typically makes for added relationship
frisson. In
Marmalade Boy,
Call Me Princess and
The Devil Does Exist the heroine falls for a boy, only for their parents to divorce and intermarry, making the guy into her stepbrother. Since they've only been siblings for a few weeks, incest is obviously a merely social obstacle to the relationship: on the other hand, there are manga like Haruka Fukushima's
Cherry Juice, in which the stepsiblings live together for years before feelings start to blossom.
Other manga use incest in a more classical tormented sense, such as Kaori Yuki's Gothic fantasies
Angel Sanctuary and
Godchild, where incest brings guilt, madness, and the punishment of heaven. In Yuu Watase's
Ceres: Celestial Legend the heroine's brother is possessed by an ancestral spirit and becomes obsessed with raping his sister. Incest between twins is its own fetish, such as the twincestuous boys in
Ouran High School Host Club (they're really just doing it to please the ladies), or the deranged incestuous twins seen as antagonists in manga like
Black Lagoon and
Shakugan no Shana.
A quick glance at porn manga, such as Yukiyanagi's
Milk Mama and Wolf Ogami's
Super Taboo, makes it clear that mother-son incest is also a popular niche. Allison's
Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (2000) dates the trend back to the late 1970s and 1980s, the period of the Japanese economic boom, when scandalous stories of mother-son incest began being reported in the media. According to Allison, the obsession began in 1979 with incest phone calls received by Daiyaru Hinin Sôdanshitsu , a telephone counseling agency. "The director of this agency in the early 1980s, Arakawa Yasuko, told me that virtually all of the incest callers were boys, most of whom she figured were using the incest as fantasy to masturbate while talking on the phone to an older, female counselor." "True confession" style stories about mother-son incest, of various levels of sensationalism, started appearing in magazines.
In Allison's analysis, the incest stories were less likely a real phenomenon than a fantasy evolution of the
kyoiku mama ("education mama") stereotype, in which overprotective mothers, determined to get their children into good schools, monitored every aspect of the lives of their sheltered sons. The home is the mother's realm, and it used to be common for Japanese mothers to wake their sons with a kiss. Ian Buruma's
Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes (1983) pointed out the "motherly" nature of some Japanese porn stars and sex symbols, whose attitude towards male sexuality was that of an indulgent, all-forgiving provider of bounty rather than an equal partner or a sex object.
Incest scare stories soon turned into pop-culture comedy, such as Kei Kusunoki's 1986 romantic comedy manga
Yagami-kun no Katei no Jijô ("Yagami-kun's Family Affairs").The teenage protagonist, Yagami, is in love with his mother, who still looks like a 16-year-old. Ashamed by his "mother complex," and unwittingly led on by his loving but oblivious mom, he is chased by a variety of other suitors, including an adult woman who has a crush on Yagami's dad but figures she'll sleep with the son instead, and a boy his own age who looks just like his mother. (Evidently Kusunoki knows the traditional Freudian interepretation of an Oedipus complex.)
Incest is a recurring theme in Kusunoki's works, playing a small role in the horror manga
Diabolo, the romantic comedy
Gals Saurus, and her recent work
Bitter Virgin, a more serious story about child abuse. As for MILFs, they appear in tons of other manga and anime. Perhaps one reason why mother-son incest is so often depicted humorously is because it is unlikely; on the other hand, the relative lack of comedic father-daughter incest stories may be because there's nothing funny in the scenario.
Yagami-kun, written by a female creator for a male audience, is more comedy than titillation. Other incest-themed manga for boys are more serious about their fetish, such as
Hinadori Girl, a typical PG-rated scenario in which a boy's little sister has a crush on him, or the lame
Onegai Twins, in which two teenage girls move in with a boy who is the brother of one of them, they're not sure which (the incriminating photo is too blurry to be sure). In Patrick Macias and Tomo Machiyama's
Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo, Machiyama explains the appeal of the "younger sister" incest scenario: "Otaku are especially fond of the younger-sister
moe scenario, where the ultimate object of desire is to protect innocence and virginity. Such qualities are prized on the one hand, and continually destroyed with the other hand in masturbatory fantasy, creating an infinite loop of arousal."
The extremely pedophilic plastic figures packaged with Kadokawa Shoten's short-lived 2004 sister-moe magazine
Shukan Watashi no Oniichan ("My Big Brother Weekly") show the link between male incest fantasies and
lolicon, with the resulting implications of child abuse. Men aren't the only ones doing it; Ken Nambara's cringe-inducing
Papa to Kiss in the Dark (1999), about a boy who is in love with his single father, is just an extreme example of the countless
yaoi manga about guardian figures (teachers, doctors, adoptive parents) and the young boys in their care.
Stepsibling, or straight-up sibling romances are popular too; translated examples alone include
Golden Cain (whose incest sequences were censored by the American publishers),
Lies and Kisses,
Menkui,
Our Kingdom,
Almost Crying, Yuzuha Ougi's
Brother, and Yoshino Somei and Row Takakura's
Skyscrapers of Oz (in which the little brother is continually flirting with his oblivious older brother). "One of my favorite situations involves incestuous relationships between brothers," writes Taishi Zaou in her notes to the
yaoi manga Electric Hands. Then there are the "hot young stepfather" scenarios, such as Akira Sugano and Estumi Ninomiya's
Clear Skies. As for
yuri (lesbian) manga, read both by prurient male and female readers, the English term "sisters" carries
yuri connotations, as seen in the title of the now-defunct manga magazine
Yuri Shimai ("Yuri Sisters").
Why are incest scenarios popular in anime and manga? One cultural reason might be found in the Japanese language, which uses family terms between non-genetically-related people more than in English; manga characters continually call one another
aniki ("big brother"),
ane-san ("big sister"),
onee-sama (also "big sister") , etc. A more likely reason might be that incest fantasies fulfill certain emotional needs. If the story, like so many shojo manga, is about loneliness and family—"finding a place to call home" or "finding a family"—then it's simple to imagine blurring the lines between family love and romantic love, a sort of one-stop shopping. A good example is Shioko Mizuki's
Crossroad, in which the protagonists live in a whole fake family of stepbrothers, stepsisters and a stepmother, none of them related by blood.
The popular
Fruits Basket plays with similar fantasies. If a story is about "looking for a missing part of yourself," like the
yaoi manga
Same Cell Organism, then it's simple to imagine that the "one person who is closest to you" might be someone genetically related to you. Most likely of all, though, both the brother-sister and parent-child incest fantasies reflect the fantasies of very sheltered people for whom family members are the only members of the opposite sex that they have access to or closeness with.
In short, although a few artists like Moto Hagio write serious stories about the consequences of incest and child abuse, most manga and anime creators flirt with incest for kink, comedy and emotional effect. As is often the case with material that would be shocking in the U.S. (not that there aren't pseudo-incest stories in American romance novels too), Japanese audiences seem willing to accept it as pure fantasy divorced from morality, but American audiences and publishers are more wary.
In fact, incest may be even less acceptable than more obviously unrealistic sexual fantasies. American publishers are more likely to publish X-rated stories of vampire rape and tentacle sex, like
Urotsukidoji and Dark Horse's
Devil, than they are PG-13 stories of incest in the style of
Marmalade Boy,
Vampire Knight and
Fruits Basket. Interestingly, even Darren Shan's mainstream young adult vampire series
Cirque du Freak (later adapted into a surprisingly good manga) has a moment of barely-disguised incestuous lust, in which the main character, turning into a vampire, can't help fantasizing about his sister's neck.
In short, vampires and tentacles may seem weird at first, but really they make it OK. As a friend in the manga industry said, "It's fantasy rape, which like fantasy violence doesn't count. Incestuous crushes are real, and therefore verboten."
Jason Thompson is one of the best-known manga critics in the US. He currently writes for Otaku USA and is the author of Manga: The Complete Guide. His website is www.mockman.com.
Manga Salad is © Jason Thompson, 2010
