REVIEW: My Brother's Husband (manga, vol. 1) by Gengoroh Tagame, translated by Anne Ishii

My Brother's Husband is a contemporary realistic manga series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

This review includes mild spoilers.

Review:

Yaichi is uncomfortable, to put it mildly, when his twin brother Ryoji's Canadian husband Mike comes to visit a month or so after Ryoji's death. Although he doesn't want to be openly rude, he can't help his knee-jerk homophobic reactions. His young daughter Kana's obvious love of Mike prompts him to try to be more accepting, and he gradually gains more and more food for thought - about his and other Japanese people's reactions to gay people, about the courage it must have taken for his brother to come out to him, and about how he'd react if Kana one day said she was a lesbian.

This was occasionally difficult and uncomfortable reading, from Yaichi's reaction to Mike hugging him to his freakout about Kana's reaction to Mike having a hairy chest. Tagame handles all of it head-on, and is just as unflinching in his examination of the aspects of Japanese culture that most Japanese adults take for granted (such as "all people with tattoos are scary"), with Kana, a child, acting as one of the characters who questions why things are the way they are. This is not the most subtle series, but it's not trying to be.

This is one of the few works I've read that's both written by a man and looks at issues gay people face in Japan. I liked the way this series encouraged readers to examine their assumptions - about everybody, not just Mike. There were aspects to Yaichi's own life that weren't like that of a typical Japanese man. For example, both Mike and I assumed that Yaichi's wife was dead and that Yaichi was a widower like him. In reality, she was very much alive - the two of them were just divorced (or separated? I can't remember), with an amicable relationship in which Yaichi was the one primarily caring for Kana.

Some aspects of this felt a little simplistic. It seemed odd how cheerful everyone was, considering Ryoji had just died a month ago. With Yaichi, it was a bit more believable, considering he'd last seen Ryoji maybe a decade or so ago (again, I can't quite remember the details), but even Mike only had a few moments here and there where he was overcome by grief. That said, everyone grieves differently, and I could understand the author wanting to keep things focused on Yaichi and Mike's efforts to connect and understand each other.

Extras:

A few of Tagame's uninked pages from the volume. I love how crisp everything looks.