Bokura no Hentai

The following assumes familiarity with the reviewed material. Spoilers below.

When Bokura no Hentai (occasionally also called Our Abnormalities) is discussed, it's usually as an LGBTQ narrative, and this is accurate, though it's not the entire story. What BnH really is, first and foremost, is three interlocking dramas, about the lives of our three protagonists. It defies easy categorization. What BnH is is a complex, sometimes difficult read about gender identity, crossdressing as an activity and hobby, the strange grey area that is young love, cycles of abuse and how they're perpetrated, and many other things. It contains elements of slice of life manga, school dramas, romance manga both straight and gay, and of course, there are genuine LGBT themes.

As for our protagonists, we have Yuuta Aoki, also known as Marika. Marika is the only one of the three protagonists who actually identifies as female and for her, crossdressing is simply a part of who she is (indeed at one point she openly questions the categorization. Challenging that she's actually only crossdressing when forced to wear the male school uniform), and by the end of the story she has transitioned (we are not made privy as to to what extent and by what method, but a clinic visit is involved). Marika is the most straightforward of the three personality-wise but even she has more wrinkles than is the norm for a character in her genre. It's true that Marika is usually fairly straightforward and earnest, but she's selfish, and when put in a bad mood she can be incredibly petty, and her feelings have a tendency to run roughshod over others'. A fair amount of her screentime is spent dealing with her desire to be seen as female--first couched in a desire to be "a princess", and then, when Parou ruins her self-perceived purity, simply as a woman. Marika's honest nature unfortunately makes her easy to manipulate, anger, and jerk around, and throughout the story she's used as a plaything by Parou and abused by homophobic school bully Shirakawa. Marika is the most "normal" of the protagonists and serves as something of a baseline to which to compare the other two.

Osamu "Parou" Temura is an asshole. There is, to be sure, more to him than that, but it's hard to shake that perception. He's manipulative, standoffish, irritating, and in poor control of his own impulses. Parou began crossdressing to attract a specific straight boy, Shibuya, a supporting character whose presence--both physical and once Parou's finally cut him out of his life for good, in the form of memory--hangs over Parou like the specter of death. Parou is probably the hardest character to like, even if one sympathizes with him, his manipulative streak makes it hard for us (the audience) to really be sure where his motives lie, and he robs Marika of her innocence in a way that is depicted as starkly and disgustingly as it should be. For Parou, crossdressing is an unhealthy coping mechanism to deal with his own history of emotional abuse and as we later find out, he is also a rape victim. It'd be very easy for the author to have simply painted Parou as effectively, the villain of the piece, but even he is painted with enough nuance that even as he's abusing others you feel bad for him too. Critically, the narrative never makes any attempt to excuse Parou's behaviors, and even as he's portrayed as wracked with guilt over his actions, and eventually (more or less) forgiven, he is not allowed to forget them, they haunt him until the halfway point of the second to last volume, where the black cloud over his head finally lifts, albeit only partially.

Finally there is Ryousuke Kijima. Ryousuke crossdresses to placate his delusional mother, who believes (for most of the story anyway) that he is his deceased older sister Yui, who we're told was a budding teen idol at the time of her death. Ryousuke initially seems like your typical "the brash one" caricature but as more of his backstory--especially relating to his late sister--is revealed it increasingly seems like a ruse put on to shield himself from others. Also, for a fair chunk of the story he claims to see hallucinations of his late sister, which is territory the manga doesn’t otherwise dip into, and can consequently seem out of place. Ryousuke is the only member of the central trio who is still a cis/het by the end of the story.

In addition, each character comes with a keyring’s worth of supporting cast members, who are simply too numerous and too detailed in their own right to discuss at length here, to do so would be well beyond the scope of this post but each and every one is unique in their own right, and that so many characters (with new ones being introduced right up until the penultimate chapter) manage to remain not just distinguishable but interesting paints mangaka FUMI Fumiko as a mighty writer indeed.

But let’s be honest with ourselves, shall we? The reason Bokura no Hentai resonates so much with me, and the reason it will resonate with many, is that it is an LGBTQ-positive and especially trans-postive narrative in a medium that is sorely lacking both of those things. No one in BnH is guiltless, but none of them--not even Parou, who I personally am painting much less sympathetically than the narrative itself does--are monsters either. I really must emphasize that Marika’s story arc--from when she comes to grips with wanting to be seen as a woman, to coming out to her mother, to transitioning formally, to her brief, questioning “am-I-really-trans” relapse at a cross-dressing contest, and finally the conclusion the story gives her, as just a normal woman working a normal job and having a normal life is genuinely powerful, to the point where I at least was brought to tears.

BnH would not work nearly as well as it does without the obvious care that went into it. FUMI’s insights at the end of each volume really help color her work--in particular that she specifically consulted both a transwoman and a transition specialist to help in writing Marika’s arc, and show that there was a level of care here beyond simply penning whatever nonsense came to mind (even as she freely admits she disliked her own characters at the beginning of the story!). To be sure it is a manga with some issues, and in particular I think that a fair chunk of what Parou does will act as bugspray to a good amount of potential readers, but what this manga sets forward as its thesis is that for anyone and everyone, even those society deems “deviants”, be it because we are unsatisfied with our assigned gender at birth, because we’re gay or abuse victims, or that we or our loved ones struggle with mental illness, there can be a happy ending.