It’s been six chaotic years since I last wrote about Yuureitou, yet the work is such a singular, insistent creation that jumping into it was as easy as if I’d never left. Yuureitou clearly has a few key influences, and is not afraid to bash them together in strange, sometimes even ludicrous ways, all for the sake of promoting a unique emotional or dramatic result. Part Hitchcockian thriller, part reflection on gender identity, and part grindhouse or Hammer horror, Yuureitou is happy to swing wildly between these passions at a moment’s notice, daring the audience to challenge its nature much like the manga’s characters often do. The manga buries itself in the messiness of identity, and through its meandering course exemplifies the multiplicity of our experience, the reality that we are all composed of jagged, contradictory instincts and emotions.
As you’d expect given that mix of influences, Yuureitou is in no way a safe, unobjectionable reflection on gender. It in fact delights in gender’s messiness and fluidity, seeing a line of kinship between those that society defines as freaks and the monsters of horror literature. It embraces the potential for solidarity among outcasts that stretches back from creepypastas to Clive Barker to Poe, that eternal quest for a world where our fangs and claws don’t cause others to shudder in fear. If you don’t feel more at home among the ghouls than their glamorous teen victims, Yuureitou is not for you – but if you too see something poignant in a killer donning a mask to briefly intermingle with the daylight world, Yuureitou will quite likely speak to your soul.
Yuureitou’s preference for society’s outsiders is made clear from the start in volume four. While the murderous mad scientist who dubs himself “Dr. Tesla” respects Tetsuo’s gender identity while describing his treatment, Tetsuo’s alleged friend (and our mundane perspective character) Amano states that “Tetsuo’s a girl, so make sure you don’t leave any scars.” Not only does Amano refuse to acknowledge Tetsuo’s gender, but he even pushes further into gender essentialism by emphasizing the importance of girls being dainty and without physical flaw. It’s no wonder Tetsuo finds the most kinship and comfort among the monsters; it is those who have been rejected by society who have to fight for their validity, and people like that are naturally more willing to accept the validity of others.
Amano’s perspective isn’t sympathetic, but it’s certainly honest. He is operating from a common cultural position, and it is essentially the grand work of this manga to prove to him what a fool he is. His perspective makes explicit the odd points of commonality, and subsequent discord, prompted by Yuureitou’s fusion of genre and substance. We’re essentially playing out a noir murder mystery, with Tetsuo occupying the role normally reserved for a femme fatale with unknowable true motives. Given the layers of deception already inherent in this genre space, is there any greater significance to Tetsuo’s gender presentation than a need to hide from the law? Of course, this treacherous region is somewhere Tetsuo had no choice but to flee to, meaning the sincerity of his identity is destined to be doubted by people like Amano, who find it effortless to live in the light.
But even accepting the ambiguity that Yuureitou purposefully injects into its narrative, the story is at its most honest when Tetsuo is reflecting on his identity. Through lines like “with this body, I could’ve only joined a female league,” he makes clear that his body is essentially an unwanted vehicle he was forced to inhabit. His framing speaks to the transformations and unruly bodies of horror media, where our skins often seem ill-equipped to contain our true selves. But in spite of the easy metaphor, there are no levels of subterfuge here – in fact, Tetsuo often repeats himself on these points to ensure he is fully understood. It might seem frightening to erupt into some unknowable new form, but after a life spent hiding in an ill-fitting shell, the honesty of that moment must be quite satisfying.
Even Amano’s hard-baked essentialism has trouble enduring against the plain facts of his bond with Tetsuo. Led by the collar into yet another tangled crime drama, this volume sees him at last realizing what everyone else deduced from the start: in terms of “masculine protector” versus “feminine victim,” Amano is absolutely the feminine one in this relationship. Only his arbitrary insistence on men being masculine and women being feminine allows him to maintain any sort of belief in gender essentialism in the face of his constant daily experiences. In truth, he is the quintessential damsel in distress: perpetually under attack by the evils of the world, and perpetually being saved by his masculine protector.
Never happy to leave a good point un-hammered, Yuureitou further prods Amano’s anxieties regarding his masculinity by disguising him as a woman while the pair are on the run. All at once, Amano is forced to grapple with the sea of fears and genuine threats facing both women and transgender people like Tetsuo, as he juggles the anxiety of not passing alongside the inherent threat of being a visible woman in society. And though he initially rebels against being treated as the meek dependent, he soon realizes he actually enjoys this role, and appreciates how Tetsuo gets to fully express his confident, cool masculinity in the context of Amano’s dependency. At last uninhibited by Amano’s limiting conceptions of identity, the two seem happier and more authentically themselves than ever before.
In a relationship that’s often been defined by mutual deceit, Amano assuming the role of Tetsuo’s wife offers an unexpected opportunity for genuine intimacy, as Tetsuo tenderly guides Amano through the anxieties of presenting a new self to the world. Witnessing Amano’s insecurity regarding this new dynamic, he apologizes for initially calling Amano an “ugly woman.” Amano’s role suits him too well for either of them to play this disguise off as a joke; in fact, his transition actually clarifies the two’s cohesion as a noir unit, as the alluring killer on the run and the star-struck girl who’s swept up in his path. His enjoyment of “being protected like a helpless girl” seems to imply his gender essentialism was perhaps a shield wielded against knowledge of the self. But as he wonders to himself “don’t all men wish to shave their legs and look pretty,” it’s clear that his old-fashioned attitudes are a feeble defense against his growing self-awareness.
And then, as often happens in Yuureitou, a bunch of pulp mystery/horror stuff transpires. While attempting to flee across a mountain range, the pair accidentally stumble into an opium-producing village, and are conscripted to conceive a child in order to maintain the village’s population. The concept is characteristically absurd, but provides an easy opportunity for Amano to receive a taste of his own medicine. After spending so much of this series leering at Tetsuo, the stares of these villagers swiftly teach him just how it feels to exist as a woman in society, and understand what it means to be “on display” at all times. From a position of unthinkingly enjoying the privilege of being a quiet, anonymous man, Amano flips to being the only young woman in town, forcing him to concede how difficult it is simply to exist in public as a woman.
Through this frightening yet illuminating experience, Amano again realizes a new level of intimacy with Testuo. His reflections prompt a rare moment of genuine curiosity from his friend, as Tetsuo prods him on the contradictory feelings instigated by his new guise. Amano is both frightened and a little excited by these new feelings, from the thrill of being desired to the comfort of being protected. But his ultimate, unerring faith in the fact that he is a man is what keeps this situation from becoming actively painful. He is still fundamentally unlike Tetsuo, in that he still has faith in a system of rules that define reality on both a personal and societal level. Though he has dabbled with the “thrill” of danger that being a woman provides, he is still ultimately comforted by his natural lofty position within this social order.
The contrast between the two of them emphasizes the injustice of this system, even when it’s ostensibly working correctly. By all rights, Amano is a meek, obsequious, emphatically non-masculine specimen of a man, while Tetsuo is strong, confident, and equipped with all the faculties attendant in alleged masculinity. Yet Amano is still seen as superior to Tetsuo by this system that allegedly venerates masculinity, all because it doesn’t actually venerate masculinity or any other theoretical personal value, it just venerates those who are socially accepted and defined as men. Whatever Tetsuo accomplishes, he will never be accepted; however Amano fails, he will never be denied.
Volume four’s monster is, unsurprisingly, this arc’s most complex and sympathetic of characters. Village elder Kume-san kills an innocent boy such that her unborn child may live, having previously been forced to abort in order to maintain the village’s carefully tended population limit. Our first “monstrous” visage in this volume is Kume-san’s face, contorted into a terrible fury by her certainty that motherhood is the greatest of all gifts. As the manga continues through a procession of terrifying Kume faces, her humanity only becomes all the more clear. Yes, she killed an innocent – but it was the only way to save her child, and she would have chosen any other path if possible. Her ugly pleas soon elevate her into the class of individual Yuureito loves best: the condemned outcast, who must flee from society simply to live their life unmolested.
As such, it is no surprise when Tetsuo offers to collaborate with her, and even agrees to help her escape from the village. When Amano protests, still clinging to his simplistic moral framework and idealist view of society, Tetsuo snaps back at him with “do you insist on being the judge here?” Amano has never had to make an impossible decision, but Tetsuo is happy to acknowledge he would also have become a monster in Kume’s situation. And turning to Amano, he asks the question that could well stand as Yuureitou’s fundamental plea: “monstrous as I am, could you please not despise me?”
In the end, Kume fails to escape her village. The spectral hand of the boy she killed seems to force a miscarriage, and the village elder returns to her original community. Tetsuo and Amano have predictably contrary interpretations of these events, in keeping with their respective views on order and justice. Tetsuo sees this result as an angry ghost lashing out in revenge, and claiming Kume’s child in payment for his own death. But Amano thinks Kume was deluded in her belief she was even pregnant, and that her one-time ward reached out from the grave to rescue her from her delusion. His conclusion is, as usual, beholden to both his limited perspective on human potential, as well as his naïve application of mystery novel structure to human interactions. But his words are meant kindly, and serve as a final answer to Tetsuo’s desperate question. Deep among the creatures of the underground, we find solidarity and love, freed from the arbitrary accusations of the surface world. Within the halls of Yuureitou’s ghouls, there is no place for judgment. After all, we’re all monsters here.
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