Welcome to (quoting labingi) "the infamous volume!"
I love its quiet first chapter, where we get a long-overdue peek at Miya, whose love for Takaya poignantly reminds us that he's not just another cog in the Yami-Sengoku war machine. This chapter feels like Kuwabara at her best--it's a melancholy, unsettling ghost story where the 'ghost' turns out to be Takaya.
Gotta say, I'm sick of all of the comparisons of the characters to "beasts", with the implication that animals are somehow stronger than human beings. Um, no. There's a reason homo sapiens are the apex predators: we have far exceeded the brute-force definition of "strength" with the force-multiplier that is our brains.
I have rarely encountered a literary use of the human-animal metaphor that's even interesting (rather than reductive and a hand-wavy dismissal of complex human psychology), and Mirage might be a textbook case for "why not to do this."
...Right, okay, I really don't know what to say about that. The reading for it is given in katakana, by the way, so it's rendered exactly as the author intended.
I'm now kinda wondering if this is mentioned anywhere else, or if it's just one of those things you think is a good idea to write at 3 a.m. and your manuscript is due the next day. Like, what are the mechanics? Are you making spiritual embryos every time you have sex? Are there all these spiritual babies floating up there somewhere waiting for an available body? Urgh...
You know what, I'm just gonna say it. I feel stupider having translated that. I sacrificed an IQ point for this translation; you're welcome.
Interesting that it's in katakana. I can say it's not a 3 a.m. one-off; it's actually plot relevant. (How relevant, I'm not actually sure because I have some haziness about how to interpret some later events.)
It's in kanji with the reading given in katakana (which is pretty rare). So, uh, I guess I have that to look forward to, lol.
I've heard Chapter 6 characterized as "rough sex", but what's described here can't be brushed off as anything so mild. The more suitable word, I think, is "sadism", and I have three huge problems with it.
First, in case anyone is in doubt: non-consensual, non-pre-negotiated pain during sex is not okay. Pain during sex is not the norm and shouldn't be normalized! If your sexual partner is not enjoying what you're doing, if in fact they're literally screaming in pain, for fuck's sake STOP! Ugh, still wondering if I should've posted this as a PSA for the chapter summary, like I had to post CWs for the last two chapters.
Second, Naoe not knowing how to do gay penetrative sex properly just makes him look incompetent and lame. The other explanation is of course that he deliberately wants to hurt Takaya during sex, and that just makes me feel disgusted with him for doing that to a vulnerable and traumatized Takaya.
Third, Naoe not doing such a simple thing as using lube and preparing Takaya to avoid hurting him fatally cheapens and undermines the whole "love is pain" tragedy of this pair. It's tragic because it's unavoidable, is the point.
So, Kuwabara-sensei, welcome to the club of authors who write bad sex. Given that it includes writers like Haruki Murakami, I guess you're in good company?
Just for fun, does anyone want to nominate other works for a bad sex award? Mine: Alan Moore's Jerusalem. How the heck did he make ghost sex so unappealing?
Okay, I have thinkie thoughts. First of all, thank you for keeping the dying tradition of read fannish meta conversations alive. I miss it so much!
Anyway, I have a really different read on this chapter. I’ll address your points one by one.
I've heard Chapter 6 characterized as "rough sex", but what's described here can't be brushed off as anything so mild. The more suitable word, I think, is "sadism", and I have three huge problems with it.
I think it’s defensible to call Naoe “sadistic” here in the same way it’s defensible to say that Naoe and Kagetora are “in love,” that is to say, yeah, sort of, but their relationship is so complex that those labels don’t really get at what’s happening.
You “have problems with it” in what sense? As a characterization of “good” behavior? As quality writing? As in-character for the two leads...? I’m curious what you’d like instead that wouldn’t be out of character.
First, in case anyone is in doubt: non-consensual, non-pre-negotiated pain during sex is not okay.
Have you met Naoe and Kagetora? :-)
Seriously, I’ve never known Mirage to be a manual for “okay” behavior.
Pain during sex is not the norm and shouldn't be normalized! If your sexual partner is not enjoying what you're doing, if in fact they're literally screaming in pain, for fuck's sake STOP!
Naoe and Kagetora aside, as general relationship advice, I take your point about your partner screaming in pain. But I have very mixed feelings about the “normalization” of pain in sex. On one level, I agree that it shouldn’t be “normalized”; i.e. it shouldn’t be treated as what people, in general, should expect all/most of the time.
On the other hand—warning for possible too much information here—as someone for whom penetrative sex is, in fact, always painful, the discourse that flies around these days that there’s something horribly wrong with the way you’re doing it if it’s painful is harmful. (“Harmful” is an overused word, but it’s true.) To be clear, this has been true for me in all situations with all partners, and it’s true on my own; it’s not about having a bad partner. All my partners have been very respectful people, one of them very sex positive and experienced. I’m one of the few women on Earth who can’t honestly say #MeToo. But an extreme reading of this dogma (which you’re not doing) would say that I can literally never have consensual sex because if I’m not “enjoying it,” by definition, it’s not consensual. That is incredibly infantilizing. I am perfectly capable of consenting to something that is physically painful; I am perfectly capable of finding it worthwhile for reasons other than physical pleasure, which is, incidentally, what Kagetora is experiencing.
As to BL more broadly and why this stuff crops up (in Ai no Kusabi, too, for example), it’s a truism perhaps but also true that BL exists in part to allow women to explore difficult issues around sex and gender through the psychological buffer of m/m relationships. In this case, Kagetora is representing Woman. It is a reality that sex is sometimes painful in many women’s lives. (There’s this common wisdom out there that losing your virginity vaginally shouldn’t hurt if your partner is “doing it right,” and God bless the women who have such expert partners and not scared high school boys, and who are also so at ease and prepared themselves, and have bodies that function inherently in such a way that they can have that experience, but I expect it’s not the norm.) Sex and pain being sometimes somewhat mixed in women’s experience is pretty normal. It’s natural for women attracted to men to have conflicted feelings about this, to want to avoid pain but to want to have sex with the guy, and it’s natural to want to explore those mixed feelings in fiction, which is—broadly speaking—what is happening here. And it would be a disservice to women to make this kind of writing exercise “not okay” in the name of virtue. It would silence an important source of literary catharisis.
As to Naoe and Kagetora themselves, you may have noticed that their relationship is messed up. :-) It’s been messed up for 400 years. They were each messed up before they met each other, and they’ve been (with some fits and starts) in a cascade of accelerating messed-up-edness since the Minako era. This is the culminating release of all of that, and I cannot imagine any way it could fall out that would be so in-character as this. Anything less extreme, I think, would not be fair to the extremis they’ve been acting out of for a long time.
Ugh, still wondering if I should've posted this as a PSA for the chapter summary, like I had to post CWs for the last two chapters.
That’s very reasonable.
Second, Naoe not knowing how to do gay penetrative sex properly just makes him look incompetent and lame. The other explanation is of course that he deliberately wants to hurt Takaya during sex, and that just makes me feel disgusted with him for doing that to a vulnerable and traumatized Takaya.
Let me unpack this.
Is Naoe an expert in gay penetrative sex? I’m going to say no. Apart from Kagetora, he’s pretty het. Does he know something about it? Sure. Is he aware on an intellectual level that lube is advisable? I expect.
When he was whisking Kagetora away to the cabin, was he thinking, “I’d better grab some lube in case we end up having sex”? Honestly, I’m on the fence about this. He does think a lot about sex with Kagetora and he is a planner, so it’s plausible. Yet they were coming out of such a desperate situation, that level of planning feels a bit cold blooded to me. BUT I have not read the end of vol. 19 yet, so I can’t judge the particulars.
Then again, is it likely they have some kind of cooking fat or something around that could be used for lube? Sure. So I agree, the lack of lube is not plausibly explained by either Naoe’s ignorance or literal lack of something to use. I do think using it is probably not second nature to him because, again, he mostly sleeps with women, and he picks women who like sex and are totally turned on by him, so I’m guessing he may not often need it with them.
So does he deliberately want to hurt Kagetora? Oh, you betcha. Kagetora has been hurting him for 400 years, and wanting to hurt him back is a huge part of Naoe’s mental landscape. Does his rational mind want to? No. Do the better angels of his nature want to? No. Are these parts of him steering? No. But mostly, I think he just overwhelmed and choosing to let go. Of course, he knows he’s really hurting Kagetora, but I think his mindset is less “I want to torture Takaya-san” than “This is our ideal way of being,” or, in other words, that this is just what’s happening in that moment of releasing this tension that’s been building for centuries.
Poor vulnerable and traumatized Takaya: Here’s the thing. Yes, he’s vulnerable and traumatized, and one major expression of that, for 400 years, has been terror at the thought of being penetrated by a man. This sucks for him because that’s also what he wants. He is specifically sexually oriented toward, well, Naoe, but that is to say, toward an older male figure who will be protector/sort-of-father-substitute, someone to whom he can be helpless and vulnerable without being abandoned for not being good enough. And his sense of trust is so broken—he has such deep CPTSD symptoms—that he can’t believe he’s really found that person until it is proven to him that he can be abject and still be wanted and not left behind. He’s plenty abject in a lot of ways by vol. 20, but one of those ways has to be being sexually “taken,” because if it’s not, then that test is never passed, that full vulnerability is never shown or confronted.
This brings us to a crucial point: this is consensual sex. It unambiguously* is. It’s the first sexual encounter they’ve had that is fully consensual. No, Kagetora is not “enjoying” it, but he absolutely wants to do it—or perhaps it’s better to say, he needs to do it. It’s a trial he needs to pass—for himself, for his own self-construal, and to confront and overcome his rape fears, which he has needed to do for centuries.
Third, Naoe not doing such a simple thing as using lube and preparing Takaya to avoid hurting him fatally cheapens and undermines the whole "love is pain" tragedy of this pair. It's tragic because it's unavoidable, is the point.
I’m not sure I follow your logic here. It’s tragic (the “love is pain”?) because it’s unavoidable? (I agree it’s unavoidable.) But if it’s unavoidable—i.e. in character for their relationship—how does writing them in-character cheapen and undermine the tragedy? Doesn’t it rather strengthen and reinforce it?
I don’t actually agree their relationship tragic, though, depending on where one places the “end” of the story. Maybe I’m being too strictly literary with the term, but a tragedy is generically defined, in part, by how it ends: bad things come to the protagonist due to fate/hubris/flaw. I think the end of the Shouwa prequels could be called tragic, as they end with everything in a mess. But Mirage as a whole doesn’t end there. To use a Christian image, it’s a redemption story, and vol. 20 is a turning point of the path to redemption. Or to use a more appropriate Mahayana lens, everyone is on the path to awakening. Naoe and Kagetora both end closer to awakening than they started, and that’s not tragic. The “love is pain” is a step, a Dharma gate perhaps.
So, Kuwabara-sensei, welcome to the club of authors who write bad sex. Given that it includes writers like Haruki Murakami, I guess you’re in good company?
So—disclosure—it’s been quite a while since I’ve read this scene, but I would call it one of the best written sex scenes I’ve ever read. Sexy? No. Not for me anyway. (I rarely find Naoe and Kagetora sex arousing.) But for me, that’s not the point. It’s a bizarre scene for a bizarre relationship in one of its bizarrest moments. It’s unflinching, and I really admire it for that.
* I mean "unambiguously" in terms of info. the reader is given across vol. 20, not necessarily in terms of what Naoe knows in that moment.
Thank you as always for your well-thought-out response!
Point 1: With the greatest of respect for your personal experience, I'd like to point out that nowhere do I say that pain during sex is automatically or always "wrong" or harmful. Nor do I deny that Takaya actually does consent to sex in this chapter. What I am saying (perhaps not clearly enough) is that there should be an "I give my consent to pain during sex" that is separate from "I give my consent to sex." The kink community should be applauded for their pioneering work on how to safely incorporate pain into enjoyable sex, which is awesome! Again, the issue to me is consent.
Given that you know your own body and past experiences, I assume that you go in consenting to both sex and some pain during certain types of sex because it's worth it to you to have that experience with your partner. For me, if I voice or am in obvious discomfort during sex with a partner and we didn't previously discuss it, I would expect my partner to stop and inquire after my well-being, and I would think less of them if they didn't.
When I mention norms, I'm thinking of societal norms. Our bodies are unpredictable, and most people have probably had at least one painful experience. I described how I think those individual instances should optimally be handled above. There's the other issue of what we as a society expect from sex, and here I think the expectation that sex is painful IS harmful. It especially disadvantages women, who are expected to shut up and like it. The New York Times published an article titled "8 Sex Myths That Experts Wish Would Go Away" with "Myth 4: It is normal for sex to hurt": "Though lubricant can help some women experience more pleasure during sex, it is important to remember that sex should not hurt. An estimated 75 percent of women experience painful sex at some point in their lives, which can have many root causes: gynecologic problems, hormonal changes, cancer treatment, trauma — the list goes on. [...] Experts emphasize that it is important for anyone experiencing pain during sex to see a medical provider."
It is absolutely not my intention to trivialize your experience, but speaking generally, I do think we need to do away with the "pain is normal during sex" myth.
Point 2: It's implied that Kagetora has always chosen male bodies during his 400 years (Naoe forcing him into Minako's notwithstanding). For at least some of those years, male-male sex was perfectly acceptable in Japanese society (see: Nobunaga and Ranmaru). Also for at least some of those years, literature on "how to gay sex" was widely available. So despite wanting to have sex with Kagetora for however long, Naoe was never curious enough about the mechanics to at least figure out that anuses don't self-lubricate? That he could make the experience really good for Kagetora with a couple of simple steps (which also benefits him because it may make Kagetora more open to repeat performances)? I contend that that IS incompetent and lame. I wouldn't expect him to have lube in a tube on hand, but I would expect him to be willing to improvise. Use cooking oil, like you mentioned, or even spit and some effort. Something.
Sorry, I don't buy the "it's built up so long I'll die if I don't nail Kagetora RIGHT NOW" argument. Preparation takes what, 10 mins? That's including a quick nip to the kitchen for cooking oil.
Er, are you arguing that Naoe both deliberately wanted to hurt Takaya and that he was doing it because he was out of his mind with longing and couldn't help himself? As I said, I don't deny that him deliberately hurting Takaya is a possibility, I just said I find the gratuitous way he does it here disgusting.
Point 3: Tragedy in that their love always brushes up against painful psychological trauma. E.g. Kagetora's rape, the feudal master-retainer framework that they may or may not have gotten past at this point, Naoe's inferiority complex, Kagetora's abandonment complex, Kagetora's dual desire for and disdain of worship, Kagetora's inability to trust in love. Of course I can only say "up to this volume," since I don't know if these issues get resolved in future volumes. To me, their love is made more poignant because they're willing to keep at it despite unavoidable pain. Thus, to add even more pain which is eminently avoidable (see above, re: lubricant and preparation) cheapens the whole thing for me.
Yes, sure I get it, this pair isn't healthy, why should I expect a little (physical) tenderness instead of Naoe plowing straight through Takaya's pain, blah. As I no doubt mentioned before, I don't enjoy whump, I find gratuitous pain pointless and the instance here worse than pointless; it's not my cup of tea, it's not what I go to fiction for when there's so much tragedy in the world already (although admittedly I read more non-fiction these days).
But again, that's my personal taste. I'm happy for anyone who liked this chapter/volume. You (general you) do you, and I'm still here translating because I hope there ARE people who want to read more.
Thanks, in turn, for your reply.
You’re right that this is ultimately a conversation about taste in narratives, and it’s totally valid for you to find this scene, Naoe, etc. disgusting.
I appreciate your dedication to translating this monster of a work. If you stopped today, you would have done far more than anyone could ask. I am profoundly grateful. I will never be able to read Mirage in Japanese. I started studying Japanese too late, and between an aging brain and no time for serious study/immersion, I have never been able to get beyond basics and have always promptly lost whatever I gained as soon as my study time evaporated. Your work here is a great gift to me and others, and I’m glad if that gives you some satisfaction, even when you’re frustrated by the story.
I agree with you that Naoe would know about lube. I had no valid reason for saying merely, “I expect so.” He’s over 400 years old and he would. It’s like Takaya asking him, “Have you ever seen a shooting star?” :-)
You said, “I'd like to point out that nowhere do I say that pain during sex is automatically or always ‘wrong’ or harmful.” I didn’t say you did, but it’s fair to say I expressed myself badly in a way that implied it. My apologies. You said, “Pain during sex is not the norm and shouldn't be normalized!” That’s a true and benign statement, which—forgive an overused word—I found triggering because I have often seen statements like lead into the kind of discourse I noted. I overreacted due to being triggered.
This (my triggering) is part of a larger social phenomenon of our discourses tending toward absolute pronouncements. “It’s like this!” “It’s like that!” with no mention of exceptions, gray zones, diversities, context, or counterarguments. So as to your points about the importance of not normalizing pain in sex, especially for women, I agree (as I said in my first post), but I think we have to careful of this cultural tendency toward absolutes.
I grew up with the opposite of myth 4: that except for (probably) a woman’s first time, sex always feels great because that’s how human bodies work. That’s what all the movies show; that’s all sex ed talked about: “Of course, you want to have sex because it’s so pleasurable, but you’d better be careful because there are risks.” (I think, among other things, this is a male-centric narrative, though men, too, have diverse experiences, of course.) The only text I was exposed to as young person that sort of diverged from this was The Mists of Avalon (which could be an essay in itself), but even it says first times and rape are awful, but other than that, everyone always loves sex. When that was not my personal experience, it was a shock, and it led to years of shame, dating failures, and trying to “fix” myself. I have to say, even in the text you quoted, “Experts emphasize that it is important for anyone experiencing pain during sex to see a medical provider,” there’s an overtone of pathologizing human diversity. Of course, someone should feel empowered to see a medical provider, but one should also not be shoved into a box of “broken,” “abnormal,” or “ill” because one’s body (or mind) doesn’t function like the majority of people. (This is related to—though a different issue from—asexual erasure; I have some overlap here.)
The upshot is that I would like to see a lot more discourse (on many issues) that leads with some version of “Life is complex, and people have all sorts of different experiences, preferences, and ways of living.” I’d like to see a lot less of “You must do X,” and a lot more of “Here are some things to consider.” Obviously, there are some absolutes, like consent being vital, but the myth I would like to do away with is the “People are/should be all the same” myth. (To be clear, I’m not saying you’re saying this; I’m saying I see this over and over in our popular internet discourse.)
And, yes, this is related to Mirage. :-)
I love Mirage fundamentally because it gets this. It really gets the mess of the human psyche like no other text I have ever read. Sure, it has hits and misses, but its hits are astounding to me.
What I am saying (perhaps not clearly enough) is that there should be an "I give my consent to pain during sex" that is separate from "I give my consent to sex." The kink community should be applauded for their pioneering work on how to safely incorporate pain into enjoyable sex, which is awesome! Again, the issue to me is consent.
I had a conversation with Katinka several years ago in which I was sort on your side of this divide. With light spoilers... (skip this par. if you don’t want them), I was complaining about how Naoe and Kagetora never seem to figure out a clear method of establishing consent and that seemed to undermine the narrative that their relationship gets progressively healthier. Katinka observed, coming from a Russian perspective, that a lot of people in RL have S&M relationships in which part of the deal is that there is no explicit discussion of consent. That may be disturbing to many (it is to me), but it’s something many apparently choose, i.e. do “consent” to.
Her point, I think, was that I should be careful about imposing my culture’s values on others. The kink community should be applauded, but Naoe and Kagetora don’t belong to the kink community (and I don’t think either of them is primarily there in that moment to have sex that is “enjoyable”).
This is where I’m not quite sure what you’re looking for from Mirage. To what extent are you wanting Naoe and Kagetora to be good role models for real-world relationships? Personally, I think their primary function is to be descriptive of the human psyche rather than prescriptive. But I also own it’s more complex than that; I think they do have a “good role model” function of some sort(s). Sometimes it’s in Kagetora’s admirable compassion for others, for example. More fundamentally, I think their stories are an illustration of how people can improve, but N&K, like most of us, improve in fits and starts, and imperfectly.
Or are you saying Naoe not asking for consent to pain/using lube is out of character? I’d argue it’s not. Or are you saying it may be in character, but it makes Naoe a disgusting character? Here, I’d say you have every right to feel that way.
Sorry, I don't buy the "it's built up so long I'll die if I don't nail Kagetora RIGHT NOW" argument. Preparation takes what, 10 mins? That's including a quick nip to the kitchen for cooking oil.
It’s not the time; it’s mental state.
Er, are you arguing that Naoe both deliberately wanted to hurt Takaya and that he was doing it because he was out of his mind with longing and couldn't help himself?
Yes...
But I want to be clear, I’m not invoking the narrative that men can’t control themselves because sexual desire is so strong. I think, it’s not primarily about sex for Naoe. For him, sex has a mostly instrumental value. The longing is for union with Kagetora; that’s one example of the “blaze.” And the realization that comes pretty quick that sex is not really accomplishing that is one example of the “mirage.”
As I said, I don't deny that him deliberately hurting Takaya is a possibility, I just said I find the gratuitous way he does it here disgusting.
The disgust is totally valid. Personally, I don’t find it gratuitous, in the sense that the scene feels psychologically realistic to me, for the reasons I’ve stated previously, which you don’t have to agree with, of course.
...To me, their love is made more poignant because they're willing to keep at it despite unavoidable pain. Thus, to add even more pain which is eminently avoidable (see above, re: lubricant and preparation) cheapens the whole thing for me.
I totally agree with all of this up to the last sentence. I don’t know how readily avoidable it is. Here’s an analogy (sorry, it’s my RL again). In my MS on relationship cutoff I talked about cutting off a friend when our relationship became very painful to me. I said that at the point where I cut him off, I had only two choices: to cut off contract or to start hollering that I hated him. My editor kind of scoffed at this. She said, in effect, “You had many more choices; you just didn’t see that at the time.” That’s what I meant. At the time, I was in such a state of acute distress that I couldn’t access the will power/stamina/rational thought for any of those other choices. In the abstract, many other things were possible. This fellow and I are friends again now, and I can exchange chatty messages with him repeatedly with no ill feeling—but that’s now. I couldn’t do that then. I had tried; I had run of gas.
Or to give a more literary analogy, I feel this is a little like saying, "Well, Frodo made it all the way to the Cracks of Doom. Are you saying he couldn't take five more seconds to throw the Ring into the fire?" (I apologize if that comparison feels inappropriate; it may well be.)
I’m not saying that it would be technically impossible to write this Mirage scene well with lube; I think that’s a choice Naoe could plausibly have made (I’m less sure about the explicitly asking for consent to pain). But overall, I find it more in character that he doesn’t make that choice: because there’s still a large piece of him that does want to hurt Kagetora, because it’s not a habit he’s in, because he has a self-construal that sees himself as a bad person and a rapist—but mostly because he’s overwhelmed and I expect it wouldn’t occur to him. That’s my read... but I could totally imagine the scene with that detail changed still being pretty much in character and doing the same work. And I can see an argument that if the change to the overall story is small, one should err on the side of good role modeling.
(And, you probably know this better than me: what kind of explicitly-asking-for-consent culture did Japan have in the ’90s? I think in the US, it was still era of “no means no” rather than “yes means yes.” Was Japan ahead in this regard?)
Thank you for sharing your perspective about where you're going from--it's a really enlightening read. Interestingly, I somehow got the opposite message from popular culture growing up, which I've also had to work to unravel: that ultimately sexual pleasure was the prerogative of the man, and as a women you had to settle for what you got. Sometimes you got lucky, but if you dared advocate for yourself--if pleasure from sex was a goal you went after as a woman, then you were a slut. From that you might glimpse the kind of M/M fiction that appeals to me.
You might also guess at how I had to clench my teeth through translating some of these scenes. Translation feels like a sort of endorsement, and my annoyance builds up until I feel like I have to write about it. Everybody has their own calibrations about criticizing yesterday's society as though it were today's society, and you're absolutely right about the state of consent in Japan in the 90s--I would hazard a guess that Japan today is at where the US was in the 90s. So yes, realism-wise, Kuwabara is probably spot-on about what women faced in sexual relationships in the 90s (on spousal rape in Japan, Wikipedia says that: "The law does not deny spousal rape, but no court has ever ruled on such a case, except in situations of marital breakdown"...which, reading between the lines, is not great).
So yes, you're right about me applying today's Western standards in my criticism, and I'll leave whether that's "fair" to people's individual discretion. But y'know, why not? When you fall in love with people, including fictional characters, they do become a sort of de facto role model in certain ways. I feel no compunction in criticizing them according to my current (ever-evolving) understanding of morality and relationship dynamics. I'm also going to state explicitly that I do believe that some cultures do better at certain things that other cultures. I mean, I think we mostly agree on the treatment of Minako in this series, and I'm going to beat on that again soon, hah.
I'm not going to try to answer your individual points, because I think we both did pretty well at elucidating our positions, which are informative and valid.
I just want to append some thoughts about my mention of the kink community + your mention of negotiation of kink in Russia. I'm not saying that Naoe and Kagetora are in the kink community, but I certainly think they can benefit from learning about the boundaries that negotiated kink sets up and why. The kink community does great work in 1) de-stigmatizing the derivation of pleasure from pain 2) a framework for agreeing to pain during sex 3) a safe way to disengage at will. I think it's the best model we've currently got to protect all parties while also opening sex up to a larger variety of experiences. (Note that I don't claim it always protects everyone, because assholes exist everywhere, but it's a good model.)
I think what you're describing re: your conversation with Katinka is the fetishization of non-consent, which is present in Japanese culture as well (and I'd say in Mirage, though you may disagree). We've discussed the problem with this lack of explicit boundaries before: how can you ever tell when someone REALLY wants to stop? Because of the heightened potential for exploitation and harm, I think the tradeoff of realism for safety in negotiated kink is worth it. People are pretty good at role-playing in the moment, after all.
(By the way, Russia partially decriminalized domestic abuse in 2017, so yeah, uh...I would not list them as a shining example of how to protect women in sexual relationships.)
Just a quick reply: I totally agree some cultures do things better than others. I didn't mean to imply everything is equally harmless/harmful, just to situate people in their cultural space.
You wrote, "We've discussed the problem with this lack of explicit boundaries before: how can you ever tell when someone REALLY wants to stop?"
(Very light spoilers) Yeah, that does bother me with later Naoe and Kagetora. As far as I'm aware from the summaries, it never gets addressed, and it makes me want to read fan fic that addresses it. The best I can come up with is I think when Kagetora really wants to stop, he tends to go physically passive and verbally rational (like in the "ice scene" in the Shouwa prequels). This is not a great standard for figuring out consent, just the closest thing to it I can observe in the text. It actually reminds of a scene from Cheers where Rebecca staves off Sam's advances by pretending not to resist and going completely limp. :-)
And here we are at the end. I can't think of any other volume that has such high highs and low lows. There's some beautiful imagery in this volume, and I love the history sequence. But man, are the lows really bad. The two from chapters 7 and 8 are absolutely egregious.
We've seen before how easily Naoe transforms Minako from rape victim to saint in his mind. In chapter 7, Kagetora does the same--except somehow it's even grosser. He thinks he manipulated Naoe into raping Minako, which means he takes some responsibility for the rape, but in this chapter he excuses both Naoe and himself by stating that Minako is happy for them for finally getting together. And just like that, someone who's had her trust betrayed by both of these men and who has been terrorized and brutalized is made to be their patron saint? Is it even possible to objectify this woman any worse than this?
I'm sorry, but this is why I don't think a "Kuwabara wrote Naoe and Takaya's relationship to reflect the plight of women in Japan" reading holds water. Mirage has a lack of major female characters problem to start with, and then you have this. Just, wow.
Chapter 8 reveals a major plot twist,
namely the transformation of Mirage into a Nicholas Sparks novel, and it starkly exposes the deep seam of solipsism in Mirage which I actually think is this series' worst flaw. The problem is, most of Naoe's actions in Volumes 13-19 don't make sense in light of this revelation. Go back to Volume 15 and read his conversation with Irobe again. I mean, he's still obsessing over his prestige and standing despite knowing Kagetora's soul is dying? He's even doing it at Kagetora's bedside in this volume! Just, wtf, Naoe? What about his slow seduction of Takaya as Kaizaki despite the sense of urgency he expresses here? And why say Uesugi is hunting Takaya down to kill him when what Takaya actually needs is medical attention? Way to stigmatize illness, bro. The cherry on top: Naoe continues to take Takaya's agency away from him by denying him the information he needs to make decisions for himself.But hey, at least we'll always have spiritual sperm, right?
No argument here. I agree the writing of women in Mirage is mediocre to poor. I think N & K's pedestaling of Minako makes sense for them, but I wouldn't call it good writing unless that got challenged somewhere, and it doesn't.
As to the inconsistencies in Naoe's behavior given Kagetora's state of health, I think I've been somewhat shielded from confronting that by my very piecemeal exposure to the text over 18 years, which really messes with your sense of pacing and plot trajectory.
I kinda feel like tossing out translations like this has a de-mystifying effect on Mirage, maybe? But there's nothing I can do about that if it's true. *shrug*
It's like Kuwabara pulled that twist out of thin air and threw it in there--which can't be true, since I believe Irobe does make slight allusion to it in the Volume 15 conversation. It feels like she wanted to shock her readers so much that she sacrifices everything else to it, including consistency. I mean, you don't have to foreshadow if you don't want to, but unintentionally making one of your main characters look stupid, irrational, callous, self-centered, and incompetent in retrospect? Just horrible, horrible plotting, imo.