Sex and Sexual Orientation in Banana Fish
Nov. 7th, 2010 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiSex and Sexual Orientation in Banana Fish
The following is conjectural since Banana Fish is famously inexplicit about its characters' sexuality (apart from child prostitution and the like). Nonetheless, I want to take a swing at combining textual evidence and supposition to examine the sexuality of Ash and Eiji. From there, I want to make a gentle attempt at identifying the issues involved in credibly slashing them.
Expect spoilers…
Ash
I think Ash's sexual orientation is undefinable for the same reasons T. E. Lawrence's is. One of the great pastimes of Lawrence biography in the 20th century was attempting to figure out if he was gay, straight, bi, asexual (though no one in the 20th century seriously considered that option), etc. You can't figure it out. Because whatever his native sexual orientation might have been, it was so skewed by Victorian repression, then rape that his sexual responses were always inflected by trauma.
Ash falls into the same category. His sexual experience from childhood was almost entirely (if not entirely) abusive and almost entirely (if not entirely) homosexual. In fact, women seem to play little role in his life. His mother abandoned him in infancy; he seems to like his stepmother okay but clearly views her as ineffectual and not highly relevant. He regards himself as having been raised by his brother. His mafia, prostitution, and gang experiences seem to include few women. All in all, Ash has been acculturated to be homosexual but also to view homosexuality negatively (both because of the abuse he has suffered and because he grew up in the 1970s-80s).
Being a bright kid, he plays both sides of this fence. He can at one moment play the extremely seductive toy boy and the next make disparaging remarks about "fags." He is in this, as other things, chameleonic.
However, if I were to have a guess about Ash's native sexuality, I'd posit that he is somewhat homosexually oriented. I say this mainly because he doesn't seem interested in girls, and someone who is natively strongly heterosexual would, I think, have discovered the opposite sex by age seventeen. Ash barely even tries to fake it. He has a throwaway line to the effect that Eiji's sister must be cute, but since the only one of the family he's seen is Eiji, this is clearly a statement about Eiji.
[Edit: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asphodel and others for alerting me to Ash's girlfriend in vol. 8. I've had a very hard time finding vol. 8 and haven't read it yet. I did hear of the gf in some meta somewhere, but I could not easily have tracked it back down to reference. So this may push Ash more toward bi. I don't think it really changes my reading a lot. It makes sense anyway that social pressure would impel him toward trying to date a girl and, as others have commented, his emotional bonding is pretty disconnected from sex anyway.]
But whatever his native orientation, I suspect that a positive sexual relationship would be very difficult for Ash. I don't think it's necessarily impossible, but it would require deconstructing several years of negative sexual conditioning. I suspect that Ash's predominant feeling about having sex is disgust and his default defense mechanism emotional distance. This is, of course, antithetical to a loving sexual relationship, and if Ash ever found himself in a sexual relationship with Eiji, for example, he would doubtless experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance between his deep love for Eiji and his instinct to emotionally distance himself from physical acts he finds unsavory.
Eiji
Eiji I read as mostly straight for the same reason I read Ash as somewhat gay: absence of evidence to the contrary. If Eiji were gay or somewhat gay or had much of a native response to Ash on a sexual level, their dynamic would be different. It would be much more marked by tension, shyness, etc. on Eiji's part.
Being gay (or even somewhat inclined to it) in Japan in the 1980s was not easy. (Maybe in some respects it was easier for a teen in Japan than in the US, but "easy" I am pretty darn sure it was not.) Especially if you're a little guy who's constantly being mistaken for someone much younger and often identified as "cute" in a "kawaii" sort of way, carrying the added weight of gay "effeminacy" is going to affect you no matter how well adjusted you otherwise are. And I see no such effect on Eiji. The very fact that he is willing to engage Ash in penis jokes and receive with reasonable equanimity "are you a fag?" comments evidences a non-gay orientation. The only way I can see that this behavior could coincide with being "gay" would be if Eiji very a confident, out homosexual, which he's clearly not.
But Eiji is remarkably unbounded by categories. He mixes freely with people regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, age, class, even violent criminal record. It's clear that Ash is the love of his life, emotionally if not sexually, and that being the case, I think Eiji is theoretically thoroughly capable of having a sexual relationship with him, simply because he is more governed by interpersonal feeling than broad, categorical response. He may have a superficial, 1980s "it's acceptable to crack anti-gay jokes" acculturation, but his barriers do not run deep. If Ash were up for it, I think Eiji would be up for it. I think Ash is not up for it, and Eiji--being mostly straight--has no particular motive to suggest it (or even think about it).
But...?
But all that said, slashing Ash and Eiji is not especially difficult. It's not so very far a leap from slash to reading the generous fade-to-blacks as almost BL canon. Canon provides most of you'd need for a sexual relationship to develop: love expressed quite openly, a willingness to be vulnerable (including discussing Ash's sexual trauma), physical closeness (in the Starsky and Hutch hugging vein). Heck, they sleep in the same room for a good portion of the story.
The hurdles are (only) twofold: 1) Ash is probably too traumatized to readily go for it, and 2) Eiji is mostly straight. But Eiji will follow Ash's lead, so the issue is getting Ash to want to make a play for Eiji. And I don't think this is very hard. You just need to catch him at a vulnerable (and horny) moment, of which there are potentially many.
Seme/Uke?
So here's where canon evidence abandons us, and I ruminate on what would make a good character study. I think Ash would plant himself on the bottom and be fairly insistent about it. His experience of sex, across the board, is negative: the idea of penetrating or being penetrated: all negative. In fact, it's so negative that I don't think you'd get penetration between Ash and Eiji unless they were together for a good, long time. But even extrapolated to loosely "masculine" or "feminine" positions, Ash's mental constructs are necessarily based on rape. To be on the bottom connotes being raped, while to be on top connotes raping. Ash would not want to put himself in a position that connoted raping someone; it would be psychologically wrenching. On the other hand, he has massive experience of weathering being raped with, as he notes to Jessica, a fast recovery time. All things being equal, he would stick with the role he's familiar with and steer well away from any circumstance that would make him feel as if he were assaulting (or even merely "using") Eiji. Now all this could certainly evolve if they had time to get comfortable with each other; you'd just have to posit an AU that gives them that time.
As for Eiji, I think he'd find it weird that Ash would choose to be on the bottom (because that's a position in which he's been so hurt). But Eiji, again, will follow Ash's lead. Knowing where Ash is coming from, he'd be up for doing whatever made Ash most comfortable.
Addendum: Is Eiji a Virgin?
Ibe ponders whether Ash's kissing Eiji is Eiji's first kiss, but I don't know that Ibe is an expert on Eiji's love life. Still, as his mentor, Ibe probably knows something about the broad strokes of Eiji's personal life, and if Eiji had had a serious girlfriend, Ibe might be expected to know. I should note, however, that a Japanese friend informs me that it is not uncommon for Japanese people to date for quite a while without kissing, so Ibe might be pondering about the kiss even if he knew Eiji had had a girlfriend. By that token, Eiji may well have had a girlfriend and not had sex with her.
[Edit: Ditto the above: in vol. 8, Eiji, so I'm told, obliquely professes a girlfriend, or girl who is a friend, with whom he has not had sex. Ah well.]
So I suppose there is some evidence that Eiji is pretty sexually inexperienced. Still, from an "effective writing" standpoint, I prefer to read him as not a virgin. By that reading, he may well have more sexual experience with women than Ash does (Ash seems not to have much/any), and that's interesting, given all the ways in which Ash's life experiences vastly outmatch Eiji's. The reading also works against the stereotypes of the "damsel" role Eiji, to some extent, fills.
Moreover, I think this reading makes sense for his background. When we meet him, he is already nineteen and from a society that is not particularly sexually repressive. Moreover, he was a star athlete, and we know that athletes are usually considered attractive. And Eiji is attractive. Not only is he attractive but he is very socially adept: he is almost universally liked and makes friends easily. He is low key but reasonably outgoing and bonds well with others. Given all this, I think it's easy to imagine that Eiji has had at least one fairly serious girlfriend, and he could well have slept her, though it's certainly not assured. This could also open up interesting commentary on the nature of love and relationships, since it's clear that Eiji has never loved anyone else the way he loves Ash. Worth a fic?
The following is conjectural since Banana Fish is famously inexplicit about its characters' sexuality (apart from child prostitution and the like). Nonetheless, I want to take a swing at combining textual evidence and supposition to examine the sexuality of Ash and Eiji. From there, I want to make a gentle attempt at identifying the issues involved in credibly slashing them.
Expect spoilers…
Ash
I think Ash's sexual orientation is undefinable for the same reasons T. E. Lawrence's is. One of the great pastimes of Lawrence biography in the 20th century was attempting to figure out if he was gay, straight, bi, asexual (though no one in the 20th century seriously considered that option), etc. You can't figure it out. Because whatever his native sexual orientation might have been, it was so skewed by Victorian repression, then rape that his sexual responses were always inflected by trauma.
Ash falls into the same category. His sexual experience from childhood was almost entirely (if not entirely) abusive and almost entirely (if not entirely) homosexual. In fact, women seem to play little role in his life. His mother abandoned him in infancy; he seems to like his stepmother okay but clearly views her as ineffectual and not highly relevant. He regards himself as having been raised by his brother. His mafia, prostitution, and gang experiences seem to include few women. All in all, Ash has been acculturated to be homosexual but also to view homosexuality negatively (both because of the abuse he has suffered and because he grew up in the 1970s-80s).
Being a bright kid, he plays both sides of this fence. He can at one moment play the extremely seductive toy boy and the next make disparaging remarks about "fags." He is in this, as other things, chameleonic.
However, if I were to have a guess about Ash's native sexuality, I'd posit that he is somewhat homosexually oriented. I say this mainly because he doesn't seem interested in girls, and someone who is natively strongly heterosexual would, I think, have discovered the opposite sex by age seventeen. Ash barely even tries to fake it. He has a throwaway line to the effect that Eiji's sister must be cute, but since the only one of the family he's seen is Eiji, this is clearly a statement about Eiji.
[Edit: Thanks to
asphodel and others for alerting me to Ash's girlfriend in vol. 8. I've had a very hard time finding vol. 8 and haven't read it yet. I did hear of the gf in some meta somewhere, but I could not easily have tracked it back down to reference. So this may push Ash more toward bi. I don't think it really changes my reading a lot. It makes sense anyway that social pressure would impel him toward trying to date a girl and, as others have commented, his emotional bonding is pretty disconnected from sex anyway.] But whatever his native orientation, I suspect that a positive sexual relationship would be very difficult for Ash. I don't think it's necessarily impossible, but it would require deconstructing several years of negative sexual conditioning. I suspect that Ash's predominant feeling about having sex is disgust and his default defense mechanism emotional distance. This is, of course, antithetical to a loving sexual relationship, and if Ash ever found himself in a sexual relationship with Eiji, for example, he would doubtless experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance between his deep love for Eiji and his instinct to emotionally distance himself from physical acts he finds unsavory.
Eiji
Eiji I read as mostly straight for the same reason I read Ash as somewhat gay: absence of evidence to the contrary. If Eiji were gay or somewhat gay or had much of a native response to Ash on a sexual level, their dynamic would be different. It would be much more marked by tension, shyness, etc. on Eiji's part.
Being gay (or even somewhat inclined to it) in Japan in the 1980s was not easy. (Maybe in some respects it was easier for a teen in Japan than in the US, but "easy" I am pretty darn sure it was not.) Especially if you're a little guy who's constantly being mistaken for someone much younger and often identified as "cute" in a "kawaii" sort of way, carrying the added weight of gay "effeminacy" is going to affect you no matter how well adjusted you otherwise are. And I see no such effect on Eiji. The very fact that he is willing to engage Ash in penis jokes and receive with reasonable equanimity "are you a fag?" comments evidences a non-gay orientation. The only way I can see that this behavior could coincide with being "gay" would be if Eiji very a confident, out homosexual, which he's clearly not.
But Eiji is remarkably unbounded by categories. He mixes freely with people regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, age, class, even violent criminal record. It's clear that Ash is the love of his life, emotionally if not sexually, and that being the case, I think Eiji is theoretically thoroughly capable of having a sexual relationship with him, simply because he is more governed by interpersonal feeling than broad, categorical response. He may have a superficial, 1980s "it's acceptable to crack anti-gay jokes" acculturation, but his barriers do not run deep. If Ash were up for it, I think Eiji would be up for it. I think Ash is not up for it, and Eiji--being mostly straight--has no particular motive to suggest it (or even think about it).
But...?
But all that said, slashing Ash and Eiji is not especially difficult. It's not so very far a leap from slash to reading the generous fade-to-blacks as almost BL canon. Canon provides most of you'd need for a sexual relationship to develop: love expressed quite openly, a willingness to be vulnerable (including discussing Ash's sexual trauma), physical closeness (in the Starsky and Hutch hugging vein). Heck, they sleep in the same room for a good portion of the story.
The hurdles are (only) twofold: 1) Ash is probably too traumatized to readily go for it, and 2) Eiji is mostly straight. But Eiji will follow Ash's lead, so the issue is getting Ash to want to make a play for Eiji. And I don't think this is very hard. You just need to catch him at a vulnerable (and horny) moment, of which there are potentially many.
Seme/Uke?
So here's where canon evidence abandons us, and I ruminate on what would make a good character study. I think Ash would plant himself on the bottom and be fairly insistent about it. His experience of sex, across the board, is negative: the idea of penetrating or being penetrated: all negative. In fact, it's so negative that I don't think you'd get penetration between Ash and Eiji unless they were together for a good, long time. But even extrapolated to loosely "masculine" or "feminine" positions, Ash's mental constructs are necessarily based on rape. To be on the bottom connotes being raped, while to be on top connotes raping. Ash would not want to put himself in a position that connoted raping someone; it would be psychologically wrenching. On the other hand, he has massive experience of weathering being raped with, as he notes to Jessica, a fast recovery time. All things being equal, he would stick with the role he's familiar with and steer well away from any circumstance that would make him feel as if he were assaulting (or even merely "using") Eiji. Now all this could certainly evolve if they had time to get comfortable with each other; you'd just have to posit an AU that gives them that time.
As for Eiji, I think he'd find it weird that Ash would choose to be on the bottom (because that's a position in which he's been so hurt). But Eiji, again, will follow Ash's lead. Knowing where Ash is coming from, he'd be up for doing whatever made Ash most comfortable.
Addendum: Is Eiji a Virgin?
Ibe ponders whether Ash's kissing Eiji is Eiji's first kiss, but I don't know that Ibe is an expert on Eiji's love life. Still, as his mentor, Ibe probably knows something about the broad strokes of Eiji's personal life, and if Eiji had had a serious girlfriend, Ibe might be expected to know. I should note, however, that a Japanese friend informs me that it is not uncommon for Japanese people to date for quite a while without kissing, so Ibe might be pondering about the kiss even if he knew Eiji had had a girlfriend. By that token, Eiji may well have had a girlfriend and not had sex with her.
[Edit: Ditto the above: in vol. 8, Eiji, so I'm told, obliquely professes a girlfriend, or girl who is a friend, with whom he has not had sex. Ah well.]
So I suppose there is some evidence that Eiji is pretty sexually inexperienced. Still, from an "effective writing" standpoint, I prefer to read him as not a virgin. By that reading, he may well have more sexual experience with women than Ash does (Ash seems not to have much/any), and that's interesting, given all the ways in which Ash's life experiences vastly outmatch Eiji's. The reading also works against the stereotypes of the "damsel" role Eiji, to some extent, fills.
Moreover, I think this reading makes sense for his background. When we meet him, he is already nineteen and from a society that is not particularly sexually repressive. Moreover, he was a star athlete, and we know that athletes are usually considered attractive. And Eiji is attractive. Not only is he attractive but he is very socially adept: he is almost universally liked and makes friends easily. He is low key but reasonably outgoing and bonds well with others. Given all this, I think it's easy to imagine that Eiji has had at least one fairly serious girlfriend, and he could well have slept her, though it's certainly not assured. This could also open up interesting commentary on the nature of love and relationships, since it's clear that Eiji has never loved anyone else the way he loves Ash. Worth a fic?
