(I’ve witnessed some drama on twitter, so I tried to be careful with my wording here- but I do express my discomfort and mixed feelings, so, up front, it anyone wants to start a fight about that I’m not interested. I tried to be fair but honest, so I want people to respect that. Also, this is LONG. My mixed feelings took a lot of explaining, it turns out. Warning for a lot of discussion of how fiction engages with csa and rape in general.)
Y’know, when I was thinking about how to approach reviewing Banana Fish, I had a weird realization. My experience watching it was similar to the one I had watching Devilman Crybaby of all things. For both shows, there were a lot of times I didn’t really enjoy watching it in the traditional sense and I often felt pretty uncomfortable with it…but still found it really interesting from a media analysis standpoint, and found the conversation about it really interesting, so I kept watching. (Also I came to kinda care about the characters, even though the narrative seemed almost ludicrously hellbent on torturing them so it felt kinda pointless to have any emotions about ‘em.)
And oddly, there are a lot of other similarities between the shows too? Both are adaptations of manga that was made around the 80s that have been updated so they’re set in the modern day, both seem to try really hard to be “shocking” but it’s just sort of exhausting at times and both have queer content that draws in the fandom, though that content is a mixed bag.
*(Also, both have issues with female characters. Banana Fish is no hellhole of titty monsters and sexual hang-ups, but it should be noted it barely has any women and when they do show up they get victimized to cause men angst).
Don’t get me wrong, though, Banana Fish is its own distinct thing. In fact the tone and construction of the narrative is very different, namely because unlike Crybaby, its aimed at women. The anime comes from a work that is fairly significant in shoujo manga history and its content falls well outside of how Western fandom think of “shoujo manga”.It’s a gritty, violent crime drama set in New York. The intense relationship between the leads was and is important to a lot of LGBT fans, as well as influential to many later works, BL and otherwise. So whether you like it or not, it has a deserved place in manga history.
The basic plot is Ash Lynx (not actually his real name, but the real one is even more ridic) is a 17 year old gangster trying to take down the man who indoctrinated him into gang life and also sexually abused him. On top of that, he has to protect his comatose brother, who somehow got in contact with a strange drug while in Iraq, one that caused him to go beserk and shoot his fellow soldiers. The only thing he said was “Banana Fish”, so Ash wants to know what the heck that means.
Ash runs into Eiji, a nineteen-year-old who came to New York from Japan. Despite the fact Eiji is fairly innocent and sheltered where Ash isn’t (or maybe because of it) he and Ash hit it off pretty quickly. But Eiji won’t remain innocent for long, because he’s quickly dragged into the gang drama.
So yep, that’s the summary. Hey, did you note that “Ash was sexually abused” part? Well, if you’re going to watch the show, prepare for an ENDLESS BARRAGE of that. The amount of horrible abuse and sexual trauma Ash has been through and goes through is honestly SO MUCH that you become numb to it very quickly- sometimes it almost feels like a parody. In addition to having the most tragic of tragic backstories, he’s threatened with rape at the rate of one o rmore times an episode- though this finally calms down around episode 11 (this is probably just a lull).
He’s not the only one though, Eiji and others get their fair share of sexual menace too, and one female character is implied to be raped…To its credit, the show does not show rape onscreen- it’s talked about a ton and we see both the aftermath and some “it’s about to happen, he’s been stripped” but not the act itself. The show also always takes it seriously and touched a bit on the culture of victim-blaming and whatnot-there’s dicussion of how messed up it is to see the police asking a seven year old if he led his rapist on and Ash’s lasting trauma is taken very seriously.
And that’s fine and all but I cannot emphasize that there is. so much. It feels icky and a bit exploitative- but the whole issue is pretty hard for me to parse. It’s kind of interesting to see rape being discussed so frankly and seriously in anime. And considering the manga was from the 80s, I think the fact it DOES discuss it so frankly, and focuses on male victims, was probably eye-opening for a lot of people.
Anifem has a really good article talking with two Japanese LGBT fans about the series, and one says their eyes were opened to the fact boys could be raped and feel trauma from it by reading these series. The rape is never romanticized, it’s treated as truly despicable and I’ve seen pages from the manga on twitter where Ash point blank discusses how in his experience, rape is more about people wanting to have power over you than anything else.
This was written by a woman and aimed at women, and Ash’s tragic life seems to be kind of a way to explore the a lot of the anxieties women grow up with regarding rape and sexual assault. It’s a way for women to engage with the horrors while also being a little bit distanced in it, since Ash is a different gender. I think that has value. It actually weirdly reminds me of a lot of fanfic I’ve read. It’s common to see young female authors pile ridiculous amount of trauma on pretty male characters in them, and it often feels like a young girl’s (often somewhat clumsy) way of engaging with the fears that occupy her mind.
I did it myself- I wrote a lot of stories about REALLY gratuitous sexual violence when I was around nine, where I took the worst possible sexual abuse that could happen to a girl and dumped it on my character, because READING about that kind of abuse had both fascinated me and given me a lot of anxiety, knowing this is a thing that could happen, that it had happened to a lot of kids. So I wrote a story that luridly described all kinds of sexual torture, in a pretty gross way, but also had the girl ultimately fight back and be saved. I kind of doubt Banana Fish will have a happy ending, but there is a similar catharsis in the fact that Ash fights back and takes revenge against his rapist and finds someone who will support him in Eiji.
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