Anime Roulette #4: Kaze to Ki no Uta

One of the shows I've been keeping up with during the current anime season is Yuri On Ice, the very popular drama about ice dancing. I figured, I really liked Free, which is a sports show ostensibly made for a fangirl audience, and Yuri On Ice seems much the same, so why not give it a shot? Like Free, I ended up enjoying Yuri On Ice quite a bit - I won't go into all the reasons why, but there's one aspect of the show that really impressed me. With most of these sports shows, there's usually a lot of homosexual innuendo - the characters aren't actually gay themselves, but hinting at homosexuality is an effective method of fanservice for the female fanbase. Yuri On Ice seems to be transcending that - the potential romance between Yuri and Victor has become a focal point of the show, one that is refreshingly understated and unsensationalized.

I can think of very few anime that is willing to tackle the subject of homosexual relationships on that level - manga, yes, but anime is very much lacking. Perhaps gay romances don't have enough mainstream appeal to ensure a successful anime series, or perhaps its easier to just churn out another fanservice show instead. Whatever the case, there are a few shows that have examined the idea of gay relationships, and I can't think of any that's more important than Kaze to Ki no Uta, or The Song of Wind and Trees.

Kaze (I'm just going to call it Kaze from now on, because typing Kaze to Ki no Uta is too damn obnoxious) began its life as a manga series written by Keiko Takemiya, one of a group of women collectively referred to as the Showa 24 Group. To put it bluntly, these women revolutionized shojo manga. They raised the level of storytelling in the genre to that of high literature. Their artwork was elaborate and set the standard of quality that continues to this day. Most importantly, however, was that they were unafraid to tackle controversial social issues in their works, whether it was examining gender roles (still a big social problem in Japan) to, most relevant for this post, homosexual romances. Without the Showa 24 Group, what we now call Yaoi or Shonen Ai in the west simply would not exist.

Despite their undeniable quality and importance, the works of the Showa 24 Group are, sadly, still very much unavailable to us in the United States. We only recently started getting Moto Hagio's major works. We have the fantastic Rose of Versailles anime series, but absolutely none of Riyoko Ikeda's manga has been translated professionally. Even Keiko Takemiya is represented in the US by only two works: To Terra and Andromeda Stories, and both of those are actually shonen manga. Needless to say, the Kaze manga hasn't been officially licensed by any American manga company - there is one group of fans scanlating the series, but their release schedule is inconsistent, and so I haven't read any of it because I'm not confident it'll actually be finished. Thankfully, there is an OVA adaptation of Kaze which has been translated and is widely available on the internet, so that's what I'm going to be taking a look at here.

License this shit, goddammit!

Now, I admit, I was a little worried going into this one, for a few reasons. First of all, Takemiya's manga ran for 17 volumes, and this OVA is only an hour long - there's literally no way to tell the entire story in one hour. Secondly, the fansub that I downloaded began with about five minutes of explanatory notes which basically served to ensure the viewer isn't totally lost at the start. This adaptation of Kaze, then, is one of the millions of OVAs made specifically for fans of its source material, to the exclusion of basically everyone else. Since I've never read a single page of the manga, I was wary - am I even going to stand a chance at enjoying this?

Thankfully, my faith was renewed when I saw that, of all people, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko directed the damn thing. Yas is most famous for doing the character designs for the original Gundam series, but in the 80s he made it big directing awesome movies like Crusher Joe and Arion. How and why a director who more or less exclusively works on sci-fi and fantasy stories ended up directing an adaptation of a '70s shojo manga is beyond me, but I was happy to know such a talented artist was responsible for bringing the story to life.

So let's actually get into the story - it begins, taking a page from A Separate Peace, with the main character, Serge, revisiting the boarding school he attended as a teenager. I don't know if that's how the manga began, but it's honestly a good way to set everything up. The rest of the show is more or less a nonstop flashback to Serge's youth, and right away, we know that whatever follows is going to be some heavy shit.

Who is this Gilbert Cocteau that Serge is literally waxing poetic about? He was his new roommate when he started school, and boy, does he have some issues. He more or less never goes to class, yet he continually gets good grades because he sleeps with other guys in exchange for his exams. And honestly, his personality is quite turbulent on its own. Of course, Serge doesn't have any indication that his new roommate is so tumultuous - I have to say, the OVA more or less beats you over the head with his relative optimism and innocence.

As soon as I saw that scene, I knew that something crazy was going to happen almost immediately, and hey, I was right. Gilbert storms in to the room, violently ill and in the throes of passion. Serge is quite taken aback, though he seems to be the only one on his floor who has any sort of reaction - that reaction intensifies when his floormate Pascal fills him in on what's going on. This all comes to a head when Jack Dren, one of Gilbert's jilted lovers, comes into their room at night, tries to strangle Serge to make him pass out in his bed...

...and then rapes Gilbert. It's an absolutely unpleasant scene, but it works - we aren't told anything of Jack and Gilbert's past, we see only the aftereffects. And those aftereffects make us question everything - what really is going on with Gilbert? Why is he drawn to these frankly homicidal men?

We aren't given any quick answers, but instead we're treated to a side of Serge we've never seen, and honestly were never expecting. Upon waking up from his impromptu strangulation, he fights with Jack until he flees the room, and then, even more unexpectedly, starts barking orders at Gilbert in an attempt to make him feel better.

Not only is his assertiveness completely new, but so is his attitude of care towards his new roommate. Obviously, we can understand that he's horrified by what's gone on, and we already know that he's a pretty good guy to begin with, but this all begs the question - is Serge, who up to this point was horrified by Gilbert's lifestyle, actually developing an attraction for him? That question comes up again and again, and even Serge's other classmates pick up on it, albeit in the most offensive and dismissive way possible.

Though we aren't told explicitly, the impression that I got is that Serge has virtually no romantic or sexual experience whatsoever, so the struggles he has are that much more complicated. This gets even more complicated when, eventually, Gilbert seems to put the moves on Serge himself.

What does Gilbert see in Serge? Like so much else of Gilbert's past and inner thoughts, we aren't told, and again, it works - we want to watch more and find out what the hell is going on in this guy's head. But, sadly, at only an hour running time, it ends before it answers much of anything. Though, I'll be honest, it works surprisingly well here.

Kaze's story, though incomplete and leaving much for us to read in the manga, feels complete in itself. Perhaps the Kaze manga, in its 17 volumes, gives us the entire panoramic view of Serge and Gilbert's relationship, but the OVA gives us only the prelude to that relationship, and it's satisfied with that. It doesn't feel random or arbitrary - Yas was skilled enough as a director to pick one small part of the story and make that feel complete, and he did.

There is a lot left unsaid - we only know Gilbert on the surface, and we only know a tiny bit of his relationship with Auguste, which, from what we're seen, seems to be the determining factor in his violent life. We're given suggestions, though, and those suggestions help us at least come to some sort of understanding of his character. Granted, I was helped by the wonderful notes presented at the beginning, but I feel that even if I didn't have them, I would have understood, and enjoyed, this show just as much as I did.

I did very much enjoy this show, and I think anyone who enjoys tragic love stories or character dramas will get something out of it. It probably was written primarily for fans of the manga, though I think it was well done enough for even someone who hasn't heard of the manga to enjoy. I now very much want to read the manga, and can only hope the scanlation group actually does get around to finishing it - this story has too much potential to leave unfinished.