WL's Gay Manga and Anime Review - 7. The Space Between (Ai no Kusabi) by Rieko Yoshihara (Classic Gay Science Fiction/Dystopian/BDSM)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_no_Kusabi

I wondered and searched in the abyss of what is considered gay erotica before the BL genre became popular in Japan, Were there any good stories, manga, or anime with gay characters? I got my answer in Ai no Kusabi, which I have to say was a surprising find and genuinely provocative. The original light novel was published between 1986 and 1987, around the time of my birth, so this story predates many modern readers and viewers. Like a lot of classic gay literature, there’s a noticeable difference in the style of how the gay community in the modern day looks at themselves versus how the authors of the past saw the world around them or what they wanted. Even though this is science fiction, it still gives readers a view of society and observations on gay relationships; in this case, there’s a distinct power and structure dynamic. Many readers and viewers can also see the traces of Akira, the famous 1980s cyberpunk manga and anime created by Katsuhiro Otomo, with Ai no Kusabi’s plots with a biker gang aesthetic and themes of corruption, power, and social intrigues. Despite the gratuitous gay sex scenes with bondage and dominance, it has a lot of deep characters and complex plots. The story was worth a deeper dive as it offered an adult angle to anime that is rare in the current BL genre.

Length: 8 volumes and two anime adaptations. The original anime adaptation from 1992-1994 consisted of two installments of around 50-minutes each. The second anime adaptation, which had marked departures from the plot, was produced in 2012 but was canceled before the story could progress beyond four episodes. As such, I am reviewing the source material and the 1992-1994 anime series, which I view as far more complete than later adaptations.

Plot: In the future, the planet Amoi is run by a powerful artificial intelligence known as Jupiter, who portrays itself as a female via holographic projections. Jupiter has created an upgraded version of humanity, known as the Elites, who are cyborgs with assigned duties and ranks with the color of their hair denoting levels of authority. At the top of the cyborg, ranks are the Blondies, the leaders in their respective fields. At the bottom of this futuristic society, there are the mongrels, who are humans born in the slums outside the genetic engineering or breeding programs created by Jupiter. Between them are castes of humans, either bred or trained for specific purposes. Pets are the most noted aspects, being bred for entertainment, especially sexual, by the cyborg elites. Pets may be humans, but they are treated as property and are usually bought at auctions at a young age by their owners, then disposed of either through sale or abandonment at brothels past their twenties. Another group of humans that are bought and trained by elite cyborgs is the Furniture, who were boys castrated in their teens and work as servants for the cyborgs.

In this setting, Riki, the young teenage leader of Bison, a street gang in the slums of Amoi, is nearly killed three years ago. However, he was saved by a Blondie named Iason Minks. In gratitude to him, Riki chooses to give himself to Iason, sexually, but he was unprepared for what Iason truly had in mind for him. The anime does not portray what occurred in the three years in detail, but the novel details Riki's life as a pet and the society of Amoi, introducing various characters and scenarios. In the present, Riki’s street gang is overjoyed to have him back, except for their newest recruit Kirie. Through a series of events, Kirie deceives the group into a black-market deal that ended up in all of them being captured by the Midas police force. Various subplots involving genetic experimentation and trade issues are explored briefly in the anime, but in the novels, they are fleshed out with plots involving Katze, Iason's right-hand man and liaison to the black market. In the novels, Kirie gets punished for his various villainous action by being turned into an Alita, a sex doll automaton. Iason intervenes on Riki’s behalf, which reveals the fact that Riki was and still is Iason’s Pet. This revelation angers Guy, Riki’s former lover and partner, who confronts Riki for bowing down to an elite as a Pet. Later, Iason sees unhappiness with Riki, so resettles his Pet in the area of Apartia, known as the place where elites kept their mistresses and prized Pets. Riki takes on his old job, assisting Katze in the black market operations. Guy tracks down Riki and learns about the Pet ring on Riki’s penis that binds him to Iason. In a fit of anger and jealousy, he drugs Riki and castrates him to remove the nanite-enhanced Pet ring, then plans for a confrontation with Iason. Riki attempts to contact Katze to help him avert the confrontation and save Iason. The ending is explosive and tragic, but it leaves readers and viewers with a lot to ponder about the story and its characters.

Review: This story is difficult in several definitions of the word. It’s difficult science fiction with advanced themes on artificial intelligence, social caste structures, and dystopian themes of order and freedom. It’s a difficult drama with interpersonal relationships between several male characters, issues of ambition, and the inability to express love between lovers until the very end. It’s also BDSM, throughout the story both in the anime and novel, Riki has to endure humiliation to break his pride, restraints, the “pet ring”, aka a cock ring, that controls his pleasure centers and some extreme themes of bondage and human servitude.

To say some of this stuff is problematic is an understatement, I have not even touched on the pedophilia that the cyborgs engaged in, because it’s overtly part of the story and there’s no debate about what they do to their pets. They auction boys based on their beauty and training in sexual entertainment as teenagers. Also, forget about consent in this society, you are bred, manipulated, or bought to be a sex slave through the artificial intelligence that acts like God. The poor and regular humans are living in the slums, working to supply goods for the elites or export to other planets, while street gangs eke out a living pickpocketing, smuggling, or even prostitution. There are even humans turned into sex dolls through a psychic reprogramming. The bondage scenes used literal chains and portray public entertainment being one of the aspects of being a pet. In short, this story has a lot of things that most people should be running away from screaming.

Yet, as I’ve said before if you write a great story and you can justify things in the context of the story, then the story’s negative elements can work for you. Here’s the thing, it’s a dystopian society run by cyborgs and ruled by an AI, so you should have a lot of bad stuff in there. It’s like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with its drug use and sexualization, or Lois Lowry’s The Giver with its themes on Eugenics and Euthanasia. Sometimes, you need to highlight the darkness in potential futures to explore its impact on humanity, which is why science fiction was created in the first place to explore strange new worlds and possibilities. While the topics would be horrible in a modern fiction setting, within science fiction, it is a cautionary tale.

Provocative concepts, such as the fact that the AI is portrayed as a female in all adaptations, added to the overall sci-fi concept and meta-commentary on the actual readership, who are primarily females that enjoy this kind of storyline and want to manipulate male characters to their whims as Jupiter does. It’s a nice thematic nod to the astute reader and the author’s acknowledgment that he can’t control what he wanted entirely either. There's the topic of gay partners in the storyline, which appear common and ordinary for the mostly male populace of Amoi as heterosexual intercourse is highly regulated for population control and genetic breeding programs. In this context, the author pushed for a flip of the switch to make gay relationships normalized, but he also added a layer of science fiction veneer to it. The elite cyborgs have a different kind of pairing relationship tied to their "pet ring", a cock ring with the power to control human emotions through pain or pleasure. In some sense, this concept appears to be a provocative argument against gay marriage, heteronormative aspects of it tying gay men like Riki to a single partner as a type of slave to his master warped the modern world argument. This kind of social commentary is very advanced and challenges a lot of what modern gay rights advocates have fought for and strived for in the last 4 decades, but it's a chilling observation that marriage and slavery are intertwined in some ways.

Other areas, found in the original novel, such as the use of human children like an organ and bio-material farm for the cyborg elites were an interesting shock. Jupiter relies on cyborgs and thus human life must be used to support her efforts to maintain control. The farm does not only treat human children like a traditional meat crop, but they also brainwash them to be suppliant to cyborg overlords and use them for the purposes of genetic experimentation. These kids are bred and born in a place called Guardian, which houses the population up until they turn thirteen, then are cast out to either become "pets", "furniture", or other instruments of the AI perfected order. Many human children, who were not useful for either pleasure, experimentation, or body parts, are just kicked out to become the underclass of society in the slums like Riki and his street gangs. Science fiction explores extremely dark possibilities, this one was especially dark.

As for the characters, they’re multi-layered and very compelling. It’s seldom that I’ve seen fiction with characters like Riki or Iason, they are both aggressive males who fall in love with each other. It’s a weird thing to see two tops like them in a relationship, but it works. Iason is an elite with boundless resources at his disposal, including being one of the few leaders who can directly counter a directive by Jupiter. He wants Riki’s love, which he does through non-consensual means including bondage, humiliation, and psychological programming. Yet, behind it all, he as a cyborg was expressing the human emotion of attraction and possessiveness. I can see why he did what he does towards Riki, it was wrong in our moral value system, but in his world, it would have been proper and expected. Riki in contrast was a human being with nothing to live for, except the small scraps he gained with his street gang. He had a boyfriend and partner in Guy, so he was already settled in the life held despite it being worthless. The life of a Pet is something that changes him forever, he gained access to all of Iason’s resources, but in exchange, loses what emotional ties he had before. Do I think Riki loved Iason in the end? I do, but how they reached that point might be a matter of debate about the concept of psychological programming and brainwashing. Iason had wanted a perfect pet, he got it with Riki, despite all his protests. Their final act as master and pet was bittersweet, but it was thought-provoking.

Iason also is involved in several incidents that were cold and calculated throughout the novel and anime, including planned assassination against foreign planetary dignitaries, black market transactions under the guidance of Jupiter to maintain power over the human populace with the illusion of freedom, and sadistic games with Riki. Iason is not a morally good person by any standard, he enjoys humiliation and making others submit to him in the worse ways. In the novels, he explicitly has his servant Daryl, a castrated teenage boy, sexually humiliate, molest, and train Riki into compliance, it's a graphic display of power through sexual submission. This is not Fifty Shades of Gray with light touches of BDSM concepts to the main character, it is very strong domination and slave training by someone lacking aspects of our social sensibilities. He broke Riki's will to fight him before he began to "love" him as it was the way the world worked. His one redeeming characteristic appears to be his latent humanity either in his mercy for Katze as a child for learning state secrets or his love for Riki to the point of bypassing social rules and legal frameworks to protect him. In a society that views human life so poorly, even this one minor exception is important. In the novels, he is far more ruthless than in the anime, but readers understand why power and control is needed with further plot points. A plot point missing from the anime that hugely shaped Iason psychological makeup, Iason showed mercy to Katze as a child, but he did not show mercy to Daryl, who aided in Riki's escape in the novel. Iason justified his decision to order Daryl's execution as a demonstration to other Furniture to reject their human empathy in service of the state. Yet, after the "disposal" of Daryl as a Furniture, he chose to allow Riki some level of freedom and gave him time to "breathe" as Daryl's sacrifice and awakening to empathy despite training and brainwashing, touched an empathetic nerve in Iason. Iason is not just a BDSM master with villainous intent, but he's also a complex being with hidden parts of his humanity that are buried behind the artificial structure within his body.

Among the side characters, I think Guy was fascinating. He was a dedicated lover of Riki, but he just couldn’t accept that his old partner had changed due to circumstances. The scenes of him drugging Riki and later revealing he had castrated Riki, to remove the Pet ring, to Iason were powerful. He was willing to destroy the person he loved most, so no one other than he could have him. He had nothing left to live for without Riki and their street gang, both lost due to Iason’s meddling. This character’s self-destruction and ultimate hand in sealing the fates of Iason and Riki made his story arc thought-provoking about the nature of freedom to be self-destructive when one is blinded by personal goals. Another interesting character was Katze, Iason's former Furniture, who became his liason to the underworld of Amoi. Katze was a multi-dimensional character, who understood the emotions of love and possession that were growing between Iason and Riki, but he had no frame of reference to help either of them. He is trapped in a tragic struggle to protect both men, but ultimately fails both. In classical Chinese and Japanese history, eunuchs were the equivalent of Furniture in a real-world context, castrated boys taken into service by the royal family. Many popular novels and dramas in East Asia portray them in roles similar to Katze, being both men and not men at the same time. In some retellings of the tales, they actually became lovers of princes and emperors despite not understanding what love is. I find that concept interesting.

The weaknesses and the drawbacks in this story come from the point I noted above-concerning facts that would scare most people away. The sex scenes were probably around 10 minutes out of the overall 100-minute story, but they were fairly graphic and earned the Yaoi genre rating. Beyond the sex, there’s some inconsistency with Riki’s character that does not appear to be explained in either the anime or novel. At times, he appears to be an aggressive street thug, who is willing to kill or do whatever is needed. At other times, he acquiesces after a bit of pouting. I thought the entire castration thing in the last novel and 2^nd episode of the anime was a bit unnecessary, leaving Riki really with nothing except for what he felt at the end towards Iason.

Rating: 3.50 out of 5, this story was complex and sophisticated despite being older. It’s a quality Yaoi science fiction anime that opens up a lot of topics. It has several notable flaws and the subject matter isn't advised for all readers or viewers, but if you are willing to open yourself, then give this story a try.