Banana Fish: A Defense of Ash and Eiji's Relationship as Non-Sexual
Behind the cut is a response to the very interesting reviews and discussion thread on the new Banana Fish anime at Anime Feminist.
"Banana Fish: A Defense of Ash and Eiji's Relationship as Non-Sexual"
I am so happy to have found these reviews and this discussion thread. I love-and miss-this kind of engagement with fandom. The degree to which reading these perspectives keys up my emotions also shows me how invested I am in the relationship between Ash and Eiji.
Like many in this conversation, I am invested, in a large part, because I care about representation, because I don’t want to see aspects of human experience erased, silenced, or distorted to create an oversimplified portrait of acceptable norms. I completely agree that BF participates in this erasure and distortion (especially with race and homosexuality), but I also love it because it represents my experience in a way very few, if any, other works do. With that backdrop I will argue that it does a disservice to human diversity to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily gay-or to argue they necessarily should/would have been written as gay but for the 1980s. Their relationship is doing something else.
(LIGHT SPOILERS for minor textual details… And a disclaimer: I have not fact-checked my manga recollections because I just moved and all my manga are in boxes. Please feel free to correct my recollections.)
I’m not a fan of the decision to update the anime’s story, and I’m going to address the manga within its 1980s frame. There’s no doubt that publication pressures, etc., shaped what Yoshida wrote, but I don’t find that especially relevant to whether Ash and Eiji should be considered “gay,” and that’s because their non-sexual relationship, as is, makes perfect sense within the story.
I see no evidence that Eiji is gay. Eiji is a Japanese teen in the 1980s (born in 1966). He would have grown up in culture in which gayness is largely erased from daily discourse and is viewed as “pervy” when it is mentioned. If you’re a gay teen growing up in that sort of culture (or even if you’re bi and feel the homosexual tendency strongly), you almost certainly have angst. You have questions about your own acceptability, normality, morality, and so on. There is none of this angst in Eiji. No angst about sharing a bedroom with Ash, no angst about Ash bathing or showering right next to him, surprise when Ash fake kisses him but no horror/overwhelm, no soul-searching over whether he’s secretly like Dino or Marvin. There’s no tension that suggests homosexual desire. It is true that at 19 Eiji has never had sex with a woman (or by implication kissed one), but as I’m sure most folks here are aware, that’s not atypical in Japanese dating culture of the era. Now, is it possible that Eiji has the capacity for homosexual feeling and he’s just a late bloomer/low sexed/very easy going/self-confident? Sure. (In fact, in my giant BF fan fic I have him mostly partnered with men up to his 80s. I’m not opposed to this possibility.) But I see no textual evidence that leads me to read him as gay in particular. (Personally, I read him as demi.)
Is Ash gay? Let’s break it down. Ash is very clearly homosocial. He bonds more readily to males. The women in his life are few and tangential-partly down to the circles he runs in. But social orientation and sexual orientation do not correlate. In fact, it’s very common to be homosocial and heterosexual. Homosociality is not evidence he’s straight, but it’s not evidence he’s gay.
As to Ash having internalized homophobia, he certainly has homophobia-it’s the 1980s and he’s been sexually abused by men-but I don’t see direct evidence it’s “internalized” in the sense of his necessarily being gay and having negative feelings that prevent his embracing that. In fact, I would argue his homophobia is rather mild (all things considered), which could mean it wouldn’t be heavily internalized in terms of negative self-image about being gay. (He has negative self-image galore, but it seems to be about the whole mess of his life. I don’t see evidence that sexual orientation is broken out as a particular issue.) Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read the manga, so I don’t have every line in mind, but I don’t think manga-Ash uses insults against a gay orientation, as opposed to insults against being a pedophiliac abuser? But even if he does, this could easily fall under tough street kid banter. Ash insults a lot of people for a lot of things without necessarily believing them. He’s a smart ass. One small piece of evidence, however, that he doesn’t strongly look down on/fear gayness: as I recall, in the prequel Shorter tells Ash that he reminds him a Christmas card of an angel he used to masturbate to. That’s kinda gay, yet Shorter very quickly becomes his best (pre-Eiji) friend despite this pretty pointed statement that he’s capable of having at least some degree of desire for Ash. All this inclines me to think that Ash is not stopped from accepting a gay orientation by homophobia; i.e. homophobia is not, I think, the reason he is not overtly gay.
So is Ash gay? I don’t think we can tell. As a rape survivor and trafficked youth, Ash has suffered an interrupted sexual development. As Vrai Kaiser says very well, he views sex as an “ugly transaction.” His sexuality is skewed in a way that could make it difficult even for Ash to extrapolate what his natural sexual orientation might be. (I think he’s very like real-life T. E. Lawrence [of Arabia] in this.) What we do know about Ash’s sexuality is this:
* He views sex as a tool to deploy against his enemies and only invites/allows sexual contact in this context (ex. he’ll come on to someone as part of an escape plan).
* He had a girlfriend (deceased) whom he cared about but “didn’t get around to” having sex with (not a direct quote, by the way).
* Other girls want him but he’s not interested.
* He has-by very, very strong implication-never had consensual sex.
All this information boils down to observtion 1: Ash views sex as a tool in a kind of battle and he’s not comfortable contemplating it in other circumstances. This adequately explains his avoiding sex with girls. It also adequately explains his not wanting any sexual contact with Eiji. Eiji is not an enemy. Ash does not want to use him or be used by him. Therefore, seeing him in a sexual light is impossible.
And this is why I’m dubious about the idea that it would be nice to see them actually get together in the BF timeline as a sexual couple. I don’t see how this would work given the trauma Ash is still actively going through in the series. It would require such a 180 in his feelings about sex that it’s hard to imagine it happening in this timeframe (about a year from first meeting Eiji). Before beginning to explore the idea of sex with Eiji, Ash would have to find the reflective time and space to deconstruct and reconstruct his entire sexuality-in the midst of crisis, chaos, and still being sexually abused. He would have to have a particular reason to do all this work in the midst of all the other calls on his energy. I don’t know what the reason would be. Raw sexual desire? Yes, he’s a teen boy, but I don’t see evidence that he needs sex in this way. It seems to me he desperately needs his relationship with Eiji to be a site of safety and rest, not effort. And reshaping his sexuality this way would surely require effort, however worthwhile the result.
“But they love each other.” Yes. Yes, they do. And I would agree that the feel of their love is romantic in that it involves two more-or-less adults meeting for the first time and being immediately emotionally moved toward each other and finding each other fascinating in an emotionally intense and intimate way. But romantic does not equal sexual. Ask any asexual romantic. Ash and Eiji do not need to be sexually attracted to have exactly the relationshp we see portrayed in BF. Their relationship does not imply that they are gay, not even in 1980s coded ways. Certainly, it allows the possibility, but it does not make the argument, even subtextually. There is official BF art that is homoerotic, but as some here have noted, it is separate from the text of the story. It is a marketing tool.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that BF as a text isn’t homophobic. It is, and it would have been an improvement if it had at least some positive gay characters. And I’m not arguing that we don’t need more positive gay characters. We do. A lot. (And I’m not arguing anything about the update, except that I think updating a quintessentially 1980s text is a mistake.) And certainly, anyone has a right to be frustrated by BF as one more text that doesn’t do positive gay role modeling. Anyone has a right to disdain it and not read/watch it.
But I don’t think BF would be served by making Ash or Eiji overtly gay. BF is doing something else. It is illustrating that love is not dependent on sexual desire. Love, even in its most intense, life-altering, life-defining manifestations does not have to be sexual. In Eiji and Ash’s friendship, “friend” is not code for “gay lover,” nor are they “just friends” in the sense of “merely friends who have not attained the greater love of sexual union.” They are Friends. That’s the point.
The very fact that this type of relationship can exist is almost completely erased from our cultural psyche. I agree that in our media and public awareness, positive gay relationships are still too eclipsed, but life defining, primary partner non-sexual friendships are a thousand times more eclipsed. I see that erasure, quite frankly, in this thread in the tendency to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily sexually attracted because they love so intensely. It was there in a story a friend told me about watching The Lord of the Rings in a theater in Serbia and hearing people shout gay slurs at Frodo and Sam. Now, the gay slurs themselves are disappointing, but the need to read Frodo and Sam-written by a doctrinaire Catholic as platonic friends-as “gay,” even in movies that had already radically stripped down their intimacy to avoid their being read at “gay” is also disappointing. The substantial erasure of Patroclus from 2004’s Troy points to homophobia but also to a cultural inability to perceive two men who are life partners as anything other than sexually involved. (Nothing in the Iliad says they are; there’s so little textual evidence that people have been debating it for 2500 years.) I haven’t seen the more recent Fall of Troy but am told Achilles and Patroclus have a sexual relationship in that series, and that’s social progress; I dig it-but it still typifies the same erasure. [1] That erasure was present in a weird user comment about the anime Gungrave, summarizing it as a story about the love between Brandon and Maria and noting how confusing it was that it almost seemed to be more about Brandon and Harry. (Yes, confused commenter, is it about platonic friends Brandon and Harry.) So erased is non-sexual bonding that in the acronym LGBTQA (with just one A), the A often stands for “allies,” not “asexual.” Yes, straight people get represented in queer community before asexuals do. (This is changing, I think, and not before time.) It is present every time someone uses the word “love” to mean only “sexual love,” as in saying to the girlfriend, “You are the only one I’ve ever loved,” except, you know, for Mom, Dad, sisters, brothers, my children…. It is present in the very expression “just friends” to mean “less than sexual.”
This matters to me personally because I am a friendship bonder. (So erased are we from existence that I had to invent a term for this, and I only figured the term out at 42 years old.) I form attachments based on becoming friends. This is not asexual or platonic: the attachements may be sexual too. It is not demisexual: the attachments do not become sexual at a certain intensity of love or commitment. It is not about sex. Whether or not I have sexual attraction for someone is something that usually exists from near the time I meet them and does not greatly change with knowing them. It is not involved to a great degree in my bonding with them. Friendship is.
I’ve had next to no cultural support for this. Not as a child in the 1980s, a teen in the 1990s, a young adult in the 2000s, speeding toward what promised to be a lonely middle age in the 2010s. For the record, my personal life today is good thanks to a lot of work and luck. But I was 30 before I ever had a healthy partnership: it was with another woman and involved no sexual attraction. And so absent was any language for discusing this kind of bonding that part of the reason we broke up is that she herself couldn’t understand the words coming out of my mouth about my feelings for her. I myself didn’t have articulate words. Identify with Ash much as someone with a totally non-normative, off-the-labels sexuality? I am not a Mary-Sueish genius and have never been sexually abused, but, yes, you’d better bet I do.
Banana Fish gets it. Probably more than any other text I’ve ever encountered. There’s no reason Ash and Eiji couldn’t have homosexual desires or-given time and a lot of psychological care for Ash’s trauma-move toward a sexual relationship. But to say the series fails by not orienting their love around gayness, in my view, misses what their relationship is doing. [2] Ash and Eiji do not fail to be gay. They succeed in being Friends.
Notes:
[1] The reason I’m totally happy with a homoerotic reading of Achilles and Patroclus and not Eiji and Ash is that there’s no compelling reason for Achilles and Patroclus not to be having sex. For Eiji and Ash there is: Ash’s trauma.
[2] For those interested in seeing a sort of Ash-Eiji dynamic that does explictly explore gay attraction, I highly recommend the manga Acid Town, which I gush over here. It is ongoing and published slowly, but is very good, explicitly BL, and has positive as well as negative gay characters and situations.
"Banana Fish: A Defense of Ash and Eiji's Relationship as Non-Sexual"
I am so happy to have found these reviews and this discussion thread. I love-and miss-this kind of engagement with fandom. The degree to which reading these perspectives keys up my emotions also shows me how invested I am in the relationship between Ash and Eiji.
Like many in this conversation, I am invested, in a large part, because I care about representation, because I don’t want to see aspects of human experience erased, silenced, or distorted to create an oversimplified portrait of acceptable norms. I completely agree that BF participates in this erasure and distortion (especially with race and homosexuality), but I also love it because it represents my experience in a way very few, if any, other works do. With that backdrop I will argue that it does a disservice to human diversity to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily gay-or to argue they necessarily should/would have been written as gay but for the 1980s. Their relationship is doing something else.
(LIGHT SPOILERS for minor textual details… And a disclaimer: I have not fact-checked my manga recollections because I just moved and all my manga are in boxes. Please feel free to correct my recollections.)
I’m not a fan of the decision to update the anime’s story, and I’m going to address the manga within its 1980s frame. There’s no doubt that publication pressures, etc., shaped what Yoshida wrote, but I don’t find that especially relevant to whether Ash and Eiji should be considered “gay,” and that’s because their non-sexual relationship, as is, makes perfect sense within the story.
I see no evidence that Eiji is gay. Eiji is a Japanese teen in the 1980s (born in 1966). He would have grown up in culture in which gayness is largely erased from daily discourse and is viewed as “pervy” when it is mentioned. If you’re a gay teen growing up in that sort of culture (or even if you’re bi and feel the homosexual tendency strongly), you almost certainly have angst. You have questions about your own acceptability, normality, morality, and so on. There is none of this angst in Eiji. No angst about sharing a bedroom with Ash, no angst about Ash bathing or showering right next to him, surprise when Ash fake kisses him but no horror/overwhelm, no soul-searching over whether he’s secretly like Dino or Marvin. There’s no tension that suggests homosexual desire. It is true that at 19 Eiji has never had sex with a woman (or by implication kissed one), but as I’m sure most folks here are aware, that’s not atypical in Japanese dating culture of the era. Now, is it possible that Eiji has the capacity for homosexual feeling and he’s just a late bloomer/low sexed/very easy going/self-confident? Sure. (In fact, in my giant BF fan fic I have him mostly partnered with men up to his 80s. I’m not opposed to this possibility.) But I see no textual evidence that leads me to read him as gay in particular. (Personally, I read him as demi.)
Is Ash gay? Let’s break it down. Ash is very clearly homosocial. He bonds more readily to males. The women in his life are few and tangential-partly down to the circles he runs in. But social orientation and sexual orientation do not correlate. In fact, it’s very common to be homosocial and heterosexual. Homosociality is not evidence he’s straight, but it’s not evidence he’s gay.
As to Ash having internalized homophobia, he certainly has homophobia-it’s the 1980s and he’s been sexually abused by men-but I don’t see direct evidence it’s “internalized” in the sense of his necessarily being gay and having negative feelings that prevent his embracing that. In fact, I would argue his homophobia is rather mild (all things considered), which could mean it wouldn’t be heavily internalized in terms of negative self-image about being gay. (He has negative self-image galore, but it seems to be about the whole mess of his life. I don’t see evidence that sexual orientation is broken out as a particular issue.) Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read the manga, so I don’t have every line in mind, but I don’t think manga-Ash uses insults against a gay orientation, as opposed to insults against being a pedophiliac abuser? But even if he does, this could easily fall under tough street kid banter. Ash insults a lot of people for a lot of things without necessarily believing them. He’s a smart ass. One small piece of evidence, however, that he doesn’t strongly look down on/fear gayness: as I recall, in the prequel Shorter tells Ash that he reminds him a Christmas card of an angel he used to masturbate to. That’s kinda gay, yet Shorter very quickly becomes his best (pre-Eiji) friend despite this pretty pointed statement that he’s capable of having at least some degree of desire for Ash. All this inclines me to think that Ash is not stopped from accepting a gay orientation by homophobia; i.e. homophobia is not, I think, the reason he is not overtly gay.
So is Ash gay? I don’t think we can tell. As a rape survivor and trafficked youth, Ash has suffered an interrupted sexual development. As Vrai Kaiser says very well, he views sex as an “ugly transaction.” His sexuality is skewed in a way that could make it difficult even for Ash to extrapolate what his natural sexual orientation might be. (I think he’s very like real-life T. E. Lawrence [of Arabia] in this.) What we do know about Ash’s sexuality is this:
* He views sex as a tool to deploy against his enemies and only invites/allows sexual contact in this context (ex. he’ll come on to someone as part of an escape plan).
* He had a girlfriend (deceased) whom he cared about but “didn’t get around to” having sex with (not a direct quote, by the way).
* Other girls want him but he’s not interested.
* He has-by very, very strong implication-never had consensual sex.
All this information boils down to observtion 1: Ash views sex as a tool in a kind of battle and he’s not comfortable contemplating it in other circumstances. This adequately explains his avoiding sex with girls. It also adequately explains his not wanting any sexual contact with Eiji. Eiji is not an enemy. Ash does not want to use him or be used by him. Therefore, seeing him in a sexual light is impossible.
And this is why I’m dubious about the idea that it would be nice to see them actually get together in the BF timeline as a sexual couple. I don’t see how this would work given the trauma Ash is still actively going through in the series. It would require such a 180 in his feelings about sex that it’s hard to imagine it happening in this timeframe (about a year from first meeting Eiji). Before beginning to explore the idea of sex with Eiji, Ash would have to find the reflective time and space to deconstruct and reconstruct his entire sexuality-in the midst of crisis, chaos, and still being sexually abused. He would have to have a particular reason to do all this work in the midst of all the other calls on his energy. I don’t know what the reason would be. Raw sexual desire? Yes, he’s a teen boy, but I don’t see evidence that he needs sex in this way. It seems to me he desperately needs his relationship with Eiji to be a site of safety and rest, not effort. And reshaping his sexuality this way would surely require effort, however worthwhile the result.
“But they love each other.” Yes. Yes, they do. And I would agree that the feel of their love is romantic in that it involves two more-or-less adults meeting for the first time and being immediately emotionally moved toward each other and finding each other fascinating in an emotionally intense and intimate way. But romantic does not equal sexual. Ask any asexual romantic. Ash and Eiji do not need to be sexually attracted to have exactly the relationshp we see portrayed in BF. Their relationship does not imply that they are gay, not even in 1980s coded ways. Certainly, it allows the possibility, but it does not make the argument, even subtextually. There is official BF art that is homoerotic, but as some here have noted, it is separate from the text of the story. It is a marketing tool.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that BF as a text isn’t homophobic. It is, and it would have been an improvement if it had at least some positive gay characters. And I’m not arguing that we don’t need more positive gay characters. We do. A lot. (And I’m not arguing anything about the update, except that I think updating a quintessentially 1980s text is a mistake.) And certainly, anyone has a right to be frustrated by BF as one more text that doesn’t do positive gay role modeling. Anyone has a right to disdain it and not read/watch it.
But I don’t think BF would be served by making Ash or Eiji overtly gay. BF is doing something else. It is illustrating that love is not dependent on sexual desire. Love, even in its most intense, life-altering, life-defining manifestations does not have to be sexual. In Eiji and Ash’s friendship, “friend” is not code for “gay lover,” nor are they “just friends” in the sense of “merely friends who have not attained the greater love of sexual union.” They are Friends. That’s the point.
The very fact that this type of relationship can exist is almost completely erased from our cultural psyche. I agree that in our media and public awareness, positive gay relationships are still too eclipsed, but life defining, primary partner non-sexual friendships are a thousand times more eclipsed. I see that erasure, quite frankly, in this thread in the tendency to read Ash and Eiji as necessarily sexually attracted because they love so intensely. It was there in a story a friend told me about watching The Lord of the Rings in a theater in Serbia and hearing people shout gay slurs at Frodo and Sam. Now, the gay slurs themselves are disappointing, but the need to read Frodo and Sam-written by a doctrinaire Catholic as platonic friends-as “gay,” even in movies that had already radically stripped down their intimacy to avoid their being read at “gay” is also disappointing. The substantial erasure of Patroclus from 2004’s Troy points to homophobia but also to a cultural inability to perceive two men who are life partners as anything other than sexually involved. (Nothing in the Iliad says they are; there’s so little textual evidence that people have been debating it for 2500 years.) I haven’t seen the more recent Fall of Troy but am told Achilles and Patroclus have a sexual relationship in that series, and that’s social progress; I dig it-but it still typifies the same erasure. [1] That erasure was present in a weird user comment about the anime Gungrave, summarizing it as a story about the love between Brandon and Maria and noting how confusing it was that it almost seemed to be more about Brandon and Harry. (Yes, confused commenter, is it about platonic friends Brandon and Harry.) So erased is non-sexual bonding that in the acronym LGBTQA (with just one A), the A often stands for “allies,” not “asexual.” Yes, straight people get represented in queer community before asexuals do. (This is changing, I think, and not before time.) It is present every time someone uses the word “love” to mean only “sexual love,” as in saying to the girlfriend, “You are the only one I’ve ever loved,” except, you know, for Mom, Dad, sisters, brothers, my children…. It is present in the very expression “just friends” to mean “less than sexual.”
This matters to me personally because I am a friendship bonder. (So erased are we from existence that I had to invent a term for this, and I only figured the term out at 42 years old.) I form attachments based on becoming friends. This is not asexual or platonic: the attachements may be sexual too. It is not demisexual: the attachments do not become sexual at a certain intensity of love or commitment. It is not about sex. Whether or not I have sexual attraction for someone is something that usually exists from near the time I meet them and does not greatly change with knowing them. It is not involved to a great degree in my bonding with them. Friendship is.
I’ve had next to no cultural support for this. Not as a child in the 1980s, a teen in the 1990s, a young adult in the 2000s, speeding toward what promised to be a lonely middle age in the 2010s. For the record, my personal life today is good thanks to a lot of work and luck. But I was 30 before I ever had a healthy partnership: it was with another woman and involved no sexual attraction. And so absent was any language for discusing this kind of bonding that part of the reason we broke up is that she herself couldn’t understand the words coming out of my mouth about my feelings for her. I myself didn’t have articulate words. Identify with Ash much as someone with a totally non-normative, off-the-labels sexuality? I am not a Mary-Sueish genius and have never been sexually abused, but, yes, you’d better bet I do.
Banana Fish gets it. Probably more than any other text I’ve ever encountered. There’s no reason Ash and Eiji couldn’t have homosexual desires or-given time and a lot of psychological care for Ash’s trauma-move toward a sexual relationship. But to say the series fails by not orienting their love around gayness, in my view, misses what their relationship is doing. [2] Ash and Eiji do not fail to be gay. They succeed in being Friends.
Notes:
[1] The reason I’m totally happy with a homoerotic reading of Achilles and Patroclus and not Eiji and Ash is that there’s no compelling reason for Achilles and Patroclus not to be having sex. For Eiji and Ash there is: Ash’s trauma.
[2] For those interested in seeing a sort of Ash-Eiji dynamic that does explictly explore gay attraction, I highly recommend the manga Acid Town, which I gush over here. It is ongoing and published slowly, but is very good, explicitly BL, and has positive as well as negative gay characters and situations.