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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh: Click To Kiss The Samurai

Published Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:00:09 -0600

Last updated Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:03:16 -0600

Whenever I put out feelers for cult or niche pop coming out, the trail invariably and consistently leads to Japan. Next week, a visual novel is going to be released in the US on PSP, and it's not any old visual novel but an Otome (translation: "maiden") visual novel.

HAKUOKI: DEMON OF THE FLEETING BLOSSOM is a visual novel that began life on the PC and has since been ported to the Playstation 2 and now the PSP. Unlike most visual novels, it is not in the Eroge genre, which is aimed at male audiences and features graphic sex (albeit censored by mosaics blurring out the naughty bits), but the Otome genre, which is aimed at the female market. Otome games do not feature explicit sex scenes, usually placing more emphasis on relationships and romance. Eroge games involving making the right choices to romance the female characters until they have sex with the hero. Otome games are about romancing the male leads until they kiss and cuddle with the heroine.

HAKUOKI takes place in late 19th Century Japan where the heroine is a plucky young thing who straps on a sword and poses as a man to go to Kyoto to search for her missing physician father, only to discover a conspiracy against the Shogunate involving vampires and the supernatural, and comes under the protection of the Shinsegumi samurai, who are also searching for her father.

Visual novels may be called games, but they're really interactive graphic novels. You're reading an illustrated story and you click through dialogue and action choices move the story forward. Your choices can lead to completely different paths the storyline can take. In the case of Type-Moon's FATE/STAY NIGHT, a choice you make at the end of the first act could lead to two completely different storylines opening up for the game, UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS and HEAVEN'S FEEL. In HAKUOKI, you play as the heroine and choose which handsome Shinsengumi samurai to pursue romantically on top of the A-plot, which is the samurai-vs-vampires story, and each choice leads to a different outcome and ending. Visual novels interest me in the way they let the writer pursue all the alternate paths for a story that might normally have to be rejected when writing a single linear story that isn't interactive, like a novel, movie or comic. For a writer, that might be a kind of dream come true: getting to have all the cakes instead of just one.

HAKUOKI has been a huge success in Japan, not only branching out from the PC to the Playstation 2, PSP and Nintendo DS with spinoffs and quasi-sequels but also a popular anime series and manga. The appeal of the series, from what I could tell, Is that the player gets to choose from six different pretty, emo samurai men with floppy hair to have a romance with. It's the Japanese interactive equivalent of a supernatural Mills & Boons or Harlequin romance novel or the books currently written by the likes of Patricia Briggs, Kim Harrison and Charlaine Harris, with the vampire just being the cream on top.

What strikes me is the commonality of the female romantic imagination at play here. As a straight guy, I look upon this with a bemused, occasionally horrified, fascination. It's not much different from the appeal of the TWILIGHT books: the desire to be with bad boys in the hopes of melting their hearts and changing them. For the Japanese, I guess, you can't get badder than a bunch of moody Bishonen (translation: beautiful boy) in the Shinsengumi. I guess – and it's a big guess – that it's like people liking soldiers and men in uniform here, even if here they're drawn to look like moody women with great hair and no boobs but really buff bods.

The big thing here is the mystique the Shinsengumi holds in the Japanese imagination that gives rise to something like HAKUOKI. They're considered the ultimate samurai, an elite police force that was formed in reaction to the chaos Japan was undergoing in the second half of the 19th Century after the US Navy Commodore Perry's arrival showed Japan up as isolated and behind the times, with various factions, both pro- and anti-Western stirring up trouble. The Shinsengumi was fanatically devoted to protecting the Shogunate, warring against rogue samurai clans out to stir up insurrection, and their actions, which included assassinations, became more and more extreme to the point of making them feared more than respected or revered.

You can read more about the Shinsengumi at their Wikipedia page:

Countless movies and TV shows about the Sinsengumi have been made since the 1950s, including a few that are considered classics. Some of them portray them as the good guys, some as the bad guys. There was even a big budget TV series produced by the NHK (Japan's answer to the BBC) a few years ago. Their rise and fall is considered a national myth. And HAKUOKI is not the only manga/anime romantic fantasy with the Shinsengumi at its centre. I can't even begin to count how many of those there are.

What the Japanese don't like to discuss openly is that members of the Shinsengumi routinely had sex with each other as a means to ensure their fanatical bond to the order in the same way the Spartans did (the latter a fact Frank Miller worked hard to deny in 300 and which the movie unintentionally (?) hinted at in its big-budget homoeroticism). It's like all those slashfic and Yaoi (Boy's Love) fantasies were true after all. This is something many Japanese friends and historians have told me about over the years, yet it has never really been addressed in mainstream movies or TV except for the late Nagisa Oshima's last film GOHATTO (translation: "TABOO"). Oshima, best-known for making movies with subversive and antiauthoritarian views, set out to expose what he felt was the real heart of the Shinsengumi, which was the repressed passions brewing under the surface of the order, upset by a new Bishonen recruit whose beauty inflames the obsessive desires of the other samurai and sows the seeds of the order's destruction.

If you really think about it, the Shinsengumi was a kind of murderous, gay, fascist death cult that the Shoganate used as their personal hit-squad, which eventually ate itself from the inside before it was completely wiped out. Few of its members saw the age of 30, which probably fed the romantic fantasy that Japanese pop culture still holds to. I haven't played HAKUOKI. I'm not the target audience, but I like how it gives me the scope to write about the cultural contexts that drive it.

You can order HAKUOKI: DEMON OF THE FLEETING BLOSSOM from Amazon in a collector's edition and cheaper regular edition.

Not kissing Samurai at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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