Japanese Yaoi, American Romance
By Lyn Jensen
Discover a Japan where a handsome young newspaperman rescues a cute innocent teenage boy from a stalker, and takes him home. They fall in love, but the boy semi-accidentally becomes a sought-after model, the famous “Pajama Boy” who drives all of Tokyo crazy. Old flames, jealous rivals, and a hypocritical family threaten the male couple’s steamy relationship. In the universe of The Pajama Boy, the Japanese yaoi genre meets the American romance novel, and both get a wonderful twist.
Originally published online, The Pajama Boy by Ginger Mayerson is now available in trade paperback, complete with three different collector’s covers. “Pajama Boy was born to kick all those stray yaoi tropes out of my head before they ended up in something else,” writes Mayerson in the book’s introduction.
She continues, “For those of you who wandered in from reality, yaoi manga is gay porn comics created by women for an audience of mostly women. There are lots of explanations why yaoi is such a huge hit.”
Yaoi originated in Japan but has since gone global, and Pajama Boy is an excellent example of the result. Mayerson, an American writer influenced by yaoi, has in turn created new erotic literature for a crossover audience.
“There are books and stories you write just to get them out of your system. That’s what The Pajama Boy is,” Mayerson explained in a recent interview. “There must be 10,000 yaoi manga where some guy in a suit trips over some kid in the street, takes him home, and they live happily ever after.” In yaoi fandom, the guy in the suit is the seme and the kid on the street, the uke.
Mayerson’s prose flows with texture and depth, creating a total environment, a total ambience, in the way the characters relate to each other, and in the way she nudges the plot along with little details and subplots including a film. She compares her style to “looking into a lacquered box, it looks like you’re looking into something.”
When the seme rescues the Pajama Boy uke from the American film, it provides Mayerson an opportunity for satire. The movie’s about yaoi, and American and Japanese characters alike consider it vile trash. “Can you imagine an avaricious American producer who says, “I don’t understand this but I’m going to make money off it?” Mayerson wonders.
The novel does have some shortcomings. Into the final thirty pages are crammed the film project, a murder mystery, AIDS, out-of-character personality and career switches, and the passage of several years. It’s as if the author feared leaving a plot twist unturned.
Pajama Boy remains overall a beautiful debut novel from Mayerson, but now that her online venture Wapshott Press has enabled her to take the self-publishing route, she plans to resurrect an earlier unpublished effort. Wapshott debuted in 2007 with the gay-themed anthology, Chase and Other Stories. It has since published several gay and/or feminist works by Mayerson and others. “It started as a one-off idea,” Mayerson says. “It turned out to be a fabulous idea.” Go to www.wapshottpress.com for information on purchasing The Pajama Boy and other Wapshott titles.