Boys in Skirts: You See, Teacher…, Vol. 1

Boys in Skirts: You See, Teacher…, Vol. 1 by Ei Tachibana (Sensei Anone., originally serialized in Oto★Nyan. Million Shuppan edition 2012; Project-H edition 2014)

Book page at Project-H: NSFW!!. Available in print or digitally through eManga (including convenient PDF download).

This is the first of a planned series of (intermittent) posts on “otokonoko” (a pun that translates roughly as “male maiden”) AKA “josou shonen” (crossdressing boys): male-oriented media that focuses on MtF crossdressing, with or without (but usually with) romantic / erotic elements in your choice of m/f or m/m flavors. (If you haven’t heard of this stuff before, you might want to check out the intro post for the series.) In You See, Teacher… we have an example of a genre that is still an oddity in English; a male-male romance primarily aimed at straight-identified men (if you have trouble with that idea, see the discussion in the intro post).

The first thing I want to get onto the table is that, sadly, this book is not porn. All three (soon to be four) of the m/m otokonoko manga currently available in English are released through DMP’s Project-H imprint, which is a hentai imprint, meaning that they’re all labelled as porn, but all of them ran in Oto★Nyan; that magazine was fairly raunchy, but it was a respectable non-restricted seinen magazine and never ran porn. I suspect that DMP put these books under the Project-H imprint because they’re smutty stuff for guys, but the degree of fanservice and innuendo in any of these books would not be excessive for a standard M-rated manga. In this case, although the cover incorporates the federally-mandated crotch shot that crops up on the majority of otokonoko-genre covers (since the conceit of the genre is that the cute crossdresser looks exactly like a girl, you have to show bulge to get across that it’s actually a boy in that skimpy miniskirt), it goes no further than a lot of salacious fanservice and some making out. I knew what I was getting, having read it in serialization, but I imagine some people will be disappointed.

Secondly, the cover is adorable. Most ecchi seinen romances only put the girl on the cover; the equivalent, for m/m otokonoko, is to only put the crossdresser on the cover (unless it’s a crossdresser-on-crossdresser title, in which case they’ll both be on the cover and probably all over each other, as in Kuromame’s Club For Crossdressers NSFW!!). Presumably this is so you don’t have to look at some dude (eww) while ogling the hottie. Tachibana gets around this by using a wraparound cover; the flirtatious crossdressing cutie is on the front, but he’s holding hands with the befuddled protagonist on the back (which also features the protag’s little brother; in a dress, of course).

Said protagonist, Kakenishi, is a 23-year-old virgin and ineffectual high-school teacher who gets walked on all over by his students, except model student Nakamura. In the opening pages, Kakenishi discovers that seemingly perfectly-behaved Nakamura is, in fact, making sexy crossdressing webcam shows using the school computers, tastefully illustrated by four full-color pages of a lightly-clad Nakamura in suggestive positions. (In fact, the very first page features an ass’n’crotch shot with panty-clad boybits prominently displayed. Just in case you weren’t clear on the premise.) Kakenishi makes an ineffectual attempt at persuading Nakamura to stop doing this, which succeeds only because Nakamura, who turns out to be quite the manipulative troublemaker when not in stealth mode, decides it will be more fun to seduce his flustered and ineffectually-protesting teacher instead. That sets up the primary plot for the series: Nakamura aggressively vamps Kakenishi in lewd, fanservice-providing ways; Kakenishi blusters and dithers but always gets dragged along. Your usual list of ecchi rom-com hijinks ensue.

As you will immediately gather, this book has a lot of raunch; there is a fair amount of humor involved, but the emphasis is definitely on titillation. Nakamura is totally shameless (early in the story he gives Kakenishi his email address written on the panties he was just wearing), and in addition to flashing everything he’s got at Kakenishi, he’s quite willing to use his sexiness to make friends and influence people make money and wrap people around his little finger, and for some reason both his schoolmates and any random other males around are more than willing to slobber on him even (or especially) when they know he’s a guy. Although there is no sex whatsoever, the series is bountiful in its provision of skimpy cosplay costumes, fetish lingerie, perky nipples, panty shots, wardrobe malfunctions, and, especially, barely-clad boybits (plus a few peekaboo shots of unclad boybits). And there is an extended sequence of suggestive things with mayonnaise bottles, if you happen to be into mayonnaise bottles.

In case you don’t care for hot-to-trot crossdressing sexpots, there’s a subplot about Kakenishi’s shy and innocent younger brother Nagare (also a highschooler), who gets tricked into crossdressing as a prank but decides he likes it because it makes him popular. Of course, he’s too sweet and innocent to understand why his new “friends” are so eager to make his acquaintance, or why it’s a bad idea to run around in a miniskirt with no panties. Nagare gets the only really squicktastic scene in the book, near the beginning, in which a group of faceless older men take advantage of his naiveté to basically molest him; going for the “creepy” double-play, Nagare doesn’t understand what’s going on, but he’s happy for the attention. Yes. Right. Fortunately this sort of thing does not reoccur, and near the end of the volume we meet an age-appropriate guy who seems like he’s being set up as Nagare’s love interest.

For a touch of drama, there is a fairly significant subplot about why Nakamura, a stellar student when he’s behaving himself, left one of the top-ranked high schools in the country to come to Kakenishi’s distinctly third-rate institution; neither Kakenishi nor the reader knows what’s going on, and Nakamura is quite definitely not telling. Later in the book, the basketball team from Kakenishi’s school has a match against Nakamura’s old school, and they manage to persuade him to come along as cheerleader. Nakamura, as you may have gathered, wants to always be in control of the situation and hates revealing any weaknesses, but even his consummate acting ability can’t completely hide his anxiety over returning to campus or being recognized by his former classmates, leading up to a cliffhanger at the end of the volume.

Despite this, the series’ primary focus is the rom-com. The US publisher’s page plays up the “forbidden” and “secret” nature of the main’s relationship, by which I’m hoping they’re not referring to the gay; Kakenishi is obviously interested in Nakamura from page one and spends very little time in “but I’m straiiiight” mode. To his credit, he is concerned about the morality of getting involved with a student and a minor, and remains so even as he admits he’s falling for Nakamura. (And from a practical point of view, he’s also afraid he’d be fired if the other teachers discover him in compromising positions with one of his students.) But from the very beginning, his main issue is that he thinks Nakamura is just toying with him; Nakamura does tell him repeatedly that he loves him, but since Nakamura is manipulative to the point of evilness and constantly jerks him around in other ways, it’s reasonable that he would have doubts. The volume ends before we get resolution on this point (or any other point), but I would be very surprised if the author has plans to not have the guys sort everything out and become a couple.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book. Nakamura’s autocratic self-confidence and relentless aggressiveness is entertaining, and I personally like the gormless “hetare” type; Kakenishi is adorable in his clueless befuddlement. And despite all the comedy shenanigans and Nakamura’s difficult personality (cough), it looks like they will make a good couple once they sort out their various issues. Teacher-student relationships bug me in general, as do age-mismatched relationships, but it helps that Nakamura so obviously has the upper hand, that the book plays everything with a strong comedy touch, and also that the series is such blatant wish-fulfillment: yes, otaku-dudes, it doesn’t matter what a gormless loser you are, someday you too can meet some hot crossdressing jailbait who will pour himself into your lap and demand sexytimes! (Incidentally, Nakamura seems to be about 17, which would make him legal in my area.) In addition, I find the sort of shameless pandering this book indulges in amusing even when it’s too over-the-top to be sexy.

Tachibana’s art is mediocre; faces are expressive but draftsmanship is wobbly and the characters go off model constantly (in particular, Nakamura’s hair-flip is sometimes incompatible with the size and shape of the normal human skull). In the author’s notes the author mentions that it is their first series, and looking at some of their more recent stuff they’ve improved considerably. Project-H’s presentation is nice, with four color pages and a pretty good translation, although there is a completely clueless ad in the back that implies that Club For Crossdressers is part of the My Cute Crossdresser series (it’s not even the same author, guys).

The one thing that makes me anxious about this book is that it’s supposed to be a series, and in fact ends on a cliffhanger, but the magazine in which it ran folded a while ago, and I can’t find any suggestions of a volume 2 in Japanese even though V1 is over two years old. The author did post a tweet about a year ago which, as far as my ability to hack bits of meaning out of Google Translate goes, indicates that they were hoping to release new material soon (if you are interested in checking out the rest of their Twitter stream, be warned that it frequently contains NSFW images). Hopefully this material will in fact eventuate, and will be translated; considering how little of this kind of work there is in English, it would be a pain for it to be unfinished.

So if you like cute crossdressing boys in fanservicey situations, or if you just want to see what it looks like when male-oriented fanservice tropes get applied to a male body, and you don’t absolutely require porn, this isn’t a bad place to start. It may not be the most polished example of the genre, but it will definitely fulfill your minimum daily requirement of scantily-clad boybits.