It’s funny how seeing one thing from the past can bring up so much.
I was doing some spring cleaning recently when I came across this relic:
For those who are unfamiliar with Borders bookstores... Borders was a bookstore chain that was popular in the 2000s, the first decade of this century, with hundreds of stores throughout the U.S. and abroad.
The height of its popularity coincided with the period of time when I was most active as a translation rewriter and freelance editor for publishers like Digital Manga Inc., Tokyopop, Bandai Entertainment, etc. That was also my most rabid and manic anime/manga fan phase. I would go to Borders and buy shopping baskets full of manga and – when I could find them – light novels.
Barnes & Noble was also a national bookstore chain back then, but I greatly favored Borders. The reasons were many. Borders’ membership card was free, while B&N charged for their membership card (they still do). Borders also had a fun store-within-a-store called Paperchase that sold kawaii stationery items. I still have some of those notebooks.
While B&N was stodgy and stuffy, Borders was fun. Their in-house café was Seattle’s Best and they sold crazy drinks like Cake Batter Latte.
But the single most important reason why Borders was better than B&N was in their manga and light novel offerings. Not only were the manga aisles at Borders always bigger and better stocked, but they actually sold boy’s love manga and light novels.
Barnes & Noble had a policy of shunning BL and yaoi books. As I heard at the time, they judged them to be too explicit. Some of them were, of course, but this attitude is one that I’ve also seen in the gay romance field and it makes no sense. Just because a story is about gay people doesn’t automatically mean that it’s X-rated; to treat those books as such in a blanket fashion is ignorant and discriminatory. It’s as if you’re saying that to be gay is all about sex and sex-related things and nothing else.
Borders had no such inhibitions... they happily sold translated boy’s love manga along with regular manga, which meant that I could edit Digital Manga’s The Selfish Demon King light novel or Aurora Publishing’s Cigarette Kisses manga and see the finished products on the shelves at Borders. That was a lot of fun for me as - being middle-aged - I sometimes felt awkward even being an anime fan at my age. I had years of editing experience prior to becoming an anime fan, and looking back on it, I wonder if I started editing in the field in part because I felt a need to justify my presence in the anime and manga world...
Alas, Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Stu Levy cited this event as being the main reason why Tokyopop’s U.S. publishing arm went out of business, and there were similar repercussions for other publishers across the industry.
I missed Borders dearly, and still do. However, they are truly dead and gone, so there’s no need to hang onto the loyalty card as if they might rise from the grave at any moment, I get that.
Their bankruptcy meant that Barnes & Noble was the last chain standing. I held my nose and started patronizing B&N, though it wasn’t the same.
But recently, something has changed... mainly B&N’s tune regarding boy’s love. Suddenly, they’re okay with it. And in a fairly big way too.
A few months back, I started getting B&N emails advertising books that looked suspiciously... BL. I’d never spent a lot of time examining the shelves at my local B&N to see if they were stocking boy’s love manga these days, but it turns out that they are.
I saw one book when I was shopping at a B&N that I kept in mind to buy the next time I was at the store. The next time I went to a B&N, I spent a lot of time looking for it in the manga section, even enlisting the aid of two young saleswomen who brought me BL book after book, asking, “Is this the one?” I finally realized that I was at the wrong B&N, and that the B&N store I’d seen the book at was some miles away.
When I went to that store, I found the book, and also discovered why I couldn’t find it at the other store:
The book is called Heartstopper, and it wasn't in the manga section because it isn’t a manga. It’s a graphic novel by an English artist/author, Alice Oseman, and it was in the “Young Adult - Graphic Novels” section of the store.
From the book description: “Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. An LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between... Charlie and Nick are at the same school, but they've never met... until one day when they're made to sit together. They quickly become friends, and soon Charlie is falling hard for Nick, even though he doesn't think he has a chance. But love works in surprising ways, and Nick is more interested in Charlie than either of them realized. Heartstopper is about love, friendship, loyalty and mental illness. It encompasses all the small stories of Nick and Charlie's lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us.”
Boy’s love - by whatever name, whether LGBT Fiction or Gay Romance or anything else - is becoming mainstream. The Heartstopper series is published by Scholastic Books, amazingly enough - the bastion of conservative educational books and non-controversial children’s and young adult fiction. It’s not just ‘weird stuff translated from Japan’ anymore.
Just recently at Barnes & Noble, I purchased the following lovely-looking book:
Sayonara Game is a Sublime boy’s love manga with older (not teenaged) characters and what promises to be excellent character designs. I’m picky about character designs, particularly in yaoi. I say that it’s promising because I haven’t opened it yet: it’s shrinkwrapped. As any fujoshi knows, this means there’s
Sublime only publishes manga and not light novels, despite being the U.S. publisher best suited to do so. They have a major corporate parent - Viz - and they’ve been in the BL business for ten years now.
According to their site’s FAQ, they do not publish BL light novels “as they are very costly to translate and do not sell as well as BL manga do.” I’m not sure what they’re basing the “don’t sell as well” part on. But then, I remember - as perhaps they do - the old Digital Manga Publishing yaoi light novels. I was the translation rewriter/editor on a number of them. Fred Lui at DMP used to tell me that their yaoi novels actually sold quite well, but despite that, DMP (or Digital Manga Inc. as they’re known today) stopped publishing yaoi novels of the sort that I worked on years ago. Looking at their site these days there is new manga, but all the novels look like reprints. Not sure why they gave up on that model...
But! In another surprise find at B&N - I bought the following from them the other day:
OMFG... what gorgeous art and character designs! And it’s a light novel! The description states that the story involves “romanticized love between two men (danmei).” What’s more... there’s already an anime of it at Funimation! How did I miss this when it came out?
The publisher - and all kudos to them - is Seven Seas. I’m looking forward to reading more danmei books and to seeing what else Barnes & Noble sells in the future.
