East Loves West: Harlequin-Style Romance Manga

Even before a certain author made the astute observation that a young man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife, romance has been among the top-selling genres of fiction. And yet despite outselling numerous other genres, it also gets very little respect, especially if it isn't written by someone from the 18th or 19th century – and if I'm honest, it didn't get a whole lot of respect even then, with Nathaniel Hawthorne's comment about “damned scribbling women” being lobbed squarely at the genres that evolved into what we today call romance. But none of this can keep it down, and it retains its title as the Queen of Genre Fiction, to say nothing about being one of the easiest ways to break into publishing, if only because there's such an appetite for romance novels that publishers are more willing to look at new writers.

It is easy to pick on romance. After all, seen in a different light, the whole genre is basically societal expectations packaged as wish-fulfillment. But it's also the only genre that is guaranteed to have a happy ending (with authors like K.J. Charles and Cat Sebastian reframing what that looks like), not to mention one of the few places where you can get away with batshit crazy plot devices and not have anyone look askance. Secret baby? Go for it. More dukes than could reasonably fit in the British Isles? Awesome. Were-badgers? Bring it on. Almost nothing is off the table and virtually any and everything can be sexy.

Manga is no exception to this, and while there's plenty we could say about the standards, there's an even more interesting phenomenon out there: manga adapting Harlequin romances and manga written specifically to mimic them. While you may remember paperback editions of “Harlequin Pink” and “Harlequin Violet” manga back in the early 2000s with the pages printed in pink and purple ink respectively (and now selling for a cool $25 - $60 a copy), the advent of the e-book has heralded an explosion of Harlequin's manga adaptations, published under the aegis of SB Creative, who also owns the GA Bunko light novel imprint. Canada-based publisher Harlequin hit the Japanese market in 1979 and began releasing manga versions of its novels in 1998, and they took off. Now if you browse e-books under SB Creative's “Romance Comics” imprint you'll find not only Harlequin adaptations, but also the aforementioned original Harlequin-style manga. And that is some interesting stuff indeed.

Before we go any farther, it's important to establish what makes a romance novel a “Harlequin” beyond the publisher. In very simple terms, there are many subgenres and types of romance novels, and Harlequin, also called category or series romances, are published in numbered books and tend to be shorter than non-category titles. They're also much tamer; while category romances now do have sex scenes, they're understated and less explicit than your average bodice ripper. That means that when you're talking about so-called “trashy” romances, you're not usually talking about what Harlequin and other category romance outfits publish – they may be ridiculous, but they aren't usually all that raunchy.

So what happens when manga creators are given the chance to create their own category-style romances? A lot of the same things that happen when anyone is given the same opportunity, but if you've never read a category romance then there are a few things that are definitely going to stand out!

What's With all the Sheiks?

Romance category, manga or otherwise, has more than its fair share of tropes and trends, but one of the most enduring and simultaneously baffling is what is politely called “desert romance.” That's code for “a story where a white woman (usually English) is romanced (or captured) by a culturally suspect Arabian nobleman.” While we can point to origins like the 13th-century text The Arabian Nights' Entertainment, specifically Richard Burton's sexy (for the Victorians) 19th-century translation, the blame for this, if we're being honest, lies squarely with Edith Maude Hull and her 1919 novel The Sheik, which was made into a film in 1921 starring Rudolph Valentino. This charmer of a book can also get a lot of the blame for the so-called “forceful romance,” because heroine Diana is repeatedly raped by the eponymous sheik before they decide they love each other and live happily ever after. Lovely. But whatever our feelings on the subject are, the fact of the matter is that desert romances have become a staple of Harlequin books and manga, with some of the titles being adapted including The Sheik's Convenient Princess by Liz Fielding, The Governess and the Sheik by Marguerite Kaye, and A Cinderella for the Desert King by Kim Lawrence. To call these Orientalism might be putting it mildly – they seem to owe more to Hull than anything better researched. More interesting than that, however, is the plethora of manga-original desert romance comics, because in their efforts to mimic the western Harlequin authors, we get stories that are basically Orientalism by way of Occidentalism – a two-fold fetishization.

So what does that actually entail? If we look specifically at a multi-author series all based around the same fictional Middle Eastern nation, The Diamond Love Stories, we can see variations on the theme. Takako Hashimoto's Love Letters Against the Deep Blue Sea, the first in the series, is very much in the Hull vein – Bianca and Salim hate each other, have marginally consensual off-the-page sex, and then suddenly love each other while Bianca traipses about in period-perfect Italian gowns and slightly suspicious “Arabian” ones. Wish Upon a Blue Star, the second book and one of two by Rin Ogata, throws in a random British butler for maximum fetishization purposes – Princess Sofia is the rebellious twin sister of the sheik character and of course can only find happiness in fleeing with Bernard to America. Her brother Ismael, naturally, has to learn to be a more tolerant person with the help of western governess Octavia in his book, Love Blooms in the Jasmine Air, which again takes a very Hull-like view of Middle Eastern culture alongside the familiar manga portrait of Anglo culture. Finally Shoko Maki's Sinking into the Blue Sand's Kiss pits American Josie against Rasheed, who pursues her for the blue diamond that features into all four of the books in the series in what is once again a very Hull-like romance.

Even without the highly problematic depiction of the Middle East and “sheiks,” the prevalence of this particular trope in romance comics is staggering. Then again, if you're itching to read about The King of Hot Sands and his Substitute Love, The Sheik and his Desert Wife, or The Sheik and a Desert Pearl, SB Creative's got you covered.

WHO is Writing These?!

It happens to all of us – you've found a creator you love, but then you run out of their books. In the case of manga, that can sometimes be due to the fact that there's no one translating any more of a given creator's titles. (I am going to naively assume legal edition reading here.) But sometimes you can still find their works if you mix up your searching habits – and surprisingly enough, romance comics are one of the places you can sometimes turn up shoujo and josei mangakas' work. It can go one of two ways: either the manga artist simply adapted and illustrated a Harlequin title or they've created their own from whole cloth, penning the story as well as drawing the images. How likely that seems to be largely based on the age of the creator – we may not have any of Yumiko Igarashi's works (Candy Candy, Georgie!) in English, which is a crime in and of itself even if Georgie sent me on a day-long crying jag when I read it in Italian, but you can absolutely enjoy her brand of fluffy, sparkly, elaborate shoujo art in her work for Harlequin. Ditto for Jun Makimura (Attacker You!, Apple Pie Story), and nearly the same for Chieko Hara, although we're lucky enough to have both The Legend of the Rainbow and Amber Silhouette available in English as well.

But assuming you're not the classic shoujo geek I am, there are still some major surprises lurking in the depths of romancecomics.com. Perhaps the most surprising are Kei Kusunoki and Kaoru Ohashi, whose work, which got a fair amount of translation from Tokyopop, DMP, and Aurora back in the day, included horror titles like Sengoku Nights, Nightmares for Sale, and Diabolo. Like Igarashi, Hara, and Makimura, they're strictly adapting in terms of what's available as of this writing, but it's almost worth a look just to see how they make the genre jump. I assume that there are fewer exposed intestines, but you never know.

Meanwhile, fans of You Higuri, creator of such titles as Ludwig II, Seimaden, Cantarella, and Gorgeous Carat (the balance of which are BL) can enjoy her take on the desert romance, The Desert Rose and the Arrogant Sheik, or the 1930s-set Hollywood title Private Lessons, which is definitely on the racier side of what the category romances do. It's also pretty fun and Higuri clearly enjoys the setting, which is a major bonus. Chiho Saitō (yes, that Chiho Saitō of Revolutionary Girl Utena fame) doesn't seem quite as enamored of her mid-Victorian world in Princess Alice and the King, but let's face it, Chiho Saitō's name alone is nearly enough inducement. Her story's much darker, involving coups and curses, and her art is a gorgeous as ever. Tomomi Yamashita (Apothecarius Argentum) takes the less-common contemporary route in her romance between a steakhouse owner and a city councilman, and Mick Takeuchi's Serenade of the Pirate King is also plenty entertaining. Takeuchi had two titles at least partially translated in the early 2000s, Her Majesty’s Dog being the one that lasted longer, which makes finding another of her books feel like an especial treat, not least because it's complete in one volume. It also involves a music-loving, dashingly romantic pirate, leading a friend to comment that it perhaps ought to have been titled His Barque is Worse than his Bite.

Bad Boys Who Aren't, Love Triangles, and Cross-Dressers: Popular Tropes

Anyone familiar with romance fiction probably wouldn't be surprised by the sheer magnitude of truly awful men who feature in romance comics. Let's just say that Emily Bronte's Heathcliff has a lot of imitators, and they are stalking their ladies all over the pages and panels of these works. But unlike with the majority of non-category romances, most of the heroes of Harlequins (the modern ones at least) are just wearing a bad boy disguise, and are instead actually secret sweeties. But that doesn't stop the cover copy from trying its hardest to make them look terrible, even if it turns out that reading down a little further will quickly prove the first line a lie. Take the copy for Mick Takeuchi's Serenade of the Pirate King, for example – the bolded intro loudly proclaims, “The man I love is a ruthless, savage pirate king!”, only for three lines down to inform us that “Cecilia feared he would be a cutthroat pirate, but while spending time with Dylan, she is drawn to his kindness.” Takako Hashimoto's heroine Rose in Jewels of Destiny “gets caught up in [gentleman thief Albert]'s affairs and ends up getting kidnapped by the thief after trying to stop him from stealing the Rosario, her family's treasured heirloom. But among other things, has the thief also stolen...her heart,” because who doesn't love it when Stockholm Syndrome is incorporated into romantic fiction? Other winning scenarios that belie the apparent charm of their heroes are Rikako Tsuji's The Beautiful King's Purchase (he buys the heroine at an auction), Ayumu Aso's The Ice Sheik's Prisoner (if she marries him, he'll let her father out of prison), and of course the ever-popular plot device the heroine of Azumi Kana's Cinderella and the Ice Cold Earl is subjected to, “the man she is to marry is the heir to an earl… handsome but difficult, with a terrible habit for criticism and expressionless eyes as cold as ice.”

Alongside this trope, romance comics also have a fondness for one woman torn between two men, much more so than in most romance novels, category or otherwise. Hiromi Kobayashi has an entire trilogy devoted to love triangle stories, two with one woman and two men (Two CEOs and High Heels and Poison, Honey, and Prince) and one with one man and two women, An Angel, a Devil, and a CEO. (I, for one, will be very sad if the CEOs in the first one aren't wearing the high heels.) Jun Togashi's Two Princes and Love at the Palace takes the trope that Chiho Saitō subverts slightly in Princess Alice and the King in having two half-brothers both angling for the heart of the heroine while Karan Dan has two full brothers in competition for Ambrose's heart in Two Princes and Their Secret Love, but Hitomi Okazaki hands-down wins the category by combining princes and CEOs in The Mirror Princes and the Princess in Love, where hapless Alice, as the copy says, “swings between twins.”

But probably the area where romance manga varies the most from its Harlequin sisters is in the use of cross-dressing heroines. While it's hardly unique to the format, for whatever reason there are definitely more original category-style romances that feature the not-so-hapless heroine eschewing her gowns for trousers. The transformation is usually for no other purpose than to get the girl near the guy, which is disappointing, but the maiden fair who cuts her hair for love usually is a little bit more willing to stand up for herself than some of her more traditionally feminine counterparts. Elesia from Takako Shigematsu's The White Rose and the Black Lion is searching for her missing father and already has the necessary sword skills to pass herself off as a squire, and unlike some other heroines, her disguise is at least passably convincing. Princess Caitlin, meanwhile, is a certified badass in Reiko Mochizuki's The Pirate King and the Princess with the Dragon Crest – no one is going to tell her who to be or what to do (until the romance bit kicks in, of course), and she's determined to live her life on her own terms, which have little to do with the 18th-century court she's been raised in. Other heroines might dress down as a peasant (The Fairy and The Mercenary) or up as a lady (Royal Court Love Banquet; both by Rikako Tsuji, who clearly likes this sort of thing). But hands down the crazy prize goes to Wedding Dress for an Angel by Kuroyurihime, where Marion is plucked from a convent to model for Alessio's fashion show.

A Lack of Secret Babies: Not so Popular Tropes

For seasoned readers of category and other romance novels, there are, of course, a few things that you'll notice aren't really there in these books. One of the major ones is the near-total lack of secret babies. What's a secret baby? A child the heroine has without the hero's knowledge, almost always his. It's fairly popular in western romance, but among the romance comics translated into English, only two show up, and one of them, Captivated by the Icy Earl by Yukako Saejima, only barely fits the trope, since the characters are married and living together, just not getting along. (Also, bonus points if you can name the other trope in that one!) Natsue Ogoshi's The Billionaire and the Stubborn Goddess is the sole true “secret baby” story available, which is definitely striking in the larger romance context.

For perhaps similar reasons, which I think we can assume have to do with the perceived “purity” of the heroines (and yes, there are scads of essays on the topic of why virgin heroines are still romance genre staples), the “fake wedding” trope is also largely absent. Again, I only found one – Yuki's aptly titled The CEO and the Sham Wedding, which is pretty much what it says on the wrapper. The Knight and the Maiden with the Lustrous Hair by Saho Natsumi is a combination of the fake wedding/engagement and another fairly unpopular one as far as romance comics go: amnesia, with Count Gawain stumbling across Melanie, “a village girl covered in mud.” The copy goes on to say that “Melanie has lost much of her memories, but Gawain senses a mysterious refinement in her, and asks her to play the temporary part of his fiancée,” you know, as one does. It's maybe not quite as interesting that I could only find one in the “forced to become a courtesan” subgenre because that one's fairly rare in western romance novels, too; it's maybe more impressive that there even is one to be found, Kuroyurihime's The Poet and the Rose of Demimonde. Ignoring the fact that there either needs to be a “the” in front of “Demimonde” or that the brothel in question is named for the entire realm of ill-repute, Lucy's status as a fallen woman may be a thing of more subjectivity than the subgenre would suggest, since she's unable to be with her true love Hubert because she needs to become a highly-paid mistress, not because she actually is one.

Finally, the biggest surprise may be the dearth of vampire romances in these comics. While Harlequin itself isn't known for paranormal love stories, other category romances certainly are, and some, like Carina Press, are actually owned by Harlequin. Despite this, only Rikako Tsuji (who has come up a lot in this article) has a vampire romance on offer, A Thousand Nights of Crimson Wine, although there are a couple of adaptations of vampire romances out there as well. Vampires aren't my thing, so I haven't read Tsuji's offering, but given the title, I am unable to give this a 100% Sheik-free guarantee.

I hope you've enjoyed this little journey through the back alleys of what gets translated and published digitally. Romance comics seem to be doing quite well despite the lack of press they get outside of their own niche, and to be honest, they're oftentimes a lot of fun. They also have some gorgeous artwork and the certainty of a happy ending as well as the chance to read some creators you might otherwise not get to. As an added bonus, they're rarely, if ever, more than six U.S. dollars. So whether you're a romance fan, looking for an unintentional laugh, or just in need of shaking your reading up as we all try to stay safe, these are a lot of fun to check out.