Kaimeiji Yu Addendum

In the May edition of RRRRRR I wrote about four techniques used in four Kaimeiji Yu manga¹ to maximise the sense of despair and hopelessness experienced by its stars. As with anything I write, upon hitting publish and taking a hot shower, my mind cleared and even more points of interest came into focus. So part 2 is a bonus chapter so I can gush even more about the frightening, erotic world that Kaimeiji imagined.

In RRRRRR I talked around the label applied to the underclass characters because they're not exactly perfect continuations of each other, so there's only partial consistency between volumes. In the interest of brevity and consistency in this article I'll just use K9 to distinguish the disenfranchised class from regular humans. I'm also mostly going to focus on volunteer Breeding and めしべのアルバム to illustrate examples.

Please take the R18 tag for this seriously. While there are no explicit images, the entire article is about the sexual efficacy of an adult manga series with explicit art. This is your last warning to return to safety.

Without further ado, let's jump into more of what makes Kaimeiji's works shine as BDSM erotic manga.

Mothers and Sons - Familial Responsibility

In volunteer Breeding there's a big focus on the familial relationship between a mother and her son, which quickly evolves into that of a pet and master. The K9 mother feels a duty to protect her son, just like she does with her daughter (mentioned in part 1), but where the society causes both mother and daughter to descend, sons of K9s retain their human status, making the father or son the de facto head of the house. The scene at the beginning where the mother is short with her son and sends him off to school despite his protests establishes the pecking order, and then the rest of the manga picks away at the mother's will until she submits herself as his subordinate. The lack of authority she has over her son is humiliating, but her inability to provide for him (outside of the strict new system) is an additional burden and a catalyst for the later fall she experiences.

We also see how society recognises the son's humanity while limiting the K9's freedom to move and act. After she's apprehended by the police, they treat her as a "lost dog" with a bad attitude, strip her, and hold her until her master (her son) returns. We see how she relies on his privilege to move through the world, such as requiring his ID to free her from police custody, and requiring special tags to commute without his, or another human's, presence.

Like daughters, the sons readily accept the system of oppression, but they entirely benefit from the arrangement, adapt to the new power dynamic and readily fill their role as masters. Out of all familiar people in her life, being commanded by her son is probably the least dignified option.

Bearing Permanent Marks

In めしべのアルバム, a rivalry between two human sisters leads to one of them branding the other (touched on in my April 12 Reading Report). The older sister, Carol, wants to get her younger sister, Wendy, out of the picture, so she drugs and brands her in order to mark her as a K9. As Carol explains, if people see the brand of a K9 they'll ignore any protests because the brand tells them everything they need to know.

Usually the basic mark just symbolises the status of a K9, but other labels are used such as for championship-winning K9 and K9 on duty. The reinforce the system by offering token rewards for K9 who conform.

In volunteer Breeding, a scannable barcode is used. Each barcode can be matched against the K9's master, demonstrating a great deal of organisation and further reinforcing how ingrained these systems are in the culture.

These brands, along with a handful of other (optional) physical markers, visually separate K9 from humans, and their permanence implies a lifetime of service, humiliation, and despair.

A Hierarchy of Slaves

It's not uncommon for K9 to lead and command other K9. In the middle chapters of めしべのアルバム the theatre instructor is a K9 who chastises and threatens her students, creating a small hierarchy within the classroom, but once humans enter the situation she immediately prostrates herself to them. The teacher at the beginning of volunteer Breeding who breaks the news to the main character is also a K9. While she's quite stern and direct to the main character, she also immediately falls into line and obeys commands when greater hierarchies become apparent - she even falls below the main character's son, her student, because all humans are above K9.

This is similar to the Sex Traitor element I wrote about in RRRRRR. Instead of supporting each other, the oppressed seek relief by grasping for fragments of power and wielding them against each other. Once again this reinforces the grief of new K9s who quickly learn that they have no one to rely on if they don't support the status quo.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The last element that supports these stories is that the system works, without fail, to convert these women into obedient K9s. Resistance is consistently and frequently punished, and just like a real animal in training, eventually she realises that her only hope of a comfortable life is to fall into place.

I think the tone of the stories would be totally different if the characters didn't eventually find their place in the society. Yes it's a cruel world the average person wouldn't wish upon their greatest enemies, but within the rigid system they're born into, maybe there's some comfort in purpose.

It's One for the Girlies

What about sexual content? How the manga illustrate actual sex acts also tells us something about the women in the story and who they're for. Despite being explicit, there's no intercourse, no x-rays, basically no penises, and very little contact with the K9 is ever shown. Light fingering and squeezing various body parts is the most intimate characters get.

Instead, whenever sexual contact is implied we see closeups of the K9's face, focusing on her discomfort, embarrassment, pain, and (of course) pleasure. I think this manga is for a specific type of woman who vicariously enjoys the consumption of her own body, who derives some pleasure from (controlled) embarrassment, exhibitionism, and a handful of other BDSM-adjacent activities and items. These stories are a safe, and pleasurable, way to engage in roleplay - through borrowed bodies - that deepens the reader's connection to her own body.

The stories leer at the female form, and they undoubtedly also explore a universe where (mostly) women exist as an underclass, but they also star women² and exclusively focus on the sexual pleasure of women, which makes them perfectly suited to a female reader. While men engage with these women and treat them in a way that's interpreted by the women (and audience) as sexual, there's no real sign that the men get any sexual pleasure at all. I'm not saying men can't enjoy these stories, of course, just that I think all of the above reasons coalesce into something that appeals to a very specific kind of masochistic woman.

What Else Can We Learn?

It wouldn't take a lot of extra work to take the dark elements of these manga and see how we can right the wrongs of our own society.

Parallels can be drawn between the K9 and how we treat animals in our civilisation. Physical punishment is excused as a necessary measure to discipline and domesticate K9 and animals. We see ourselves as de facto arbiters of their schedules, the scope of their worlds, choose when they eat, when they can speak, and even deprive them of essential biological processes. I'm not even talking about police dogs and work horses, I mean all kept animals. Is any of it ethical? I'm not arguing for full-scale pet reform, but reading these genuinely made me question my own relationship with animals. How many of them only see the light because they survived the dark tunnels we constructed for them?

Examining the story from the human angle, these stories are great examples of failures of class and sex consciousness. They show a complacent society with little concern for the welfare of others. They show a society that categorises people from birth. Reflecting on these made me think about my own tendency to take the path of least resistance, avoiding hard questions and turning a blind eye to the suffering of others for the sake of my own mental health. But we can take the negative image of these worlds, see where characters fail, and construct something better. These BDSM manga make me want to be a better person.

When discussing the manga with my fiance, he pointed out that these manga are a good illustration of the tendency for outsiders to be flabbergasted by the organisation of people that they aren't familiar with. In the real world we see this with things like: Westerners being surprised that China, Japan, and Korea don't experience a kinship because, "they're all Asian." Just look into the history of who the "White" label has been applied to in the west to see how much hair has been split over people who, as far as I care, are basically the same. So how do K9 differ from humans? Brands are man-made and can clearly be used on other humans. The dog whistle demonstrates some physiological difference, though it's not exactly evidence of other differences. When I think about the mother in volunteer Breeding, I think about how secure her life seems before it rapidly degrades. She's creative and diligent, but it's not enough in a world that considers her a K9 because of a sound she can hear.

I think asking questions like this are just part of consuming any media, which is why I find it so frustrating when people dismiss adult media as vapid. I think we can find meaning in almost any art, we just have to take it seriously.

Bonus: "That Just Raises Further Questions!"

In just 800 pages I was inspired to consider everything that made Kaimeiji's worlds work. In RRRRRR and this blog I touched upon the world, but a handful of moments also inspired me to wonder about what isn't shown, so I thought I'd just share a few seeds for further world development, in case anyone wants to expand upon Kaimeiji's ideas!

• K9 don't wear many clothes, but how do the fashion conventions change during winter or in the snow?
• There's only one example of a male K9 shown. I'd like to see more of their stories.
• We see a number of employed K9 such as teachers, police, instructors, performers, and more. I wonder what qualifies certain K9 for intellectual jobs.
• My impression is that the entire K9 thing is a farce to control a population for sexual and other purposes, *but* in volunteer Breeding there are instances where a dog whistle is used as evidence that K9 are physiologically different to humans. What other differences could there be?
• Foreign K9 are mentioned and shown. I wonder how far these conventions have spread throughout the world.
• We basically only see K9 between a limited age range, but I wonder what a retired K9 is like, if they retire at all, and it would be interesting to see the childhood branding.
• In the real world we have a huge variety of dog breeds partially because they (historically) fit specific functional niches. It would have been fun to see a greater variety of bodies for K9 to demonstrate their use in all sorts of industries.

¹Those manga were: めしべのアルバム, コレクション, bodyShop and volunteer Breeding.
²Yes, they even pass the Bechdel Test!! In fact, men are rarely the focus of any stories except by relation to women or as tools to advance the plot (with some fun exceptions, such as in コレクション which I don't touch on much).