This is going to include some spoilers for both Aoi Hana and Wandering Son, not just Anime wise but also for the Manga. If you care about those, you should probably go read both Manga like right now. It’s worth it.
I’ve always struggled to talk about Takako Shimura’s two most popular works, the lesbian drama “Sweet Blue Flowers” (Aoi Hana) and the absolute landmark of transgender media that is “Wandering Son” (Hourou Musuko), as two pieces of media that are just that. Manga about being lesbian and transgender. It’s important to note in my opinion that Shimura herself is, at the very least publically, a straight, cisgender woman and thus is in some ways lacks a certain understanding of what being an LGBT person is like. This does show, especially with a lot of the major things that often accompany gender anxiety for a lot of the trans community absent from the Manga.
It’s hard to say though that Shimura doesn’t get things right here. After all, as a pre-transition transgender woman, I find it hard to tell anyone that Aoi Hana is not relatable to a lesbian person and in a lot of places Wandering Son was extremely relatable to me from a trans perspective. One of the very first line in its Anime Adaptation stands out to me as one of the most memorable quotes in all of Japanese media and has served as the bio for my private twitter account for more than half a year for that exact reason. And there’s also absolutely no diminishing how important the empathetic representation of lesbian and transgender characters is to me and many many other LGBT people. But the characters that I keep coming back to in both Wandering Son and Aoi Hana, the ones that I relate to the most, aren’t those that are sure of their LGBT identity, but rather those still searching.
Looking for identity and yourself is one of the biggest themes in both works. Ironically so, considering both Nitori and Fumi, the two main characters even within the main duo of both works are the people that seem to be the surest of their identity. Nitori knows from the start that she wants to be a girl. Fumi knows from the start that she is a lesbian and while both Wandering Son and Aoi Hana are in a lot of ways a story about their lives as a transgender person or as a lesbian person, they are just as much stories about other people trying to find that reassurance. Be it A-chan’s confusion about love, Takatsuki’s insecurity about her gender identity in later parts of the series or even just Makoto not knowing why he wanted to become a girl.
Of course, this is a purely personal experience, but even for me as a transgender person, the transgender part of wandering son was never what was the most relatable. Nitori Shuuichi is a character I care about deeply, but I’d struggle to personally call her relatable. Fumi similarly is a character that I love deeply, but she’ll never be as relatable to me as A-chan looking and finding her own identity throughout the Manga or Takatsuki constantly questioning themselves. I’ve been on the search for an identity for almost all my life and in times where I was questioning my gender and identity as a whole, Takako Shimura not only introduced me to LGBT characters in popular media but much more importantly, taught me that I’m not on my own. That’s why I consider both of Wandering Son and Aoi Hana to me my favorite works in Manga.
AniReminiscing 