Anyone writing a graduate thesis on the presentation of gender in Japanese pop culture will find abundant material in the manga series Otomen. Readers looking for laughs will also find what they seek in Otomen, but rather less abundantly.

The main characters are a trio of high school students, with the focus on Asuka (a boy who has a name more common for girls), who is in love with Ryo (a girl who has a name more common for boys). Their would-be romance is complicated by the constant presence of their friend Juta, who tries to play cupid, but is more often a third wheel.

Asuka is the captain of the school kendo team, and is admired by everyone as a "real man." But he is secretly an "otomen," a boy who is into girly things, such as cute stuffed animals and delicate pastries. He is at least as skilled at cooking and sewing as he is at sports, but he keeps that side of himself hidden. Ryo is Asuka's mirror image in that she has been raised by her socially inept father to follow in his footsteps as a martial arts champion, but she strives to put up a feminine front at school. Juta has a secret, too, as he is actually a best-selling manga artist who is using the couple as a model for his stories.

Over the first six volumes, this core group is joined by other otomen whose secret skills in make-up and flower arranging come in handy during several madcap adventures. The silly scenarios, with Asuka filling in for a sick rock star or confronting a runaway bull, provide a few chuckles, but much of the humor seems to have been lost in translation. Comments from mangaka Aya Kanno in Volume 4, mostly set at the beach during summer vacation, throw some light on the standards of shojo (girls) manga: "In this chapter, Asuka and his friends spend the entire time nearly naked [shirtless], so my assistants kept asking me how much muscle we should draw and whether we could draw abs and what we should do about nipples. This is what we settled on. I think this is about right for a girls' comic."

The listed bodily details are omitted from most of the drawings, and are only faintly hinted at in others. And if Kanno didn't mention body hair, it's because there's nary a wisp.

Those are legitimate aesthetic choices, but in Volume 6 the artist admits that two supporting characters, a boy and a girl who are not related, inadvertently "look so much alike...they're almost like twins." Kanno is not the only mangaka to make such a confession. When even artists can't tell their characters apart, perhaps their artform has become mired in convention.

If so, somebody needs to start breaking manga's portraiture rules as much as Otomen's characters try to break society's gender rules.

(Jul. 23, 2010)