Trans Men/Mascs in Storytelling, Part One (3) To Kill Your Womanhood

 

“And so, the bride met her death. But she did not meet her end. Within her lifeless body roiled a tempest of hate. Transforming her into a nightmare, into an Onryō.” - Play Narrator, Blue Eye Samurai (The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride, released 2023, written by Amber Noizumi and Yana Bille)

Blue Eye Samurai, written by co-writers Amber Noizumi (she/her) and Michael Green (he/him) is marketed and described as being about a woman who is forced to disguise as a man as a means to take revenge against her father and three other white men he is associated with. The on screen portrayal, however, has our titular character, Mizu, react with aggression whenever he is referred to as a girl or a woman. On screen he navigates the world as a man and is referred to as such, in the writers room he is referred to as a woman, sometimes with a they/them thrown in, as described by Green in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “To have a character like that who lives in a time, who wouldn’t necessarily have a vocabulary to consider her gender, it’s been really heartening and interesting hearing people see the show now thinking about what Mizu might identify as. Referring to Mizu as she or they — that’s amazing. We made sure in the first episode, when people were reading it, that it was a misleading read. We said her gender was Mizu. We threw in a they or two because we wanted the experience of the reader to be a surprise at the end that they never saw that coming.” ( https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/blue-eye-samurai-michael-green-amber-noizumi-interview-1235636619/ )

In the same interview, Noizumi delves further into Mizu’s ambiguous gender, and how that parallels him being mixed race: “ I think mainly because I’m a woman, and I was imagining what it would be like for me there. I guess it was also just giving her a second otherness, that it wasn’t just her having to deal with her race. It was somebody who had to overcome two challenges. She had to be so driven and so focused, and we can really see that she didn’t just take it lying down. She had to really rise up.”

and further in: “With Blue Eye Samurai, we wanted it to just break all of the boxes. Mizu isn’t Japanese or white, she’s not female or a male, and this show is not like anything anybody’s ever seen. It’s not a cartoon, it’s not anime and it’s not live action.”

In narratives of this nature, ranging from Osamu Tezuka’s (he/him) Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight in English translations) to Riyoko Ikeda’s (she/her) The Rose of Versailles to Disney’s Mulan (directed by Barry Cook (he/him) and Tony Bancroft (he/him)), the narrative brush stroke is the same–we are presented with a woman who by some force of plot is forced to pretend to be a man, but it is while living as a man that she (or rather he) explores her identity. Often these narratives end with a return to womanhood, but the majority of onscreen presence is our “woman” living and exploring relationships as a man. Going as far back (and further, of course) as William Shakespeare’s (he/him) Twelfth Night, or What You Will, these narratives have always existed to explore gender roles and sexuality. Whether or not they had the words for it, these narratives on some level explore transmasculine experiences, and often queer experiences broadly, through the lens of plausible deniability.

Mizu is certainly not explicitly transmasculine, but he was intentionally written with our experiences. We see him uncomfortable to the point of aggression at being referred to as a woman, when forced to be a wife, he initially refuses as he is “nobody’s wife.” We have an elongated sequence of him being uncomfortable with his developing chest and binding it. The viewer learns that he is “not really a man” at the end of the first episode when Ringo walks in on him bathing and comments on his chest, the shot exposing his fully nude form acting as shock value. As Green puts it in the aforementioned interview “The reader would have to contend with their own presumption, that, ‘Well, clearly anyone who’s this badass must be a guy.’”

One of the most common ways that a “woman disguising as a man” is revealed to be “not a man” is through exposure of his body (I am using he/him pronouns for spite). The idea that this character is challenging misogynistic stereotypes by “being a badass woman” but simultaneously what is revealed to prove his womanlieness is the body he was born with. These stories give us characters living on the tight rope of forced femininity and chosen masculinity and yet the end game is often for their body to be exposed of not their own will and for them to be pulled from a chosen masculine expression to what is expected for a woman.

It is often said of the tomboy that she is accepted socially, but what people often forget about the tomboy is that she has an expiry date. Even narratives featuring tomboys end with her growing into a more feminine presentation. The idea of the tomboy is something of childhood–you grow out of it and become a woman. Transmasculinity is viewed in a similar sense, as is lesbianism, these are things that you are supposed to grow out of and accept your place in heteronormative society.

The episode The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride in particular exemplifies the basis of Mizu as a trans man written by people who do not view him that way, but choose to use those narrative threads as symbolism for his thirst for revenge. This episode exists in three timelines, one acting as a framing device, and of every episode in the show, I’d argue it’s the most intriguing.

The framing device of the episode is a play about a ronin and a bride, it is narrated while puppets are used to tell the story. The meat of the episode is Mizu protecting sex workers from the yakuza, it’s an elongated, tense, and brutally violent action scene that gives supporting characters Ringo and Akemi moments to shine. The episode flashes back to a marriage Mizu was forced into by his mother (or, who he believed to be his mother).  She nurses him to health from an injury and coerces him into marrying Mikio, a retired samurai looking for a wife who would provide well for both of them. He is resistant initially but agrees to it so that his mother will have a stable life.

It is in this episode that we are shown Mizu playing the role of a woman. He stops “pretending to be a man” and performs as a wife, quite awkwardly at first as up to this point he has lived as a boy and a man. Him and Mikio begin to bond, their marriage of convenience transitioning into one of romance. Mizu opens up to Mikio about his “disguising as a man” and his training with a sword, later, in a moment of emotional intimacy while sparring, Mikio asks to see “all of Mizu”. Mizu spars with his full strength, and with little trouble overpowers Mikio. Mikio calls him a demon, and it is implied, sells him out to samurai looking to collect the bounty on his head. The episode ends with Mizu killing those samurai, his wifely makeup that he wore to win his husband back ruined. Mikio and his mother accuse each other of selling him out, Mikio kills his mother, he kills Mikio. This ending cements his path of revenge, his living as a man and seeking revenge therefore are intrinsically intertwined.

In a moment that mirrors his own betrayal, he lets the men Akemi’s father sent to retrieve her take her, despite her pleas for him to save her.

The play ends with the ronin killing the bride, and the bride coming back as an Onryō.

This episode is a stroke of storytelling brilliance, combined with the outstanding visuals of the show broadly, it forces you to let the symbolism sink in, giving you something to pick apart. At various points the play seems to depict the relationship between Mizu and his mother, or Mizu and his husband, but I read it as it showing us Mizu’s relationship with himself and the gender roles expected of him. The representation of his masculinity killing his womanhood, and his womanhood changing into that of the Onryō.

Quite literally he is shown to us as a vengeful spirit, the Onryō often being born from a woman who was wronged in life both plays into the idea that he kills the “woman part of him” whilst also still framing his story as that of a woman’s. His masculinity is shown to us when he enacts violence, it is his drive for revenge, his discipline to perfect his swordplay and remain formidable. After killing the woman he was he closes off his emotions, if he assists people around him it is a means to his own end (so he would say, though his actions imply a battle with his own empathy).

And while we have stunning moments later into the series where he realises that he must accept all of himself to realise his full strength, there is a strong disconnect from how the narrative tries to frame him vs how he acts on screen. I think often about when he was hunching in front of a mirror, wincing at his reflection, trying to hide his chest–I see myself in that. To remember these moments and then to read the showrunners describe him as a woman, even with a sort of “gendered otherness”, it is clear they don’t view him as a man, but it is clear that Mizu doesn’t view himself as a woman.

Much like the previous discussion about Paul Millander, we also see Mizu symbolically kill the woman part of himself, and we see how his expressing masculinity is narratively tied to him becoming, or being viewed as, more monstrous. If a woman cannot be a woman, we must wonder what trauma befell her, and should she lack this core nurturing part of herself, what sort of beast does that spawn? Does the symbolic figure bearing similarities to that of a trans man grow more monstrous when he does masculine?

Stories of this nature play into a couple very pertinent stereotypes about transmasculine people. The first is that we become men from some form of trauma, there must be a reason we don’t want to be women. That is what the focus always is: “Why do you want to be a man?” implying we must have some issue with “staying a woman”, and perhaps some level of internalized misogyny. As though internalized misogyny is especially present in transmasculine people. The second, tying into the first, is that we transition to escape misogyny. This implies that we can escape it, and that if we did, it is somehow a fault on our end–as though not seeking to escape oppression something honourable.

These notions do, however, become internalized by us. Transmasculine people exist on an intersection between transphobia and misogyny, and for men of colour, vilified masculinity. This intersection is not the same that transfeminine people face, however, and thus it would certainly suit us to have our own name for it (I’ve been using the term antitransmasculinity and will continue to). A tactic of antitransmasculinity is the refusal to let us name it, to put us in a position where we either say “yes, we experience misogyny (which we do)” so that the response is “so you’re basically a woman”, or “no, we do not experience misogyny” so that the response will be “so you transitioned into privilege, into the oppressor class”.

A debate so prevalent in our own community that elevated and respected trans theorists engage in it, in his article Transmisandry is Not Real, Devon Price (he/it) has this to say: “It seems to me that some trans men who talk about ‘transmisandry’ seem to find it outrageous that they experience sexism. It seems fundamentally more wrong to them that they are sexually assaulted, denied tubal ligations, asked to remember in-law’s birthdays, and mocked for enjoying ukulele music and slash fiction than when women are.” ( https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/transmisandry-is-not-real ) This article is pushing back against the idea that the intersection of oppression transmasculine people face has any factors unique to us, and argues that it does not need a name to set it apart from other intersections of oppression. In reading through it, my thought was simply “It is outrageous and wrong for anyone to experience sexual assault and medical gatekeeping”–and the idea that these actions are more acceptable against transmasculine people than they are cis women is present in Blue Eye Samurai itself.

Akemi is an excellently written character, even her moments of sexuality give her autonomy and power, she steals the show, she is undeniably intelligent and badass (she’s my favourite character in the show, I might be glazing her a bit). Mizu, however, is shown to us to be “not really a man” when his naked body is lingered on and his chest is comedically commented on in an, in my opinion, out of character line from Ringo (he refers to Mizu’s chest as “peaches” in a reference to a prior scene where he was intimate with a couple sex workers). Akemi’s womanhood and the power she learns to gain with it are never treated in a leery or comedic light. But Mizu’s body being exposed against his own will is comedic, he is an acceptable target for a shot exposing his nudeness, a body we are shown he is uncomfortable with. The misogyny and transphobia of treating his chest as though it is indicative of his “real gender” is somehow acceptable, almost a punishment for him “pretending to be a man”.

To assume and argue that misogyny does not grow a new head aimed at transmasculine people is a dangerous level of ignorance.

Blue Eye Samurai is a standout, nearly a masterpiece, and maybe in season two we will see Mizu’s masculinity written in a more empathetic sense, not tied to bloodlust or him becoming a monster, but simply part of who he is outside of his quest for vengeance. Or perhaps we will simply get more shots lingering on his naked form, to mock us for ever thinking that a woman could be a man, silly.