Gravitation: Will shonen-ai anime capture a wide audience?

Gravitation V.1, Fateful First Encounter. V.2, Stars on the Rise. V.3, One Million Copies!? V.4, Secrets of a Troubled Past.
TV series (13 episodes), 2000-01. Director: Bob Shirohata. V.1, 2 & 4, three episodes/75 minutes; v.3, four episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.95. Distributor: The Right Stuf International.

Shuichi Shindo and Hiroshi Nakano, two recent high-school grads, decide to start a rock duo, Bad Luck. Shuichi, the lead singer and lyricist, can’t think of anything to write. Hiro, the guitarist, jokingly suggests he find someone to fall in love with to get inspiration.

Shuichi does. But it’s not with a girl.

Shonen-ai (pretty-boy love = male homosexual romance) manga has been popular in Japan for some time, especially by female authors for women readers. Gravitation, based on the manga series by Maki Murakami, is not the first to be adapted for anime, but it is the first to be aimed for a broad audience. A two-episode OAV version in 1999 was popular enough that this 13-episode version was produced (by Studio Deen) for broadcast from Oct. 4, 2000 through January 10, 2001 over the WOWOW satellite pay-TV channel.

This American DVD release is age-rated 13+.

While Shuichi was in high school he idolized the #1 rock band, Nittle Grasper, and wanted to start his own band just like them. Nittle Grasper broke up but its keyboardist, Touma Seguchi, started the N-G record company, which has become Japan’s top producer of teen music CDs and developer of new rock bands. Seguchi agrees to give Bad Luck a try as the opening act at a pop concert of ASK, the band that N-G is currently promoting. Seguchi is brainstorming their opening number in a park when the wind blows his sheet of scribbled lyrics into the face of a handsome man walking past. The latter reads the lyrics, sneers that they are juvenile drivel showing zero talent, and leaves.

Seguchi — furious — demands to know what right the man has to criticize him and learns he is Eiri Yuki, currently the most popular writer of women’s romance novels. A confrontation stirs emotions in the two that neither expect. Shuichi is the first to realize that he is in love with Eiri, while Eiri tries to deny his feelings and discourage Shuichi.

Gravitation mixes comedy (including exaggeratedly cute “super-deformed” animated sequences) and the glamor of the pretty-boy pop-rock music industry with serious gay romantic melodrama. Seguchi wants to expand Bad Luck to a trio by adding Suguru Fujisaki, a mid-teen prodigy keyboardist; how will he fit in with Shuichi and Hiro? How will Hiro react to his best friend becoming gay? Ryuichi Sakuma, the former lead singer in Nittle Grasper, is amused by Shuichi’s hero worship of him and guest-sings a number at Bad Luck’s first appearance, making it outshine ASK’s featured performance. Shuichi figures out how to get Bad Luck favorable publicity on a TV variety program. This arouses the jealousy of ASK’s lead singer, Taki Aizawa, who learns of Shuichi’s gay romance with Eiri and threatens to out the two, ruining both their careers, if Shuichi does not disband Bad Luck.

Shuichi’s and Eiri’s romance has its own problems. Eiri’s parents and older sister are trying to push him into a traditional arranged marriage (to a girl he does not love, but who genuinely loves him and whose feelings he does not want to hurt). Eiri also has a Dark Secret in his past.

Murakami’s original Gravitation manga is being published by TOKYOPOP for the unexpectedly large American adolescent female readership for romance manga. Will there be an American market for shonen-ai manga and anime, too?