fujoshi interlude –
call of the NIGHT HEAD

(this is the first entry in a series discussing night head and its female fanbase) 

Because my understanding of NIGHT HEAD has been framed by its notoriety and popularity among western anime fans, particularly women, I’ve always been interested in this exact context and moment in time – how popular was the original show while it was broadcasting in the 1990s? What was its Japanese fanbase like? The above excerpt is fantastic, as it opens up a conversation around a somewhat under-examined topic: female audiences creating fan works around non-anime/manga content. 

I assume most readers will be aware of the terminology I’ll be using here, but just to make sure at the top: 

• Doujinshi are self-produced fan works – usually comics or prose – which are made and sold (often) for large-scale events like Comiket. Think fanzines, think fanfics! 
• BL (boys’ love) is the umbrella term for male-male content marketed towards women.¹
• Fujoshi is the self-deprecating moniker taken up by the BL fanbase.²

So, as I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been looking into the contemporary female fandom for NIGHT HEAD! Consider this the first look at some of my findings. I decided to make this first post on the subject now based on the timeline that George presented in his book – ‘the turn of the year’ would imply december of 1992, which aligns with the episodes we’ve covered so far. In a separate interview, he says that he believes it was “around the latter half of the broadcast” that this sort of popularity started to really gain momentum.   

This is interesting, but also, makes things somewhat frustrating – because NIGHT HEAD began in autumn 1992 and (if I trust George) became popular enough to have doujinshi sent to him by winter 1992, that just so happens to place it before the winter comiket³… Meaning, if I had a comiket catalogue to hand, I might see evidence of its popularity at that time, but I won’t have anything from when it began to air to compare that with – to see the ‘rise’, if you will. Of course, there’s also interim doujinshi events such as Comic City,⁴ but I’ve found it difficult to obtain as many catalogues from those events (much to my chagrin). But, I’ll keep trying!

For now, while I have been collecting comiket catalogues from the right time period, this post will focus on some of my research questions, as well as what I’ve been able to gather without having a lot of data from events. I will be posting a bunch about comiket etc in future, though – do not worry! Those catalogues are dense and interesting enough to warrant their own posts. 

My biggest caveat here is that I don’t own any of these doujinshi, and haven’t read them – though I would very much like to.⁵ These are doujinshi I’ve discovered through places like mandarake and surugaya, and they cover a period through the early to mid 1990s that includes – and goes beyond – the broadcast of the show (1992) and the release of the movie (1994). I’m hoping that this post can become the foundation of a larger, more in-depth collection, so that these works can be appreciated in full!

I have a few questions that I keep in mind as I collect my materials and look through them later: 

• Based on what we’ve seen in the show up to now, what themes interested people – and what clicked for fujoshi in particular? Male vulnerability and intimacy? Trauma? Psychic powers? New age mysticism? All of the above?
• What plot elements from the show did they explore in more depth? Which ‘moments’ are repeated or expanded on?
• Based on the above anecdote, who sent George their doujinshi?? 

After looking through as many of the doujinshi titles as were available, I started to notice a pattern I hadn’t expected: a significant portion were actually RPF, or Real Person Fiction of the two main actors, rather than ‘NIGHT HEAD’ proper. This raised a few more questions for me: 

• What do those even cover? Being on set? Running away from fans, Hard Day’s Night style?
• What does the removal of psychic powers do for ‘plot’? 
• How different or similar did people think their ‘characters’ were, compared to their actors? 
• Pre-internet, where were they getting information on the actors (and their interactions) from? Magazine interviews? TV? Pure imagination?

Now, without further ado, I present to you my personal collection of NIGHT HEAD doujinshi covers – I’ve done my best to gather information on the teams that worked on them and the dates they were released, but in some cases, this information wasn’t available. Doujinshi without date attribution for release will be at the bottom of the pile, but hopefully I can eventually triangulate where they belong! 

NNN.Co.LTD

麻倉かれん / 帝国堂

Beau Cerveau

立野真琴 / 浅草サンバ / JUNGLE HEART

わたなべゆり / 働く婦人の家・蛇口主義舎分室

1. Speaking for the majority of anglosphere/western fandoms, this term jostled for prominence for a long time against yaoi, but is now the prevailing genre designation as far as I understand it. However, back in the 1990s, yaoi was often the primary terminology, especially among doujinshi creators and consumers in Japan. ↩︎
2. Literal translation, “rotten woman/girl”. ↩︎
3. An event which takes place twice a year, winter / summer ↩︎
4. Not affiliated with comiket, these events happen more frequently throughout the year, and, not exclusively in Tokyo ↩︎
5. It’s become increasingly difficult to buy and sell secondhand doujinshi, especially older ones, with the closure of places like meikido, and the lack of online stores for places like K-Books. While some doujins can come up on yahoo auctions occasionally, they’re often overpriced, and there’s not quite the same fun of browsing through loads ↩︎