Japanese society runs on a set of unwritten conventions known as "reading the air."
No phone calls on the train. No raised voices in public. Never look better than your boss at the office. Never do anything at school that makes you "different from everybody else."
These unwritten rules weave into one enormous net that holds everyone inside the same pattern of behavior.
That is tatemae.
The public face. What you say for appearances.
In public, everyone is obliged to keep it intact.
Break it and you become "someone who can't read the air."
In Japan, that label is roughly equivalent to social death.
Set against it is honne.
What you actually think.
Or, put another way, private desire. The things that cannot be laid out on the table.
And the Japanese are astonishingly tolerant of honne.
The straitlaced middle-aged section chief at the office may be, in private, a rabid fan of some idol group.
The housewife who smiles politely at the supermarket all day may spend her nights deep in BL fan works.
Everyone knows this. Nobody points it out.
Because "what happens in private should stay in private."
Tsushima Kagami's problem was that his private had been dragged out into the public.
That was the violation.
What you do in private is your business, but you must not let everyone find out about it.
No sociology textbook puts it that way, yet every Japanese person understands the principle.
So public opinion detonated.
Not because adult manga itself was so unforgivable.
But because an Akutagawa Prize winner should never be publicly caught doing such a thing.
Two layers of error.
The first layer was doing it. The heavier one was the second layer: being found out.
This is that other famous feature of Japanese society, the culture of shame.
And shame here does not mean the fear of doing something wrong. It means the fear of being discovered afterward.
The turning point came when the professors and the older generation of novelists and literary giants began stepping up for him.
A good number of those professors and writers even volunteered that in their own youth they had regularly read adult magazines.
And said it was simply human nature.
Some even grew nostalgic about it: the sneaking around with classmates and friends, the battle of wits against their parents, that first sexual awakening.
And the Japanese public, already inclined to trust authority without question, was floored. Writers of that stature look at this sort of thing in private too?
So it isn't something shameful after all?
It was then that a single comment on an anonymous online forum was voted to the very top.
I always thought I was the only one who looked at this stuff in secret.
Every time I finished, I felt ashamed. I wondered whether there was something wrong with me.
But now I get it. Even those professors and famous novelists say it's just human nature.
So what's the harm in me looking?
The reply count under that comment blew past four digits within hours.
User after user announced that they finally had a theoretical basis for openly reading adult magazines, playing with adult figures, and buying AV discs.
This was the moment honne was set free.
Japan's honne culture had held together all this time for one reason: everyone assumed "I'm the only one like this."
Every middle-aged man assumed it was humiliating that he secretly watched idol concert videos.
Every housewife assumed it was strange that she stayed up past midnight with a BL novel.
Every high schooler assumed that drawing doujinshi was something "only I do."
But all it takes is one person with enough weight behind them stepping forward to say "me too," and the thing called shame collapses on the spot.
Hard on the heels of the various authorities, more voices rose in Tsushima Kagami's defense.
A veteran editor at one of Japan's largest publishing houses wrote on his blog, "I've been in this industry for thirty years. I've lost count of the writers I've met."
"I can say this with full responsibility: in the literary world at least, the number of authors who have drawn adult manga is far larger than you imagine."
"Tsushima-kun just happens to be the honest one."
A social commentator who was a regular fixture on television said on air, "If anything, I think this whole affair proves how ordinary Tsushima-kun is."
"He isn't some literary prodigy manufactured by a publicity department. Although perhaps that's not quite accurate, since his work has genuinely earned him the title."
"What I'm trying to say is that he's a real seventeen-year-old boy. And seventeen-year-old boys are interested in sex. Isn't that perfectly natural?"
"Are we really supposed to pretend a seventeen-year-old is only normal if literary fiction is the sole thing he cares about?"
Reporters promptly rounded up students from Eisai Private Academy, the school Tsushima Kagami attended, for comment.
One boy in glasses pushed the frames up the bridge of his nose and answered in a tone of complete indifference, "Tsushima-kun? Ah, you mean Xuanyaye. Yeah, I bought that doujinshi of his."
"I thought it was decent. Just a normal doujinshi."
"Honestly, in our year alone I know of more than one guy who draws doujinshi on the sly."
"It's just that he won the Akutagawa Prize, so people came looking for him."
The remark worked like a key in a door that had been locked for a very long time.
"He's not the only one in our year drawing doujinshi in secret."
The line set off a chain reaction online.
More and more high schoolers, and even middle schoolers, began confessing from anonymous accounts.
They drew doujinshi too. They slipped off to conventions too. They too had a pen name their teachers and parents could never be allowed to hear.
"So everyone's like this after all."
It is a very simple truth.
But when that truth is confirmed by one concrete incident and one concrete person, the chain called shame falls away from every neck at once.
The second key to the reversal of Tsushima Kagami's public image was the theory of extraordinary men.
This ties into another quirk of Japanese cultural psychology.
Tolerance toward genius.
Japanese society holds ordinary people to a brutally strict standard, yet indulges the genuinely gifted to an almost pathological degree.
If an ordinary salaryman turns up five minutes late, the entire department gives him sidelong looks.
But if an artist who has won international awards turns up late, people say,
"Well, he's a genius. Geniuses don't fuss over small things."
Behind that double standard lies a subtle piece of reasoning.
"That person isn't like us, so he can't be measured by our standards."
By taking the Akutagawa Prize at seventeen, Tsushima Kagami had already been drawn outside the category of ordinary people.
He was a genius. He was a monster. He was the youngest phenomenon in the history of Japanese literature.
And in sociological terms, a genius drawing adult manga and an ordinary man drawing adult manga carry entirely different weight.
When an ordinary person does it, it means "pervert," "creep," "not normal."
When a genius does it, it means "of course, that's genius for you," "it would be strange if he played by the rules," "so this is how a genius thinks."
It is a logic with no rational basis whatsoever, and it works beautifully.
One more factor cannot be overlooked.
That is where adult manga sits on the ladder of contempt among Japan's various industries.
Japan is a country relatively permissive about the expression of sexuality.
Adult manga is an entirely legal industry, with its own bookstores, its own publishers, its own distribution channels.
An adult manga artist who does well can support himself on page rates, and live rather comfortably at that.
Of course, a certain amount of shame still clings to the trade.
It is not a respectable profession. It is hard to announce at a family gathering, and hardly a selling point at a matchmaking meeting.
But however unseemly it may be, it still ranks above another perfectly legal industry.
The sex trade.
That comparison turned out to be unexpectedly effective in Japanese moral arithmetic.
Set beside the sex trade's full-service package of crime syndicates, loan sharking, and women coerced into prostitution,
adult manga suddenly looked positively respectable.
"At least he drew it himself. It's not like he did anything illegal."
"He drew manga. It's not like he went out and filmed that stuff for real."
"Bottom line, it's paper. It isn't real people."
These arguments circulated online again and again, hardening into a moral defense strategy of "not the best, but far from the worst."
People did not say outright that drawing adult manga was fine. They said that compared with the alternatives, this was pretty good.
The effectiveness of that rhetoric lies in how it sidesteps the binary judgment of good and bad.
In its place it introduces a vaguer and far more palatable standard: relatively good.
And Japanese society tends to accept relatively good far more readily than absolutely good.
On that same anonymous forum, another comment surfaced.
"Hold on. That writer who cheated on his wife a while back, didn't he go right on winning prizes and selling books?"
"Infidelity is about as morally serious as it gets, and everybody managed to swallow that."
"So why can't anyone swallow one high schooler drawing an adult manga?"
"He drew a comic. He didn't hurt anybody. That's a lot lighter than cheating, isn't it?"
The comment landed like a bucket of cold water on the boiling discourse.
Everyone went quiet.
Because it was true.
Infidelity may not be encouraged in Japanese society, but the public's tolerance for writers who commit it is astonishingly high.
Run through the list. Of all the authors exposed for affairs and forbidden romances, how many were ever genuinely blacklisted?
Almost none.
Their books still occupied the most prominent shelves in the stores, their new work still won prizes, their interviews still ran in the magazines.
Readers' attitude generally amounted to this.
"A person's character and a person's work are two different things."
"I don't approve of what he did, but I still want to read his books."
Behind that tolerance lies the same contest between honne and tatemae.
In public one must say infidelity is wrong. In private a great many people do not actually care.
And if you set infidelity on one side of the scales and drawing adult manga on the other,
however you weigh it, the manga comes out far lighter.
Infidelity hurts specific people, destroys the trust within a family, and raises both ethical and legal questions.
Adult manga, or at the very least the manga Tsushima Kagami drew, hurt whom exactly?
Once that question was put on the table, the entire discourse seemed to hit pause.
Again it was that suddenly thriving anonymous forum.
An anonymous IP posted a thread titled "Youth."
"A seventeen-year-old boy doing something adults consider out of line. Isn't that exactly what youth is?"
"What was I doing at seventeen?"
"Sneaking cigarettes. Looking back, it was so stupid."
"And Tsushima Kagami is at least a cut above me. He was drawing manga."
"When he's forty or fifty and looks back, he'll probably think the same thing. That was youth."
The word youth carries a particular weight in Japanese society.
It stands for a socially licensed period of stepping out of line.
During this stage, young people are permitted to do things that are less than proper, less than mature, less than respectable.
And society forgives them with an almost grandfatherly gaze.
"Well, they're still young."
That sentence explains a great deal.
It explains why high school boys can cross-dress at the school festival.
Why college students can get drunk and lie down at the side of the road.
Why people barely past twenty can make every kind of foolish decision.
Because "youth" is precisely that: a zone of exemption marked off in advance.
Tsushima Kagami was seventeen this year.
He still fell within the bounds of youth.
And so the final link in the chain of public reasoning was forged.
He's still young, so he's doing something stupid, so this is youth, so it deserves forgiveness, and beyond that, youth deserves applause.
And with that, the whole affair flipped completely.
The words that had once flooded the Yahoo comment sections, disgrace and revolting, were gradually replaced by God of Pure Love, youth, kind of cute.
Television panel shows stopped inviting education experts on to wring their hands and turned instead to discussing the erotic tradition in Japanese literature.
The storm ran for nearly two weeks before it finally began to show signs of subsiding.
And then it was May.
On this particular day, Tsushima Kagami received an unexpected interview request from AERA.
AERA was a news weekly launched by The Asahi Shimbun in 1988, often called Japan's answer to Time.
It currently held the largest circulation of any serious current-affairs weekly in the country, with a readership distinctly younger than that of the traditional newspapers.
Tokyo. Chuo Ward. The Asahi Shimbun headquarters building.
The AERA editorial department looked out directly onto Tokyo Bay. Beyond the windows the sky had been dyed a gradient of sunset orange, and a scattering of ships marked the water.
If not for the corporate drudges hurrying up and down the corridors preparing for something or other, the view would have been genuinely restful.
The interview had been arranged in a modestly sized reception room.
Dark gray fabric sofas. On the glass coffee table, two cups of sencha already brewed, steam curling off them.
Along the wall stood several rows of shelves packed with back issues.
Tsushima Kagami sat by the window in a black turtleneck sweater, a charcoal cardigan over it, looking considerably steadier than his actual age.
Kobayashi Yusho, who had come along with him, sat a little further off with AERA's managing editor, the two exchanging occasional quiet remarks.
The lead writer conducting today's interview went by the surname Takano, early forties.
Rimless glasses, hair combed without a strand out of place, the very picture of an elite newsman.
He leafed through the question outline in his hands, glancing up at Tsushima Kagami now and then, his gaze carrying a professional blend of caution and curiosity.
He had interviewed no shortage of famous people, but a seventeen-year-old Akutagawa Prize laureate who was also a young man fresh out of a media firestorm over drawing adult manga was a first.
The first half of the interview went smoothly enough.
Takano asked plenty of standard questions.
How his life had changed since the prize.
His plans for the next book.
What he made of the trend toward younger voices in contemporary Japanese literature.
Tsushima Kagami's answers were poised without being bland, and every so often he tossed out something Takano had not seen coming.
There was a rare quality to this young man, Takano thought.
He carried none of the arrogance of those who find fame too early, and none of the guarded shyness so common among writers.
He spoke at an unhurried rhythm, like someone long since used to the spotlight.
On the coffee table, the red indicator light of the recorder blinked steadily.
Takano turned a page of his outline, adjusted his glasses, and settled into a looser posture.
He opened in the tone of casual conversation, his voice low and easy. "Tsushima-sensei, I ran a small survey among our readers recently, and I turned up something rather interesting."
"Oh?"
Tsushima Kagami tilted his head slightly, drawing his gaze back from the water outside and settling it on Takano's face.
Takano went on. "A lot of readers tell me that your work…"
"I mean The Setting Sun, No Longer Human, and the Hear the Wind Sing trilogy."
"Including the stories you've been serializing lately in the manga magazines."
He paused, as though weighing his words.
"Almost none of them has a good ending in the traditional sense."
"Your characters are forever struggling, forever falling, wounded again and again by wanting what they cannot have."
"And even in the occasional piece that closes on an open ending, neither good nor bad, the tone running through it always leaves a faint sadness that refuses to lift."
His pace slowed as he spoke, as though he were recalling reader feedback and assembling his phrasing at the same time.
"So a phrase has begun circulating quietly among readers. That Tsushima-sensei is a depressing-type writer."
As he said it, a polite smile appeared at the corner of Takano's mouth, faintly probing.
"I'd like to hear what you yourself make of that assessment."
For a moment the reception room went silent.
The white steam of the sencha rose and drifted, tracing a pale trail through the air.
Tsushima Kagami did not answer right away.
He thought of the readers who wrote him letters.
It was a long while before he spoke, smiling. "Takano-san."
"If I told you I'm actually a healing-type writer, would you believe me?"
Takano froze.
The answer was the last thing he had expected.
He blinked, running back through his own question to confirm that he had not misheard.
Healing?
From the man who wrote No Longer Human and The Setting Sun.
Those stories, with their deaths one after another, their losses beyond recovery, their farewells that tore the heart out of you.
The distance between all of that and the word healing was roughly the width of the Pacific.
Takano set down his pen and leaned slightly forward, his tone carrying undisguised confusion and curiosity. "Tsushima-sensei, forgive me for being blunt, but I find that a little hard to follow."
"Every one of your works is steeped in such thick sorrow. The ground color of those stories, the fates your characters finally arrive at, make it very difficult to associate them with the word 'healing.'"
Tsushima Kagami was in no hurry to argue. He reached behind him instead, produced a book he had brought with him, and laid it on the coffee table.
He nudged it gently across to Takano.
Curious, Takano picked it up and looked at the cover.
Against a blue-green field was printed a small white sailboat, poised as if it were about to put out to sea.
Just then, Tsushima Kagami spoke again, still smiling.
"In the middle of this month, my newest novel, The Sound of Waves, produced with Shinchosha, goes on sale."
"Through my fisherman Shinji, I'll take readers to feel the plainspoken honesty of Uta-jima's sea wind and the burning sincerity of its breakers, to understand and feel their way into that character, and through him to carry forward the Tsushima aesthetic of healing and pure love."
A few days later, in the magazine racks of every convenience store, bookshop, and newsstand,
there it was: that week's AERA, Tsushima Kagami's handsome face printed on the cover.
And across the cover, in enormous type, ran the headline.
["Depressing" or "Healing"? Tsushima-sensei Responds for the First Time to Readers Who Call His Work Despair-Inducing]
Below it ran a subheading.
[Youngest Akutagawa Prize Winner Announces New Novel The Sound of Waves, On Sale This Month. Tsushima-sensei: What I Want to Write Is a Paradise That Can Heal Everyone]
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