This freaks Yaichi out, and he breaks out of the embrace and asks Mike not to call him that. When Mike first arrives, he wraps Yaichi in a bear hug and calls him brother. But underneath all that is a whole story expressed through touch and care for the body.
There’s not a whole lot of action on the surface this is a very quiet domestic drama with lots of talking, Yaichi’s internal dialogues as he explores his own discomfort with Mike, and getting lost in his memories and regrets. When Yaichi meets Mike, he is overwhelmed by the reality of Mike and his brother’s relationship, but he is also overwhelmed by Mike’s physical self, his size, his strength, his beard, the hair on his body. My Brother’s Husband, at least through the first volume, is completely G rated, however the art style is shot through with his aesthetic. Tagame describes himself in his twitter bio as a “gay erotic artist,” and most of his work (which has not been officially published in English translation) is sexually explicit stories featuring BDSM themes and big, muscly, hyper-masculine men presented as both figures of fear and figures of desire. The sensuality of bodies is present on every page, in every panel. Mike is enthusiastically welcomed by Yaichi’s grade-school aged daughter, Kana, and this first of two volumes follows Yaichi through this brief visit as he struggles to balance his conflicted feelings about gay sexuality and his estrangement from his brother with his responsibility to his family and his love for his daughter. My Brother’s Husband is the story of Yaichi, who is forced to confront his feelings about his late twin brother, Ryōshi’s death and sexuality when Ryōshi’s widowed Canadian husband, Mike Flanagan, arrives at his doorstep to visit the town where the boys grew up.
The other examples of queer tropes in the culture are probably worse, which are the eroticized bisexual/lesbian chic like Ghost in the Shell, a melange of badass and charismatic characters that queer readers love but that were created for the pleasure of straight boys.
There are many manga and anime series that play around with homoerotic subtexts and images (including my current favorite, Yuri on Ice!!!), however-and, please understand that I have a very superficial understanding of Japanese culture-my perception is that many of those tropes are a slightly performative and desexualized playgrounds of desire for (mostly) straight preteen girls.
I picked up My Brother’s Husband, by Gengoroh Tagame, because I read that it was going to be adapted into a live action TV series, and that made me think about how few Japanese LGBT narratives and stories I knew. The loveliest reading experience that exists is the experience of coming across the right book at the right time, and feeling so completely understood by it, and feeling like you completely understand it.