A bit of Japanese folklore, intertwined with hairy dicks, and unashamed mansex.

I’m on the hunt for details about a comic that I really want to post here for you guys, but which was published in a magazine that doesn’t seem to be in print, and featuring an artist whose own website is shockingly impenetrable and unhelpful.

But in the meantime, I stumbled across this one shot story by legendary manga/bara artist Seizoh Ebisubashi ( 戎橋政造 ). It’s the tale of a handsome, muscular man who seems to live his life with a minimum of sexual complication. He wanders his property in just a robe and fundoshi (traditional Japanese underwear with which I am newly obsessed), and lounges around his house in even less.

On one of his strolls around the grounds, he encounters a wounded Tanuki, caught in a trap. The Tanuki is a mythical animal in Japanese folklore, and is – more precisely – a bit of a catchall term describing several different factual animals, and some that are imbued with magical powers. Shibata assumes that the Tanuki he has found is one of the magical ones, and when a stranger appears at his door days later, he is certain it is the Tanuki he rescued, having taken human form.

For reasons that elude me, but with which I find no real argument, Shibata decides to have some rough bondage sex with his newly returned Tanuki and proceeds to tie him down and penetrate him with fingers, dildos, and ultimately his own ever-erect penis. Just, kind of, to pass the afternoon.

What’s magical about this story is not the nature of the sex, or the rather unabashed and uncomplicated way that Shibata decides to have said sex with another man (which he believes to be a magical racoon-dog in human form). Although those are great elements. What I love about it, is the elegant ways that filthy/naughty images are presented to the viewer. After Shibata removes his fundoshi to bandage the Tanuki, he is shown from behind, blasting full hairy ballback. When he meets the stranger at the door, his “growing erection” is presented in side view, straining the fabric of his tiny fundoshi. During the sexual interactions, bodies are moved this way and that so that the viewer sees the most invasive possible angles, and (even though they’re obscured by pixilation) close ups of the loosening hole, the constantly leaking penises, and especially the place “where the two were connected.”

It’s interesting to see sex in this way, as the carnal connection of two men, absent the naughty/dirty/slutty/porny elements of traditional erotic art or comics. At its core, it is plainly just two men who are having sex; one being penetrated, and one penetrating, so that they might be physically joined. It seems almost ‘not gay’ in a lot of ways.

Which is probably what I like so very much about it.