Those familiar with my work already know I’m a big fan of the yandere trope in anime and manga. That is, a mentally ill girl (well, any gender can be yandere, but I swing toward the ladies) who is utterly, completely, and dangerously obsessed with the one she loves. Hence the portmanteau of 病んでる yanderu “to be sick” and デレデレ deredere “lovestruck.” So today I’m going to introduce a recent yandere-themed manga I enjoyed, Ijousha no Ai.
Ijousha no Ai, literally “An Abnormal One’s Love,” by Daisuke Chida is a dark, compelling thriller that’s really heavy on fetishes.
Yanderes exist in many forms and subtypes. Benign yanderes stalk the target of their obsessions, learning everything about them, but generally keep their distance. More actively dangerous ones become violent toward themselves, those they see as romantic rivals, and even to the ones they love. Those are the kind I like the most. The bloodier the better, in my opinion. And the main antagonist of Ijousha no Ai, Saki Midou, is very bloody and dangerous.
The story covers the lives of its main characters over six volumes, 74 chapters, and many years. We start in primary school, where, as a child, Midou first falls in love with her classmate Kazumi Ichinose, and where she commits her first murder.
Chida-sensei gives us several time skips as we watch Midou chase Kazumi through his life, trying to figuratively or literally capture him and force him into her delusional idea of a perfect, happy life together.
It’s interesting to see how the characters grow, or how they don’t, stunted by Midou’s cruelty and violence. But the most compelling part of this thriller is how each side executes their plans against the other. Midou has a brilliant tactical mind and seems to have a contingency for every eventuality. She’s a truly terrifying villain. But Kazumi is no slouch himself and doesn’t let Midou’s plans go unopposed. Most of the conflict in the story is Kazumi’s commitment to killing Midou and ending the torment she’s foisted onto not only him, but everyone else in his life.
That torment is mostly literal, and that’s where the intensely fetishy stuff comes in. Midou is not shy about murder, having gotten away with it as a child, but she tends to prefer kidnapping and torturing those she sees as a threat to her relationship with Kazumi rather than outright killing them.
Chida-sensei’s creativity with Midou’s torture scenes is inspiring. There is lots of bondage and BDSM play, of course. Midou makes good use of the boxcutter that is her weapon of choice throughout the story. But she also gets clever with a girl’s piercings, she gets into the omorashi torture of filling her victim’s bladder and not letting them empty it, she does pet play — it’s a real fetish bonanza. When Midou starts a “punishment” session, as she calls it, you never know how weird it might get.
My biggest problem with the story is that after these intense torture sessions that she ultimately executes on dozens of women, she just lets them go. She records the humiliating torture to hold over her victims so they won’t go to friends, family, or the police. And certainly, some of her victims are so psychologically scarred by the event that they live in fear of her forever. But I struggle to believe that fear of public humiliation is such a strong motivation that not one of her victims goes to the police, considering the extreme level of violence Midou executes upon them. It hurts my suspension of disbelief.
But I look past that plot hole because the overarching plot is otherwise very well structured. Threads are laid in the first volume that wrap up and pay off only in the sixth. The twists and turns of the story remain compelling and the ending is as satisfying as it is dark.
Ijousha no Ai is very much a fetish story, though. The torture scenes are graphic and bloody and can be very hard to read (the piss torture I mentioned, in particular, had me cringing as I turned the pages). It never drifts into guro, the fetish for gore and dismemberment, but it does involve a lot of cutting and beating. Midou also rapes Kazumi more than once, and that’s content that can put off some readers.
But if you enjoy a dark, fetishy, violent, bloody thriller of a love story as much as me, Ijousha no Ai is worth your time. As of this writing, KhaosScans (whose translation I used in this article) has translated up to the beginning of the fourth volume and the Japanese original is available from publisher Shonen Magazine.
