Takahashi Rumiko: The Fluctuating Gender Boundaries Reflected in the Work of a Master Manga Artist

Back and Forth Between Boy and Girl: A Fresh Take on the Manga Hero

“I’m a boy!”

How many fans thrilled to hear voice actor Hayashibara Megumi roar this line again, when the all-new anime adaptation of manga artist Takahashi Rumiko’s sublime martial arts rom-com Ranma 1/2 began streaming on October 5, 2024?

Promotional art for the all-new Ranma 1/2 anime. The series is broadcast on the Nippon Television Network System and available for streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and other services. (© Takahashi Rumiko, Shōgakukan/Ranma 1/2 Production Committee)

The protagonist of Ranma 1/2 is Saotome Ranma, a 16-year-old boy raised by his father to be the next head of the Saotome Anything-Goes School of Martial Arts. But Ranma has a secret: he was knocked into a cursed pond by his father during a training session in China, and now he magically turns into a girl when splashed with cold water, while hot water turns him back into a boy. Ranma goes back and forth between girl and boy as he battles a series of bizarre rivals while bickering with (but gradually drawing closer to) Tendō Akane, the girl introduced to him as his betrothed.

The original manga version of Ranma 1/2 began serialization in 1987. No doubt fans of Takahashi’s previous work Urusei Yatsura (1978–87) chuckled to see Ranma’s cry of “I’m a boy!” because they would have recognized it as the mirror image of Urusei Yatsura character Fujinami Ryūnosuke’s catchphrase, “I’m a girl!”

Deconstructing the Ideal Showa Boy

Ryūnosuke makes a striking debut in Urusei Yatsura, seeming to be a boy with beautiful features clad in a handsome gakuran school uniform. We soon learn, however, that Ryūnosuke is actually a girl. Her father wanted a male heir and raised her as a son, and so she uses the rough male-coded first-person pronoun ore and has great physical strength, but she nevertheless identifies as female. Fascinated by things like sērāfuku (sailor-suit-style female school uniforms) and bras, she struggles valiantly to overcome her father’s interference and live like a normal girl.

Fujinami Ryūnosuke—handsome, manly, and female. (Courtesy the “Takahashi Rumiko Information” X account @rumicworld1010; © Takahashi Rumiko/Shōgakukan)

Ryūnosuke’s first appearance was in 1982. It took until 1985 for Japan to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and in 1986 the country passed its first Equal Opportunity Employment Law. When Ryūnosuke made her debut, gender equality was not yet part of the public debate, and there was powerful social pressure to confirm to masculine or feminine norms.

Strong and stalwart, stylish and cool but innocent at heart: Such was the ideal man during the Shōwa era (1926–89). Ryūnosuke undermined them by meeting them despite being a girl. In 2019, Takahashi wrote that she “made it a rule for Urusei Yatsura that all good-looking male characters had to be idiots,” but “sometimes you do want to draw a cool male character who really is cool. . . . That’s when inspiration struck: Maybe people would accept a character like that if she was actually female” (from Mangaka-bon Vol. 14: Takahashi Rumiko bon).

As the “orthodox”—albeit female—hunk of Urusei Yatsura, Ryūnosuke is constantly surrounded by adoring girls. Her betrothed, Shiowatari Nagisa, similarly appears to be a graceful, beautiful girl at first, but turns out to be male. Devoted, sweet, and unfailingly supportive, Nagisa both reflects the ideal Shōwa woman, and—like Ryūnosuke—slips through these fixed conceptions simply by inverting the genders involved.

Ryūnosuke’s betrothed Shiowatari Nagisa reveals his gender in volume 32 of Urusei Yatsura. (© Takahashi Rumiko/Shōgakukan)

In Takahashi’s oeuvre, collectively known as Rūmikku wārudo, or the “Rumic World,” transcending boundaries is a regular theme. Even Lum, the female protagonist of Urusei Yatsura, bears the less than heroic name of “Invader.” The arrival of Ryūnosuke was a watershed moment after which the crossing of gender boundaries—or fluctuation among the genders—became a regular theme.

The Creative Impulse Beyond Gender Divisions

“Ranma 1/2 is what you might call ‘gender-free,’ with shifts from male to female and female to male. I really wanted to explore that kind of idea,” said Takahashi in Rumic World 35: All Stars.

Ryūnosuke “brought new energy” to Urusei Yatsura when Takahashi was struggling to come up with fresh ideas for the series: “The character’s gender was ambiguous, and she was fun to draw,” recalls the artist. The experience roused Takahashi’s creative impulse to new heights.

The result was the birth of Ranma 1/2, in which gender fluctuations were even freer and more sweeping. Ranma initially insists that he is a boy and refuses to act like a girl in any way, but gradually becomes prepared to dress as a girl if that’s what it takes to win a fight.

Saotome Ranma, hero of the all-new Ranma 1/2 anime. (© Takahashi Rumiko, Shōgakukan/Ranma 1/2 Production Committee)

At one point, Ranma puts on a frilly dress to go on a date with a boy, saying, “For a chance to be all-male, all the time . . . Heh, I’ll even be the prettiest li’l thing you ever saw!” On other occasions he dresses like a Playboy bunny or in nothing but lingerie. His breasts are constantly popping out. The ambivalence could not be greater.

Girl Ranma dresses up for a date in the hopes of becoming “all-male, all the time” in volume 15 of Ranma 1/2. (© Takahashi Rumiko/Shōgakukan)

The harder Ranma strives to attain masculinity, the more female he becomes. On the other hand, it is when he freely flexes his feminine side that his mind is at its most manly. This freewheeling back-and-forth between manliness and womanliness effects a transition toward a situation in which the two states are equal to one another.

The First Gay Character in Rumic World

In Ranma 1/2, all of the characters whose genders are ambiguous in some way—including Ranma himself; Kuonji Ukyō, a girl who has “abandoned femininity” and dresses like a boy; and another male character who pines for Ukyō and dresses like a girl—are heterosexual. The same is true of Urusei Yatsura. In 1984, in Kataritsukuse netsuai jidai (Telling It All About the Passionate Years), Takahashi herself said, “Male-female interactions are the foundation. No matter what, you can’t leave out the elements of male and female.”

The first character to break that unspoken rule was Jakotsu, one of the antagonists in Inuyasha (serialized 1996–2008). Jakotsu is a man who dresses in women’s kimono. While Urusei Yatsura’s Ryūnosuke was the result of starting with a hunk and sliding him toward femininity, Jakotsu was originally conceived as female but ended up being male when Takahashi realized she was reluctant to depict “Inuyasha fighting a woman to the death,” as she put it. “It was the first time I drew a male character that liked men,” Takahashi has stated. Jakotsu’s development and design revolved around femininity, so he can also be read as a gay character depicting a variation on heterosexual romance.

Jakotsu falling in love at first sight with the title character in volume 24 of Inuyasha. (© Takahashi Rumiko/Shōgakukan)

Changing Forms of Love Through the Decades

In Rin-ne (serialized 2009–18), we finally meet a male character, with a conventionally masculine appearance, who likes another boy: Matsugo, childhood friend of the series’ protagonist Rokudō Rinne. Matsugo is attractive, having pursued self-improvement in terms of appearance and intellect through sheer effort, and completely devoted to Rinne, with no interest whatsoever in the affections of his beautiful female classmate Anju.

Matsugo in a white tuxedo in volume 22 of Rin-ne. Rinne, being pulled along by the hand, also wears a tuxedo rather than being depicted as “playing the female role.” (© Takahashi Rumiko/Shōgakukan)

Matsugo insists that what he feels for Rinne is “friendship,” but those around him are quick to remark, “You mean love.” When the characters visit a world where people can dream whatever they wish, Matsugo skips with Rinne in matching tuxedos through a field of flowers, crying, “Let us vow eternal friendship at the chapel!”

The result is a slapstick story that goes back and forth between classic male-female romance—like in a shōjo manga where a heroine’s rescuer proves to be a long-lost childhood friend—and a “bromance” between two men.

Transcending New Borders in the Reiwa Era

Throughout Takahashi’s oeuvre, characters who transgress gender boundaries leap over fixed conceptions in their quest to attain the appearance or relationship they want. They are gloriously energetic and freewheeling, guided not by common sense but by who they truly are.

At the same time, it should not be overlooked that they are all treated as comic relief or abnormal “perverts.” Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2—each of these works reflects the values of its time, and those times are now past.

Takahashi Rumiko’s current series Mao is still ongoing in the weekly Shōnen Sunday magazine. After decades of constant evolution, always at the forefront of the shōnen manga scene, how will Takahashi depict transgressors against gender that no one will laugh at, suitable for the Reiwa era? We can only look forward to the day she effortlessly transcends both the expectations of her fans and the hidebound views of gender that still linger.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner image: Ranma in her girl form. In the anime, red hair is her trademark. © Takahashi Rumiko, Shōgakukan/Ranma 1/2 Production Committee.)