IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei

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I.S. is one of the manga out there that I really loved. Not, because there's romance and mushy feelings that drown your sorrows and make you think 'Oh, perhaps I have a chance and one day my prince will come'. That's utter bullshit, as far as I'm concerned. It does, however, have warm feelings packed within it. Soft feelings, and sorrow. The pain of being different is shown very clearly in this manga, in many different ways. Being 'different' isn't something that a lot of people openly want, most people just want to fit in and be 'normal'. This shows in this manga, where being ... inter-sexed is a large problem.

The first volume or so of this series starts out with a collection of short stories. Through them, you get a gist of how hard it is for inter-sexed children to grow up in the world. There are people in the world who don't understand intersexuality, or children who are 'different', or who have special needs, etc. There are also the hardships of parents raising a child who is neither a boy nor a girl, and have to make decisions that will not only impact their lives, but the future of their children's lives, and their mentality.

This is very touching, and while some things might not be straight to the point or factual in this manga ( in spite of lots of research, from what I can tell ), the volumes of this manga does a very good job of conveying hardships for families of intersexed children, specially as they grow. Which leads me to Haru's portion of the manga, and the characters.

The rest of the manga, is the story of Haru. We see the way that Haru's parents decide to raise him, we see the affect that being intersexed has on him. The entire ordeal is very touching and very cleverly done. Romance, love, pain, suffering - all these things, and so much more, are elegantly woven together and create a near-perfect story. The character development in this series is absolutely fantastic.

The characters are what really make up this manga/series. The characters are the shining light of the manga, and are so provoking and interesting that you find yourself wanting to read on and on, because you want and need to know what happens to them in the end. Whether the IS children chose to become male, or female. What the characters surrounding those children are like. Teasing, cruel, misunderstanding - or even sweet, kind, and friendly.

The artwork is simple and clean, though shading and tone can be a bit messy or awkward, though that's not abnormal for shoujo manga. The characters are simple, but you can tell them apart, and as they change, it's a visual change, and not just something that's noted only through speech.

This is a manga I would recommend for anyone, and everyone, as long as you have an open mind and can sympathise with the fact that, people out there are very different. Not, exactly, by their own choice. This manga was very touching, and such an amazing read.

This is going to be a hard review to write, because I have very mixed feelings about this manga.

IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei is a manga composed of 3 different stories, the first 2 being only 6 chapters each and the last one taking up the majority of the manga. This is by far the best one and the only one I will be discussing in the review. To me, volume 2 (chapter 13) is where the actual story begins, so if you start at the beginning and really aren't feeling it I'd recommend just skipping volume one as it has no effect ... on the rest of the story.

So, how is the story? Well it's fantastic, and very interesting to boot. Haru is a great protagonist and you really feel for him throughout the story. We follow him from birth all the way to early adulthood and his character development, as well as the development of many of the side characters is so well done it deserves praise. The art style is your standard shoujo, nothing to write home about but gets the job done. Character design is decent which I don't mind as long as they look distinct enough from each other, which they do. The drama is great and almost brought me to tears at points, and the story itself is really moving. So why do I have mixed feelings about it?

The pacing. For the first 30-40 chapters the story moves at a great pace, but then we get stuck in "almost-filler-land" for I don't know how long. Basically most chapters take place from a single characters viewpoint, and that character is often the main character, Haru. Now as I said, Haru is great, and there are several other characters that are great, but at some point the author decided that every single minor character needed their own chapter, their own problems, their own tragic backstory, and it just totally messes with the flow of the story. You're so into it and then all of a sudden it feels like half the chapters become unnecessary side-story filler about people you really aren't that invested in.

What makes it worse is how formulaic it eventually becomes. I wasn't exactly counting but it felt like there were at least 15 chapters in this manga that all followed the exact same formula. We get to know some minor character, they have it rough for some reason, (boyfriend only wants sex, rough family life, is bullied, can't stand up for themselves, dead mom etc) then they meet Haru, is sometimes mean to him at first but he just takes their abuse and then calmly relates their problem to his own, tells some personal story about his life and then gives a motivational speech which makes them respect him/feel better. Not only does this get extremely repetitive but it also makes Haru seem really one-dimensional when we know he isn't.

The problem is that these chapters are split up so you don't get them all in a row, and while some of them really could be skipped without missing anything of note, others cannot, so you need to read it all unless you want to risk becoming confused later. For the record, I'm not saying all of these chapters are bad, they just feel like they're interrupting the flow of the story and all I could think while reading some of them was that I wanted to get back to following Haru and his journey.

Eventually the story more or less gets back on track and from that point on it's pretty good again all the way to the end, which I liked well enough although I was kind of hoping for a bit more (that could very well just be my preference though)

Overall, IS: Otoko demo Onna demo Nai Sei is a fantastic manga plagued by some baffling pacing decisions here and there. If I could judge only the good parts this would be a 9, but as a whole it's probably closer to a 7.

That said, when it's good, it's really good and I'm glad I read it.

I started reading this manga when I was a teenager in the 00s, and only recently did it come to my attention that it was scanned and finished. That made me quite happy, and I rushed to read it again from the start. However, now I wish I hadn't done that, so I could have kept my memories of it instead.

It pains me to write this, but even though this is a beautiful and unique manga, it basically turns into a bland romance that drags on for volumes and volumes, with everything else taking a backseat, including the main topic of discussion that gives ... the manga its title. By the 17th volume, the only thing I felt was relief that it was over, rather than a sense of happiness for the characters. Honestly I would probably have liked it more had it ended somewhere after the third volume or so. It was also annoying because of how inaccurate it got, with things I already remember feeling a bit confused about as a teenager, but being an adult makes it worse.

I could not understand Haru's insistence about being unable to have a physical relationship because of him being intersex: "I'm not sure I could show someone my body, and even if I did, we couldn't actually do anything", is something he keeps repeating with different words through the whole story. We see with the failed attempt from doctors giving him an ultrasound that he doesn't have a proper vaginal canal, but there are a lot of ways to have physical relationships that don't involve vaginal penetration or even taking your clothes off. For a manga that's treating this kind of topic there's a point it really just got ridiculous; it tries so hard to paint a picture of people outside of the norms, and then... it doesn't really do that.

There's also no mention that plenty of people also live happily without sex, like asexuals. I couldn't suspend my disbelief because really, how does the author think men have sex exactly when there's no vaginas involved? 'Sides' exist as well. Even though the main relationship is perceived socially within the story as a gay one, it ends up being childish and clueless: sometimes it only seems to remember it is perceived as such to show them being the target of homophobic bullying at school/university. I try to be lenient towards authors that aren't men when writing a gay (or adjacent to it) type of relationship, I overlook quite a lot of things because I know what I'm getting into and it'd be like me trying to write a lesbian relationship, but this really exceeded my tolerance level.

I also found quite strange that transgender people are never mentioned, even though this is basically what Haru is doing because he was assigned female when he was born: he'd be considered both intersex and a transgender male, and yet the word isn't mentioned even once: There's just a vague allusion to people who use "cross-sex hormones" (or something like that, I can't remember) when his mother takes him to another doctor. The LGBTQIA+ community in itself is basically non-existent in this story, with not even a mention to Ni-chome's gay scene or anything of sorts. I found impossible to believe that everyone within Shizuka No Kai, a group entirely made of intersex people, were in the end always seeing themselves and living as heterosexual men or heterosexual women, with the only one that broke this rule being Haru. There were a lot of things through the manga that were wrong too, like the assumption that all intersex people are sterile: there are many different cases of intersexuality where it is possible for them to have children.

I have to wonder if the sensitivity reader that the author mentioned at the start of the manga stopped correcting her after the first two volumes: the information in it is extremely dated even though this manga ended the past decade, both when it comes to intersex people and other topics, and it loves to confuse the term 'gender' with 'sex' time and time again. I'm not going to go over all the characters because then I will stay here the entire day, but let's start with Aida.

The reason Aida wanted to get the divorce, besides feeling like a burden after the accident, was his feelings of inadequacy as a man because he couldn't give his wife a child anymore. Besides this being obviously not fitting for a manga like this, sure, he might be paralyzed from the waist down, but there are techniques for sperm retrieval and lots of clinics for infertility treatments would take his case. And, if the problem is money, then there are a lot of other ways you can have a family, like through adoption. The mangaka seems to understand this at one point, giving Haru a beautiful found family made by Miyu and Makuson, and then it breaks it apart a few chapters after just for the characters to never be mentioned again, all for the sake of Haru eventually going back to Ibuki and Miyu (a sixteen years old!) eventually getting married to a widowed doctor called Himuro. Besides the relationship being highly questionable, it's a good example that highlights one of my biggest gripes: this manga tries to be educational, revolutionary, make you think, and all that, but then it just goes back to keeping up with social norms as much as possible next. Quite the contradiction.

Another example: Miwako. We know she didn't want to get any surgeries, but she ended up doing it anyway to... yes, again, conform to the social norm. And also to please a man, because of course. Surely if you're going to have a major surgery like that, it should be because you want it, not so the government recognizes your existence (transgender people in Japan can only change their legal gender if they have gotten SRS) or your lover is the one who wants it? Would she not regret if their relationship ends one day? When Leon says that he expected dying a virgin I couldn't believe my eyes because, again, it's the same case as with Haru and Ibuki. The parts talking about the surgery are also inaccurate: for example, dilation frequency lessens with the years, especially when being sexually active. I also didn't like that the manager of Shizuka no Kai forced the expulsion of Miwako by deleting her data without asking her first: that's a decision she should do herself. Suddenly she comes in telling her she can just forget she's intersex... Seriously? I can't believe they didn't even go to the wedding "out of consideration". Are they not friends anymore? I get she was always closer to Haru, but this really rubbed me the wrong way.

Lastly, to not make this longer than it already is: Haru's refusal to use any hormones through most of the story got on my nerves, and that's why he was about to start testosterone and then decided not to after meeting Ibuki (what's with all the comments about how being with him "made him feel like a woman"?). Tied to this, I also couldn't believe in his sudden change of mind, nor could I believe the negative reaction he had in high school towards his male classmates when we see him being just fine with them ever since he was a toddler, and usually preferring their company too.

Another thing I couldn't understand was him saying he hated taking female hormones (couldn't it just be called "estrogen" or "progesterone"? For an intersex manga it sure insisted on keeping a sexual and gender binary that is obvious who anyone who read it doesn't actually exist) and never giving male hormones (please just call it "testosterone") a try. With how much he tried to educate others on what intersex means, it just takes me out of the story that Haru never made much research about his own condition. Plenty of nonbinary people use testosterone/estrogen and then stop when they get the effects they wanted, or even cycle through them as many are also reversible. He wouldn't have been signing up a contract for life. I can see the doctors in the story being wary of such a thing, but surely this would have been better than spending whole years without enough levels of any sexual hormone and delaying getting his dream job by destroying his health like he did. By refusing to make the choice of taking anything, and because inaction is still making a decision, his body kept on feminizing (just slower) too, which is exactly what he said he hated so much: we see him miserable more than once as his breasts grows and he gets periods, and the few days he tried to take the estrogen/progesterone he had a breakdown. He's supposedly conflicted (supposedly because, as I said earlier, I couldn't suspend my disbelief about it) about what to take because of his gender identity, which in a vacuum I would have understood, but unfortunately that decision didn't feel like it existed without external influence. What the author did here just came off to me like Haru's main "conflict" about his gender was staying feminine-looking enough for the sake of keeping (or the small chance of getting back later) his first love.

I couldn't be happy for Haru and Ibuki going back together (for like the third time) at the end: Ibuki admitted that he wanted and expected Haru to have the typical body of a woman; he also was physically forceful the day before they were going to go separate ways knowing Haru didn't want to go any further; he broke his promise of reuniting with him five years after; he talked about how right it had felt to be with Nene because she was a woman and, in general, he basically kept denying Haru through the manga, saying and promising things he wouldn't commit to and breaking Haru's heart time and time again. I'm sorry to the author, but there's no way I can root for such an irritating and pathetic character like Ibuki. I wish Haru had stayed single, but considering how many characters kept getting paired up as if the only way to Real Adulthood And Happiness was getting married and/or having children, I wasn't expecting them not to end up together (they even got the random abandoned kid). Good luck on keeping your very obviously heterosexual partner, Haru: you're going to need it.

I remember recommending this manga when I was a young teenager, and it was definitely the first time I heard of the word intersex, but I'm not sure if I would do it now. At best, I would recommend reading the start, because even though I liked when other intersex characters were introduced again in the last volumes, I don't think it's worth the hassle of reading to the end (and judging by the way the mangaka broke them apart, I guess she didn't like them much either). Don't feel bad if you're reading this and have dropped it: even the first translation team did it after it turned into little but mediocre romance.