[1] Yuu Watase, Absolute Boyfriend, 6 Volumes (San Francisco, CA: VIZ Media LLC, 2006).

[2] Patrick W. Galbraith, The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan, (Kodansha USA, 2009), 39.

[3] Sharalyn Orbaugh, “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (2002): 439.

[4] Polly Pocket and Mighty Max were toy lines produced by the English company Bluebird Toys in the 1990s. While Polly Pocket was market at girls and Mighty Max at boys, both lines consisted of miniature figurines inside pocket-size cases containing playsets with different themes (for instance, a beauty salon or a dungeon).

[5] Orbaugh, “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” 440.

[6] Bo Bennett, Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (eBookIt.com, 2012), 87; Bo Bennett, “Appeal to Normality,” Logically Fallacious, November 24, 2014.

[7] “Prince Charming,” TV Tropes, May 20, 2009.

[8] Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 88.

[9] Keith Vincent, “Making It Real: Ficiton, Desire, and the Queerness of the Beautiful Fighting Girl,” in Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xviii.

[10] Boris Ondreicka & Nadim Samman, Rare Earth, ed. Boris Ondreicka and Nadim Samman (Vienna: Sternberg Press, 2016).

Zettai Kareshi,[1] or Absolute Boyfriend, is a reverse harem shōjo manga by Watase Yū, [Figure 1] serialized between 2003 and 2005 in Shōjo Comic, a comics magazine known for running contents more risqué than other competing publications (e.g., Margaret or Hana to Yume). Given its popularity, the series has also been adapted into a dorama in Japan (Zettai Kareshi, 2008) and other East Asian television series, including the Taiwanese Absolute Darling in 2012 and Korean My Absolute Boyfriend in 2019. [Video 1] Despite Watase’s mastery of the comics medium, Zettai Kareshi does not appear outwardly different from the many comedy-dramas abounding in Japanese comics aimed at teenage girls. Except perhaps for its somewhat daunting premise: Izawa Riiko, a virgin high school student who is consistently rejected by her crushes, accidentally orders an ideal “boyfriend” online. At the beginning of the series, Riiko, amidst her latest romantic frustration, meets a mysterious sales clerk with an orientalist sci-fi look reminiscent of a genie in the lamp, who directs her to a shady‑looking website called LoverShop. LoverShop, that Riiko at first mistakes for a slave trade organization, promises to “furnish you with the ideal lover, who will exist solely for your sake.” Convinced that it is a joke, Riiko ends up seizing a “three-day free trial period” opportunity to design her fully customized boyfriend. And so, the next day two delivery men hand her a card box the size of a man containing, well, a man. [Figure 2] More precisely, what appears to be a life-sized Ken android programmed to fall in love with his buyer when activated with a kiss. After speed reading through the handling manual—whose first Q&A entry is “is it possible to get pregnant?” (“The hell!! That’s so wrong!!” says Riiko)—Riiko learns that the body’s lips have a sensor that recognizes the customer as its “lover.” In an inverted fairy tale sequence, complete with sparkling screentone effects, heartbeat onomatopoeia and lots of blushing on Riiko’s part (“I’ve never even done this with a living male, but…here goes nothin’!!”), the heroine reaches towards Night and wakes her enchanted prince with a kiss on the lips, thus setting him to fall madly in love with her.

Riiko’s “boyfriend” is a new type of sex doll: the Nightly 01 model by a company of dubious origins, called Kronos Heaven. The android’s realism resembles that of high-end products like the CandyGirl dolls, produced and marketed in Japan by the Tokyo‑based company Orient Industries. [Figure 3] Like the supple silicon flesh covering the CandyGirls’ stainless steel skeleton, Riiko immediately marvels at the softness of Nightly 01’s skin.[2] Unlike the CandyGirls, however, Nightly 01 is a bishōnen, a “beautiful boy,” typical of manga for adolescent girls, where most male cast members fit into this mold. During Nightly 01’s setup procedure (“Hello, Girlfriend,” he greets upon waking), Riiko names the figure “Night” and quickly realizes that her “boyfriend” has a predisposition to undress and make sexual advances—that the heroine promptly refuses, explaining that “I want to do it right and fall in love first…! Then we’re supposed to wait until after we both say ‘I love you!’!! That’s why, (for now) it’s no!!”. Confronted with Riiko’s normative shōjo manga fantasies, Night kisses her on the forehead at states, smiling, that “a boyfriend… doesn’t force his girlfriend to do anything she’s not ready for.” This early interaction, in which Night swiftly adjusts from a potential rapist to a respectful lover, establishes the basis of Riiko and Night’s relationship.

Together, Riiko and Night undergo a coming‐of‐age journey in which they discover love while tackling with posthuman issues such as what distinguishes humans from a figure that can think and feel emotions. As the story progresses, the romance between the heroine and the android turns out to be “real,” exploring a theme dear to Japanese comics and animation, that of cyborg subjectivity, with its fair amount of corniness and genuinely heart-warming moments. Indeed, Zettai Kareshi’s camp sensibility makes for a truly captivating read. On the one hand, it embraces many soap opera clichés and plot twists: a love triangle involving Riiko’s childhood friend and suitor Sōshi, who is secretly and not so secretly in love with the heroin; the manipulative frenemy; the breakup drama; or Riiko’s long lost first love, who suddenly emerges from her past. On the other, these tropes are intermingled with the genres of fantasy and science fiction, deliberately removing the story from its grounded, daily life scenarios. Night, for instance, proves to be a bona fide action hero, ready to give anyone who messes with his girlfriend a piece of his mind and fist. Additionally, Zettai Kareshi is sprinkled with pulpy and nonsensical occurrences, including mood rings, flash visits to paradisiac tropical islands, obstacle courses in spas, miniaturization, and epic fights with rival robots. The result is a quirky yet perfectly integrated mix of by‑the‑book shōjo manga and genre pastiche, making Watase’s series a rare bird within Japanese girl-oriented media. [Figure 4] 

In “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” Sharalyn Orbaugh notes that although Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto proclaims that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” Japanese manga and anime often deal with this topic in ways that are very much ingrained within the binary opposition between sexes. Even in highly innovative anime works such as Shin Seiki Evangelion and Ghost In The Shell, that “challenge the notion of the individual, autonomous identity housed in a singular body,”[3] sex-gender roles play an essential role. At first glance, Zettai Kareshi appears removed from such complex debates, as the series’ humorous tone and light-hearted shōjo manga tropes frame its sci-fi element. What is more, all the characters in Zettai Kareshi are “normative” (hetero, cis) individuals, including Night, who is not at all the monstrous or uncanny cyborg, but a pretty boy—in fact, as one reviewer points out on Goodreads, by the end of the series, one could almost forget that Night is not human. But it is precisely because Zettai Kareshi lacks the posthuman radicalism of Evangelion or Ghost In The Shell that it is worth scrutinizing. Zettai Kareshi’s focus is on the subversion of an “ordinary” female fantasy: the Prince Charming. Night (whose name is pronounced like “knight,” as in “knight in shining armor”) is the series’ crucial element, as the narrative shenanigans revolve around his anomalous personhood, or objecthood, in a silly and charming way that nevertheless manages to gnaw at traditional social categories and hierarchies.

Unlike other iterations of the Prince Charming, Zettai Kareshi does not naturally present Night as the dashingly handsome model boyfriend of shōjo romance. Instead, he is shown to be the product of Riiko’s point‑by‑point (and rather gigantic) wishlist, which she eagerly orders on the Kronos Heaven website: “Skilled, smart, cute, stylish, kind!!, reliable, manly (will scold me when I need it), adorably naïve, specialty is cooking, pre-emptive reflexes, just a little perverted, a strong fighter!!, good hygiene, will save me when I’m in a tight spot, gets just a little bit jealous, a little forceful, humble, refreshing.” [Figure 5] Riiko’s wishlist is hardly surprising; after all, Night was custom-made by the target demographics of shōjo manga—a 16-year-old girl. This breakage of the Fourth Wall, acknowledging the medium and the gender conventions occurring between the characters and the audience, is one among the various ways in which Zettai Kareshi presents the Prince Charming as a highly processed commodity for mass consumption.

For instance, Night’s “love at first sight” for the heroine is a preprogrammed feature, like the romantic relationships between the player of an otome game and the bishōnen characters who pursue her. Even the “kiss of life” through which Riiko initiates Night is an activation procedure in the latter’s user manual. Furthermore, in a reversal of social ascension tales like Cinderella, in which a pauper marries a prince and becomes a princess, Riiko acquires her fantasy boy through a commercial transaction that leaves her on the brink of bankruptcy. As the Kronos Heaven sales clerk later explains to Riiko, each customization option comes at the cost of 1 000 000 yen, confirming her suspicions that LoverShop is, in fact, an exploitative scheme. “By th’ way, ya put in too many ideal options!!”, the seller chastises, stressing both the unrealistic quality of Riiko’s expectations and her penchant for conspicuous consumption.

To make up for her debt of 100 million yen, Riiko takes up a job as a hostess in a club. Night, who accompanies her to the job interview, is also recruited (“You have a beautiful face!” says the club manager, “If you’ll wear women’s clothing, then ok!!”) and ends up serving customers in maid crossplay, while Riiko in a nekomimi (“cat ear”) costume complains that the place reeks of otaku. Night’s crossplaying sequence, which is a fanservice sequence to please Zettai Kareshi’s female audience, highlights the bishōnen as an ambiguously gendered figure outside human “normalcy” (for instance, seeing Night in his maid get‑up, Riiko mentions defeatedly that “it suits you too well” and that “it’s true… he’s perfect because he’s a figure, but…”). Moreover, when confronted with the hostess club’s (as she puts it) “world of adults,” Riiko becomes aware not only of the aggressive male gaze directed at her but that she too has been reduced to the condition of a reified sex figure, like Night. At one point, a customer grabs Riiko’s shirt and pulls it up her bra, prompting Night to jump to her rescue and physically threaten the customer. As a result, they are fired, but the issue of objectification is followed-up in the next pages. Confronted with the fact that Riiko is unable to pay for Night, the sales clerk from Kronos Heaven demands that she lets the company collect information on her feelings to improve Night’s performance. Kronos Heaven’s objective, therefore, is to create the perfect lover not only in appearance but one who is capable of answering the ultimate Freudian question of “what does a woman want?” After all, concludes the sales clerk, “If ya don’ have feelin’s fer him, ya don’ wanna do him, right?” To mine Riiko’s emotions, Night wears a mood ring that turns red if the girl is happy, blue if angry, and black if sad. “An’ when she feels good, it’s pink! A pleasin’ shade of pleasure” pitches the clerk.

The fact that the “female mystique” is reduced to a basic color code aligns with Zettai Kareshi’s camp sensibility, suggesting that Riiko’s passions are just as objectifiable, and merchandisable, like Night’s “fake” preprogrammed love. The objectifying element underlying Zettai Kareshi is most visible in the character of Night, who despite the narrative insistence on his humanization, suffers from several uncanny troubles throughout the series that disqualify him as a proper human being. Not only does Riiko initially assume that Night is a corpse, but he is home delivered in a card box like an Amazon package, has a 72 hours trial period, a warranty, requires maintenance, and eventually, as we will see, succumbs to planned obsolescence. Riiko’s childhood friend, Sōshi, even spots a bar code on the back of Night’s ear, causing him to tell Riiko that Night is “strange” and “doesn’t exactly seem human…”

 On one memorable occasion, Night, forced to fight against a more advanced robotic model sent to fulfill the mission of becoming Riiko’s lover in his stead, ends tearing off his rival’s arm. The sight of the other robot’s exposed circuits and metal frame is enough to keep Riiko awake at night, giving her second thoughts about her boyfriend’s humanity (“Night really isn’t human,” Riiko reasons, “although I knew that from the time I brought him, now that I’ve seen an actual detached arm…!! I wonder if the h…head detaches too?”). The next day, Riiko learns that Night too did not escape unscathed from the confrontation: he greets Riiko in Chinese, has a conversation in Spanish, and prepares a foul-tasting breakfast. At school, Night reads the lesson in German as smoke starts to come out of his ear, and his arms bend into unnatural positions. Finally, Night feels dizzy and is taken to the infirmary. His mechanical malfunctions intensify Riiko’s anxiety-filled thoughts: “Somehow like this, he seems like a machine, although he is soft to the touch, although he is warm and even though he is breathing… This is a robot,” she concludes, wearily.

As Kronos Heaven takes Night’s body in for repair, they provide him with a substitute miniature body. [Figure 6] During this time, Riiko attends school with Night in her pocket, like a portable toy reminiscent of Polly Pocket or Mighty Max.[4] At home, Night slips into Riiko’s pajama, puts toothpaste on her now gigantic toothbrush, tries to fry an egg in a skillet four times his size, gets chased by a cat and is almost vacuum cleaned by his love rival, Sōshi. His recurring arguments with Sōshi also acquire a slapstick tone, due to the sheer difference in size between the two, as well as Night’s bravado despite his diminutive form. Moreover, because Night’s body swap from bishōnen to a chibi caricature happens towards the latter half of the story when his humanization is well underway, it tosses the android back into the uncanny valley of quasi-humanness. Along with other instances of Night’s reification, the incident highlights what, according to Orbaugh, is a fundamental question of cyborg fiction: “What is the power relationship between the biotic and the techno-mechanical components; which is ‘really’ in control.” [5]

Zettai Kareshi’s breakup arc addresses this topic: when another woman manages to kiss Night’s lips, she causes him momentarily to become her boyfriend and Riiko his “ex-girlfriend.” When Riiko confronts the Kronos Heaven sales clerk about it, he explains that Night identifies whoever kisses his lips as his lover and that the only way for the bond to become permanent is by having sex with him. “Ya need t’ hurry up an’ have sex with ‘im!” urges the clerk, in a perverse recreation of the peer pressure that teenagers experience to have sexual relations. After that, Riiko makes up her mind to steal Night back from the woman before he becomes hers irremediably. When she finally succeeds, Zettai Kareshi implies that Night himself wished to return to his former owner, thus circumventing his techno‑mechanical imperative in the name of true love. Still, the question of whether Night’s attachment to Riiko is “real” remains an important one throughout the series.

Meanwhile, Riiko’s childhood friend, Sōshi, who, we learn, has always been in love with the heroine, attempts to win her over by asserting his biosocial supremacy over Night’s perceived abnormality. During the latter half of the series, Sōshi finally discovers Night’s secret and confronts Riiko, eventually confessing his feelings for her. From that moment on, the choice between Sōshi and Night and its ethical implications becomes Zettai Kareshi’s central point. Does Riiko prefer the Prince Charming, who is nothing but a figure preprogrammed to love her? Or the “real” man, who has silently loved and looked over her for years? As Riiko herself admits, “Sōshi, he’s pretty great… He can cook and his grades are good and he has a pretty face. And he knows me better than anyone…” hinting at the realness of the bond she shares with her childhood friend. Sōshi, in turn, insists that the heroine should wake up from the fairy tale and face reality. “Now’s the time to open your eyes,” he tells Riiko, warning her that Night is not human and that “someday you absolutely must separate.” In his attempts to convince Riiko, Sōshi appeals to nature and normality,[6] arguing that Riiko’s liaison with Night is contra natura: they will not grow old, have children or otherwise experience the “normal” human biological life cycle together. After much drama and indecision, the heroine eventually chooses Night over of Sōshi, eliciting an outpour of anger from a significant part of Zettai Kareshi’s readers, who preferred that Riiko chose the human over a figure. At last, the couple consummates their love and, ironically, Night performs his original role not as a sex doll, but as Riiko’s “true” lover. [Figure 7]

What makes Riiko's choice so provocative is not so much the human/robot or reality/fantasy dichotomy, but the interposition of Night between Sōshi and his “natural right” to the heroine. Indeed, as the “ground zero for all Princely Tropes,”[7] the Prince Charming has long since been a tool at the hands of patriarchal ideology, equating women with submission and men with a provider figure upon which feminine happiness is founded.[8] And while Riiko, herself, often fits the part of the damsel in distress rescued by her knight (or rather, her Night) in shining armor, Zettai Kareshi nevertheless turns the spell against the sorcerer. For when Riiko chooses Night over Sōshi, the choice is not merely between fantasy and reality, but what Sōshi himself represents: Riiko’s socially legitimate partner, a hard-working, rational man who can provide her a “normal” life and does not hesitate to pathologize the heroine’s attraction to Night. Sōshi also plays the part of a moral guardian of monogamy, lashing out at Riiko when she dares suggest that she might be in love with both him and Night. “That’s ridiculous, saying ‘both of you.’ Normally people fall in love with one person, right?” he reprimands her angrily, proceeding to invalidate Riiko’s polyamorous feelings: “I guess, you still haven’t really fallen in love with anyone.” [Figure 8]

Sōshi’s insistence on framing Riiko’s choice in terms of human exceptionalism, rather than a choice between two individuals, is his downfall. By arguing that he is categorically different from his love rival (“I’ll teach Riiko that a human guy has more good points than a figure!!”), Sōshi fails to account for the fact that human sexuality is inseparable from fantasy, and that to some extent we all exist as imaginary characters in our partners’ minds. As Keith Vincent explains in the preface to Saitō Tamaki’s treatise on otaku sexuality, Beautiful Fighting Girl,

In this light, no matter how vanilla the sex, Zettai Kareshi already engages with a queering of normative romance—more than an android, Night is a Prince Charming, belonging in the realm of fantasy and fairy tales. At one point, the Kronos Heaven sales clerk even remarks about Night that “If this kind of fellow actually existed, I’d be scared!” only to conclude, wearily, “Well, he has been made already, but…” This comment testifies to the extent to which Night exists outside our “normal” reality.

The last chapter of Zettai Kareshi can indeed be understood as a return to order, despite its divergence from the typical happy ending of mainstream shōjo manga, in which the usual question is not whether, but how the leading couple ends up living happily ever after. At the end of the story, Night renounces his alterity, smashing the mood ring because “a normal boyfriend doesn’t need this”—this decision, however, seemingly leads to Night’s exclusion from the commodified world that he inhabits, i.e., the pages of a girls’ comic. After a few weeks of marital bliss, Night becomes sleepy and does not wake up from a nap on the couch. In a heartbreaking sequence, the “kiss of life” trope is subverted one last time, as Riiko attempts and fails to revive Night with several kisses, imitating how she had first activated him at the beginning of the story. Riiko is heartbroken and struggles to overcome the death of her lover until, one day, Sōshi returns from his self-exile in Spain, to where he had traveled after being rejected. He brings with him a letter where Night asks him to take care of Riiko after his “death.” In the end, it appears, the conservative agenda prevails, as, in the manner of a conventional bildungsroman, the status quo absorbs the heroine’s youthful transgressions. Still, the bildungsroman’s focus on compromise is ultimately absent from Zettai Kareshi. First, because as the sales clerk explains to Riiko, although Night has expired his shelf life, the body will be kept intact inside the headquarters of Kronos Heaven and the company will continue to attempt to repair it. Incidentally, Kronos Heaven’s offices look like a futuristic castle, and Night’s body is kept inside a narrow box resembling Snow White’s glass coffin (again, inverting the positions of the Prince Charming and the damsel). Thus, while Zettai Kareshi’s ending is undoubtedly tragic, the hope—or threat—remains that Night will one day return and claim the heroine.

Second, because Sōshi is “hurried out” of the picture in the last pages of the story, causing many readers to complain that the series’ finale felt rushed. It may very well be, but the fact remains that there is no ultimate celebration of adjustment or compromise in Zettai Kareshi. Not only that but when Sōshi returns to Japan, Riiko momentarily mistakes him for Night, in a beautifully executed scene conveying her wishful thinking through the comic medium. In two identical panels, the heroine’s hand is in the foreground, revealing an approaching silhouette beyond them, with Riiko uttering the syllable “Ni-” before realizing that the person is her childhood friend. [Figure 9] There is a dissonance at work between Sōshi’s return to be by Riiko’s side—and eventually, take over Night’s place as her lover—and how the whole sequence focuses on Night’s last words to the heroine, which Sōshi dictates to her in the form of a letter. After performing his duty as Night’s envoy, Sōshi’s screen time is cut to a single panel in a dismissive, slapstick tone. Above all, Riiko’s finals words in Zettai Kareshi leave no room for doubt: “Night… You will forever be my first man. My absolute boyfriend.”

In the end, Zettai Kareshi’s understated queering of an otherwise “normal” heterosexual romance may lack the radical tone in which oft-analyzed works like Evangelion or Ghost In The Shell handle the question of singularity. Nevertheless, Watase’s series shares their same belief that “while we may design our technologies, these tools… shape us in turn,”[10] i.e., that humans are and have always been complex entanglements of flesh, bones, and the whole body of techniques, methods, and processes through which we mediate our world. By turning the Prince Charming into a sex doll, Zettai Kareshi negotiates a space for nonconforming desires within the heteronormative matrix of mainstream Japanese girls’ comics, playing into binary sex/gender oppositions to express fantasies and anxieties concerning the possibilities (and limits) of intimacy in late capitalist societies.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Floating Dakimakura, Poison Girls & She’s Not Your Waifu, She’s an Eldritch Abomination.

REFERENCES in Absolute Boyfriend.

MAJOR SPOILERS!

• Zettai Kareshi (manga)