103 DOI: 10.24411/2658-6789-2019-10012 Origins of the Shōnen-ai and Yaoi Manga Genres Yu.A. MAGERA Abstract. This article discusses mainly the works of Japanese manga authors of the 1970s – Takemiya Keiko and Hagio Moto, who created the manga genre shōnen-ai (boys’ love). This manga genre, intended for female audiences and developed in Japan, had been considerably infuenced by European art, espe- cially by French literature and cinema. Such flms as “This Special Friendship” (1964) or works of Jean Cocteau and other French writers formed a special aesthetics of manga about beautiful boys who love each other. Keywords: Aesthetic fction, female comics, Japanese literature, French art, homoeroticism, manga, shonen-ai, yaoi, Year 24 Group. From the beginning of the 1970s, such manga genres as shōnen-ai (boys’ love) and later yaoi, which portray relationships between male characters, became very popular in Japan. These stories are created by women and for women. Currently there is no strict division between the two genres, and Japanese publishing houses unite such products under the common title “boys’ love” (ボーイズラブ), sometimes abbreviated as “BL”. Researcher Mizoguchi Akiko says: “The term “yaoi” was coined in the early 1980s by amateur fanzine writers of the ani-paro (parodies of popular animation shows) subgenre as a self-derogatory term” [Mizoguchi 2003, p. 50]. Yaoi is an abbreviation formed from the initial characters of the Japanese phrase “Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi (“no climax, no punch line, no meaning”), which was used to characterize low-grade stories, mostly of pornographic content, created by fans and non-profes- sional writers. Therefore, the term “yaoi” is commonly used in Japan in relation to amateur non-commercial works called dōjinshi. There were other terms to refer to the stories about same-sex relationships, such as bishōnen manga (beautiful boy comics) or tanbi shōsetsu (aesthetic fction), but they do not refect the essence of this phenomenon so well.