Doctoring the Evidence?
by Penny Paperbrain
Author’s disclaimer: I’m not even sure if I believe myself, here, but it’s interesting...
Muraki is straight. Or, more precisely, nature intended him to be be, and Muraki the man, in as far as there is still such a creature alive underneath the psychopathology, is straight.
I don't mean that homosexuality is by nature psychopathic, just that Muraki has constructed an artificial personality as a way of coping, and that to fulfill the purposes it was needed for, that personality had to be gay. I'm building here on the popular assumption that Muraki was sexually interfered with as a child, and this led him to see his earlier self in other vulnerable young men and attempt to destroy that self in them because he hates its weakness. This can’t be proven from canon, but the shoe certainly fits (sorry I can’t remember the fine article which developed this theory: anyone who knows who wrote it and where it’s posted, please send us the link!)
As Starza points out, we know that Muraki can’t be exclusively gay because of his relationship with Ukyou. Scant as the references to this relationship are, they imply a deep attachment - in manga volume eight we see him take a phone call from her when he has refused everyone else, get almost angsty about the fact that she has cancelled their theatre date, and eventually 'die' thinking of her. Oriya refers to her as "precious Ukyou-chan". His tone implies both that Muraki is wrapped up in Ukyou, and that Oriya is jealous.
Ukyou and Oriya seem to be the two people with whom Muraki has anything like a sane relationship, and Ukyou, the woman, is the one he is in love with, while he doesn't even seem interested in a random shag with Oriya, though it's pretty likely he could get one for the asking. The only part of Muraki's 'sane' life we know about therefore presents him as classically straight.
Yet Muraki the psychopath does not, as far as I can tell, molest women. That dubious honor is reserved for pretty boys. Think of the contrast between Hisoka and the victim of the murder he witnessed – they're both beautiful, but it's Hisoka who gets the full grim treatment. Tsubaki-hime, too, is killed without a second thought. Muraki’s dismissive attitude to women implies a gay misogynist, as does his assertion to Hisoka (regarding Tsubaki) that “We men don’t have a different feeling that women call love. Our behavior is more base.”
But if he’s exclusively gay, then where does Ukyou fit in? And why doesn’t the apparently sexually voracious and amoral Muraki make a move on Oriya? Though he seems quite content about his friendship with Oriya, he never takes steps to protect it from any other problems – like his own propensity for serial murder – so he’s presumably not holding back out of that concern. On a Machiavellian level, there’s no reason to think sleeping with Oriya would make the latter less useful to Muraki or damage their friendship; if anything a one-night stand would probably make him even more hopelessly devoted. Given that Muraki does seem to care about Oriya in his own way, it seems surprising he does not acknowledge the latter’s implicit attraction to him and deal with it more considerately than he does, even if it’s only to convey the message “Sorry, I don’t fancy you”. One answer is that the sane part of Muraki, the part that deals with Oriya, doesn’t want to *know* about the brothel-keeper’s attraction to him. Every aspect of Muraki and Oriya’s interaction could be mapped perfectly onto the familiar real life situation of a straight man who has a gay close friend who fancies him, but completely ignores the attraction because he himself is uncomfortable with it.
When Muraki behaves in an overtly gay fashion, it’s always about control. It’s often said – and I agree – that on some level he genuinely loves Tsuzuki, but I think this is actually a brotherly love, derived from his perception that they are both descendants of darkness. Moments of affection and moments of molestation are usually separate. It’s Tsuzuki who dreams, however apparently unwillingly, of the doctor proposing marriage and wanting to “be together” (at the beginning of manga volume 5), not Muraki himself. Muraki’s actual sexual behavior is a blend of harrassment, admiration for Tsuzuki’s body as the incarnation of an ideal, and corny one-liners about wanting Tsuzuki to “blossom” underneath him. In fact, having acquired Tsuzuki for a night on the Queen Camellia, Muraki immediately gambles him away in pursuit of an even more appealing prize, the further humiliation of both Tsuzuki and Hisoka. Nor does he, as far as we see, exploit the opportunity to do anything X-rated to Tsuzuki in the run-up to the proposed head transplant. You’d think he might want to take advantage of Tsuzuki while the shinigami still has his beautiful amethyst eyes, but sexual desire per se is less in the equation than ever: at this stage he just wants to get his torturing hands on the rebuilt Saki.
There’s no evidence of Muraki having had gay sex with a man for whom he feels any positive connection: just the rape of the stranger Hisoka, who threatened him by reminding him of himself, and the planned rape of Saki (he doesn’t specify rape as something he has in mind for his half-brother, but he’s undergone a remarkable character change if it isn’t in the wings).
Muraki’s gay impulses, whether they manifest in ridiculous chat-up-lines or savage rape, are always a means to an end, whereas his ‘death’ speech to Ukyou shows that his affection for her is an end in itself. Hence my conclusion that the former are a feature of the distortions in his personality, while the latter belongs to the remains of a sanity hidden underneath. While Muraki could still be bisexual, that would make the gender division in the relationships analysed above quite a coincidence.
Poor old sensei: he might not want you to know it, he might not want to know it himself, but it looks like the YnM character who makes the noisiest show of gay promiscuity is actually a wannabe after all.
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