The J-Drama Drop #35

Believe it or not, I had so many book and J-drama reviews planned for the first half of 2025, and yet here I am in May, just now publishing something new on this blog for the very first time this year. Charge it to my hormones, not my heart. (Backstory: I started a new medication in January. It's serving the purpose it was prescribed for, but it's hard to write about the stuff you read and watch when you're not finishing anything, and it's hard to finish things when your brain is foggy and your concentration is sometimey.) Anyway, I think I've finally adjusted enough to get back into writing again, so here's my review of a scandalous infidelity-themed J-drama that I watched in the second half of 2024, a heart-wrenching yet adorable father-daughter J-drama that I finished this February, and an honorable mention K-drama that I finished last month.

夫の家庭を壊すまで (Otto no Katei wo Kowasu Made/Until I Destroy My Husband's Family/Until I Destroy My Husband's Household) - TV Tokyo, 2024

• 
  Minori is a Waseda University-educated mother and housewife, and Yudai works in sales. Minori believes that they've been happy together for the past 17 years, until she sees a text on her husband's phone from a mysterious contact named "W.M." Suspicious, she follows her husband around one night and discovers that he has a whole second family. This family includes a hairdresser/salon owner named Riko who was one of their high school classmates, and her 18-year-old son Wataru (the "W.M" who's been texting Yudai). Back in high school, Yudai knew Riko first before getting close to Minori. Sometime after marrying Minori, Yudai rekindled his relationship with Riko (after she had a baby by a different married man), and has been spending time with Riko and Wataru on the side for about a decade.
• Minori's female lawyer friend strategizes a divorce plan for her, but thousands in alimony isn't enough. Minori wants to punish Yudai for his "crime" of adultery, and destroy his second family too. She begins by getting herself hired part-time as one of Wataru's juku (cram school) tutors, so she can gain intel via proximity and manipulate Wataru via the crush he develops on her. Which is how she learns that Riko is pregnant with Yudai's child. More sleuthing reveals that not only does her mother-in-law prefer Yudai's side family, but mother and son have been plotting on Minori since high school! Minori is the secret love child of a former employee of the Tsukishiro jewelry company and the company's current chariman, and Yudai's mother knows this because she used to housekeep for the Tsukishiros. Yudai was coached by his struggling single mother to date and marry Minori, so they could eventually manipulate Minori out of an inheritance that she didn't even know she had. (Minori's mother died when she was a child, and her maternal grandfather raised her without informing her of her heiress status.)
• Armed with the full knowledge of her husband and mother-in-law's scheme, her grandfather's deathbed confession about her parentage, her father's resources, and Wataru's misplaced loyalty, Minori enacts her revenge. She gets her mother-in-law fired, gets Yudai exposed at work and demoted, rubs their deceit and imminent poverty in both of their faces, causes Yudai to abandon Riko, demands that Yudai sign divorce papers, and leaves town with her and Yudai's young son Tsubasa. Seven years later, Minori (now 40) is running a kid-friendly cafe in the countryside, and by pure coincidence Wataru (now 25) shows up as a new teacher at Tsubasa's school. He makes clear that he still desires her and that he's not a kid anymore, which she repeatedly rebuffs at first. Meanwhile, Yudai is a pitiful shell of his former self hoping Minori will give him a second chance, and having learned nothing from their comeuppance, both his mother and Riko devise ways to get back at Minori. 

Meh: The hair technology is still not technology-ing! Just like in 'Tokyo Girl' and 'Fukushuu no Miboujin', we have yet another female lead sporting yet another egregiously terrible bob-with-extensions combo that isn't blended well! The color match is perfect but the overall cut and shape are not, which is especially obvious in episodes 2 and 3. Minori goes to Riko's salon to get her hair cut by (and spook the life out of) Riko in episode 4, so obviously the "new" bob is the hairstyle the actress has had all along (which looks fantastic on her!), and she only needed extensions to give her character the illusion of long tresses for the beginning of the series. But come on! Y'all gotta at least pretend to care about pulling off a hairstyle that's convincing! 

 

Better: I was unprepared the level of empathy displayed between Minori and Wataru. Minori does use the boy to hurt his mom, but she also recognizes that he's not at fault for her husband's affair. And when Minori reveals to Wataru who she really is in episode 4, he doesn't expose her identity or her plan to Riko and Yudai. Because of their shared experience as children of affairs, he empathizes with how much Minori has suffered due to Riko and Yudai's selfishness, and shockingly, he promises to help her with whatever she needs for her revenge plot so that he and his mom can be forgiven. Minori is cognizant of the fact that she doesn't deserve Wataru's empathy given the power imbalance between them, and she's steadfast about keeping her distance from him in the flash forward (episodes 9 through 12), but he insists on offering it anyway. Now grown, having tried to approach Minori multiple times, Wataru gets caught in the rain with her in episode 10 and they take shelter in a construction site. During this scene he explains to Minori that although she used him, he credits her for setting him on the path to becoming a Wasei-educated teacher and an overall more caring person. They make out (initiated by him) after he moves her to tears by calling out the sense of guilt he sees in her for making bad people suffer even though they deserved it, because he feels the same guilt, and he believes they can overcome it and move on together as a couple. Their kiss is interrupted by a phone call from her son, and Minori once again rejects Wataru (not wanting to hurt her son, Wataru, or Wataru's little sister/Riko and Yudai's lovechild), but the pair do make their own unique commitment to each other by the end of the series. I'm not saying their relationship is right or appropriate, I'm just saying their ability to empathize with each other and eventually fall in love on less imbalanced terms makes narrative sense in context.

Speaking of Wataru, I appreciate how much 'Otto no Katei' is willing to lean into giving us someone to hate (in addition to Yudai and his mother), that someone being Wataru's mother. Riko is such a bird! Sure, she's been desperate for love her whole life and has never been anyone's first choice. But the show never lets the audience forget how much of a bird she is, and the audience is allowed to keep judging her for it, especially since Yudai is getting his just desserts too. We can look down on them both! Which is so much fun! (For those who don't know, a "bird" is what Black people have been calling women who forsake their dignity in order to get, keep, or align with men for decades, long before "pick-me" became the more recent popular slang term for that same phenomenon.) You are a MOTHER! Why does your SON have to run away, then agree to move back in on the condition that you leave your married boyfriend alone, in order for you to finally stop messing with said married boyfriend? I know I just waxed on and on about empathy, and I know Nichole Perkins said side chicks deserve empathy too. But some (fictional) side chicks deserve to be told about themselves, some of them deserve to lose something, and shows like this and the K-drama 'Doctor Cha' understand that in a way that satisfies the petty subsection of my soul. Nonami Maho truly did her job playing this character, because literally the only thing I liked about Riko was the fact that she resembled the singer Che'Nelle.

Best: The way Matsumoto Marika plays Minori as a woman who's losing her mind (actively unraveling at home and in meetings with her lawyer friend), but who's also still shrewd enough to keep saying targeted things to her husband and gauging his reactions (repeatedly toeing the line of almost revealing what she knows before the time is right)? The serial killer energy of her performance reminded me so much of Dominique Fishback's performance in 'Swarm.' Especially Matsumoto's ability to deftly switch between emotional levels, facial expressions, and tone of voice. One minute she's the dutiful housewife with the cutesy high-pitched voice who pretends to be oblivious to her husband's exploits, the next she's a gravelly-voiced woman scorned who's ready to stab and/or scare him to death. Just magnificent.

 

Also, the opening theme song, "down under" by zakinosuke (now known as YUSII)? It GOES! I dare you not to body roll to it!  

海のはじまり (Umi no Hajimari/Umi's Beginning/The Beginning of the Sea/Where Does the Sea Begin) - Fuji TV/2024

• 
  Eight years after the last time he saw Mizuki (his ex-girlfriend from college), Natsu gets word that Mizuki has died from cervical caner. At the funeral, he meets Mizuki's nearly 7-year-old daughter, whom Mizuki's mother Akane (the child's grandmother) reveals is his daughter too. Natsu impregnated Mizuki in college, but didn't learn this until she had him sign an abortion consent form. She couldn't go through with the abortion but also didn't want to limit Natsu's future prospects (knowing that he'd drop everything to father his child if he knew she kept it). So she let him believe that she underwent the abortion, then dropped out of school without telling him, and then broke up with him over the phone, lying that she fell in love with someone else. She proceeded to raise the baby (the titular Umi) as a single mother, with increasingly more help from her friendzoned library co-worker Tsuno and her parents as her cancer was diagnosed and worsened. 
• At the funeral, Akane tearfully asks Natsu to consider raising Umi, but doesn't give him a chance to process and respond before walking away and taking Umi with her. On the other hand, Umi becomes so obsessed with forging a connection with Natsu that the next day, while Akane is out running errands, Umi sneaks out and visits Natsu at his apartment all by herself. (She knows the way because Mizuki had previously walked her there and told her that this is where her father "Natsu-kun" lives.) This leads to a loose visitation arrangement, where Umi and Natsu alternately spend time at each other's homes and on outings, Natsu learns more about how Mizuki was living before she died, and Mizuki's parents patiently advise Natsu while waiting for him to decide if he wants to assume his parental rights to Umi or not.
• Natsu comes from an unconventional family himself (a blended family consisting of his once-divorced mom, his stepdad, and his younger step-brother), and so seeks their input on the Umi situation. This is in addition to the input of his supervisor at work, and that of his girlfriend Yayoi, who often participates in his visitations with Umi despite her own complicated relationship with the notion of motherhood. Even as Umi is ready to love Natsu and Natsu gradually embraces the changes he must make to be the father she needs, hiccups abound that they both learn to bounce back from. And while Natsu must decide whether to legally acknowledge his daughter, Umi must decide who she wants to live with, and if she's willing to change schools and leave her grandparents to live with Natsu. All of this, while everyone continues grieving Mizuki in their own respective ways.

Meh: I don't like how the script has Yayoi tell Natsu that she "murdered" the baby she previously aborted (more on that later). But given that the scene is her opportunity to be more honest with Natsu and admit how her over-eagerness to fill the role of Umi's new mom was motivated more by a desire to assuage her own guilt than by genuine affection for Umi (more on that later too), I can let it slide.

 

Better:  The writing of 'Umi no Hajimari' offers an abundance of  vulnerability, and so many difficult but necessary conversations. The last time I recall witnessing J-drama dialogue this consistently nuanced and mature was in 'Prism.' And maybe 'Rikon Shiyou Yo' too.

 

Also, it's common for Japanese names to be nature-themed, but that theme seems particularly pronounced through this show's character names. Natsu (meaning in summer, plus his last name Tsukioka partially refers to the moon, "tsuki"). Umi (meaning sea, Mizuki's favorite place that she and Natsu used to frequent together). Mizuki (the "mizu" refers to water, plus her and Umi's last name is Nagumo, meaning southern cloud). Yet another commonality I noticed between this J-drama and 'Silent', in addition to both shows featuring Meguro Ren as a lead character who has trouble communicating verbally. (In 'Silent' his character stops talking once he loses his hearing, whereas in 'Umi no Hajimari' his character is simply not very talkative or outspoken.) And as I write this I'm discovering that these commonalities aren't merely coincidental, since both shows share the same screenwriter (Ubukata Miku) and directors (Kazama Hiroki and Takano Mai)! 

 

Best: This little big-eyed 7-year-old girl is so precious! As Umi, Izutani Rana is one of the most impressive child actresses I've seen in a very long time. The baby can act! And apparently she's been in the industry since she was 2.

 

As integral figures in the Natsu/Mizuki/Umi saga, the side characters are what give this show extra heart. Even from just the first two episodes, I was astounded by Otake Shinobu's ability to portray all the nuances of pressure that Akane is under: having to balance her own grief with the responsibility of raising her granddaughter, holding the floor open for Natsu to step up as a father, but also having patience for the fact that he's going to be ready right away, thus masking her own disappointment and managing Umi's expectations, while not crushing the child's hope of having a relationship with Natsu or making Umi think that his hesitancy is the child's fault. The show does not work without Akane fostering opportunities for Natsu and Umi to bond despite her own trepidation and pain, and Otake Shinobu gets every bit of that across.

 

Tsuno's character is important representation for people outside of a deceased person's family who get left out of the grieving process, despite having been a mainstay in that person's life while they were living. Akane belatedly calls Tsuno and acknowledges as much to him, thanking him for taking care of Umi when Mizuki was too stubborn to accept her parents' help (before she got sick and moved back into her parents' house with Umi). In that same phone call Akane apologizes to Tsuno and invites him to Mizuki's 49th day burial ceremony, and you can read on his usually stoic or sour face how much hearing that acknowledgement means to him. He basically set his (mostly) unrequited feelings for Mizuki aside and spent years of his life helping to raise Umi out of the goodness of his heart, picking the girl up from daycare and babysitting her at his place as Mizuki needed. He encouraged Mizuki to tell Umi's birth father about her existence, looked after Mizuki in the hospital as her cancer worsened, everything. Only to feel cast aside and cut off from Umi after Mizuki's funeral. He'd tried to help sort through Mizuki and Umi's belongings at Mizuki's apartment, but Akane refused his assistance, saying "the family" would take care of it. With Akane rectifying that by acknowledging Tsuno as family, Tsuno received the validation he deserved.

 

The other side character who makes an indelible difference in this show is Yayoi (Arimura Kasumi from 'Call Me Chihiro' and Hanataba Mitai na Koi wo Shita). Learning about Mizuki and Umi from Natsu is triggering for her because, as it turns out, she had an abortion in a prior relationship. Just like Mizuki did with Natsu, Yayoi presented the abortion consent form to her then-boyfriend and he signed it, but unlike Mizuki she followed through with the procedure. Years later, Yayoi still keeps that fetus's sonogram in an envelope, tucked inside an old diary in one of her drawers. She even maintains a memorial locker and tablet for the fetus at a separate location from her apartment. THAT backstory made me realize why an actress of Arimura's caliber took on this non-leading role. And the honesty in her character's trajectory is so rich! Yayoi goes from gleefully trying to be Umi's replacement mom, to pulling away from both Natsu and Umi (starting to resent that all her time with her boyfriend tends to now include Umi too), to fully accepting that she actually doesn't want to be slotted in as Umi's mom after all now that she's no longer motivated by her abortion guilt like she was when she first met Umi. She loves Natsu and Umi, and enjoyed being a trio at first, but ultimately doesn't want to be Umi's mom. Especially not with the spectre and mention of Mizuki looming over everything, when Yayoi never met and didn't know the woman; this "family" of three she thought she wanted doesn't feel like it belongs to her, and it makes her jealous, which she hates being. So she declines becoming Umi's mom in any official sense and tearfully breaks up with Natsu in epsiode 9, admitting that what she truly wants (a relationship with just her and Natsu) is not possible. And it's so painful for them both, and they don't fault each other at all, because in order to be happy Yayoi HAS to choose herself, and Natsu HAS to choose Umi. So much meat to chew on as an actor, so much for Arimura to do, and she does it superbly.

 

And apparently, Yayoi unknowingly contributed to Umi being born in the first place. It's only revealed to the audience that at the last minute, what changed Mizuki's mind about having an abortion was the entry Yayoi had written in the clinic's "thoughts and feelings book" (coincidentally they visited the same women's health clinic for their procedures). Yayoi's entry expresses her guilt about having an abortion and her frustration at not having the support from her then-boyfriend and her mom that would've enabled her to make a different choice. She knows it's the best decision for her situation at that time, but she doesn't want other women to follow what others say and ignore what they really want like she did. Women should decide for themselves, and make the choice that will make them happiest. Reading this made Mizuki realize that what would make her happiest was keeping her child, even if it meant letting Natsu go. 

Honorable Mention: What Comes After Love - Coupang Play, 2024

Based on a 2005 novel of the same name co-written by Gong Ji-Young and Tsuji Hitonari, 'What Comes After Love' is technically a K-drama, but since it's another bilingual show set between Tokyo and Seoul about a Japanese person and a Korean person falling for each other (similar to 'Eye Love You'), I decided to include it here. I've also never forgotten the impression Sakaguchi Kentaro left on me in 'Soshite, Ikiru' and was eager to watch him work again. Contrary to the pairing in 'Eye Love You,' this time the people falling in love are a Korean woman and a Japanese man.

In the spring of 2019, an aimless but optimistic college grad and musician named Hong (Lee Se-young) moves from South Korea to Japan to try living on her own for the first time, taking her fellow Korean friend up on her offer to split the rent. Upon arrival at her new home station near Inokashira Park, she runs into Jungo (Sakaguchi Kentaro), who helps her get her luggage unstuck from an exit ticket gate, takes a picture of Hong and her friend together per their request, and bids them goodbye. Hong and Jungo meet again while both vying for a job at a ramen shop, and the two see each other every day due to Jungo working at a nearby food truck and them both volunteering for their neighborhood business association's clean-up crew. Aside from their mutual attraction, they bond over a shared love of literature: as the eldest daughter of a renowned Korean-Japanese interpreter/translator Hong has enrolled in Japanese classes at a local university with plans to pursue a graduate degree in literature, while Jungo is already a literature graduate student who dreams of publishing his own novel one day. After they start dating Hong moves in with Jungo, and the lovers give each other cognate nicknames in their respective languages; Jungo calls Hong "Beni" and Hong calls Jungo "Yun-o." 

Unfortunately, as Jungo becomes increasingly absent due to his multiple jobs, the isolation of being emotionally neglected in a foreign country while her family faces financial and health struggles back home becomes too much for Hong (plus, her best friend had already moved back to Korea). So she leaves a parting letter for Jungo before moving back to Seoul in the middle of the night. By 2024 (the present), Hong has thrown herself into her career as a director at her father's publishing/translation company and is unenthusiastically engaged to a doctor and longtime friend. Of course, when she's required to assist one of her subordinates in picking up a Japanese author client named "Sasae Hikari" from the airport to promote his new book in Korea, "Sasae Hikari" turns out to be none other than Jungo. (The novel he's promoting has the same title as this K-drama. It's a fictionalized version of their relationship, with reflections on where he went wrong, written in hopes that she'd read it and understand why he so regrettably fumbled their relationship the way he did.) Jungo tries multiple times to speak with Hong privately, and Hong avoids him like the plague. Meanwhile, Hong drags her feet on wedding planning and Dr. Rebound notices. Meanwhile, Jungo's literary agent Kanna (my girl Nakamura Anne from 'Kikazaru Koi' and so many other things) unexpectedly joins him on this promotional trip; Kanna and Jungo dated before he met Hong, and Kanna wants that old thang back. 

Thematically, this K-drama is very reminiscent of Hanataba Mitai na Koi wo Shita, one of the JFF+ (now JFF Theater) online film festival selections I watched last year. Both productions feature a passionate relationship between two university students going sour, when the boyfriend gets so engrossed with working to provide for himself and his girlfriend that he doesn't have time to be present or attentive anymore. Both productions also philosophize about what love is and what it means. When Hong breaks up with Jungo, she laments that no love stays the same or lasts forever, and in the present she still assumes that Jungo's love for her lessened (that he stopped caring about her), because how else did he not notice how lonely she was? But Jungo insists that his love for her never changed. Answering the titular question "What comes after love?" during one of his book events in Korea, Jungo muses that one only truly understands what love means after the love (the relationship) has ended. So in a way, regret is inevitable for people who love; the deeper the love, the deeper the regret when it's over, and he feels so much regret now precisely because he loved and still loves Hong so much, not because his love waned. The final episode further emphasizes that no love is meaningless, that love is a blessing no matter what kind it is or how long it lasts. Hong and Jungo even have a moment to finally sit down and talk the night before he's set to leave Seoul, where he apologizes to her for not taking her loneliness seriously, and she (having finally read his book for herself) thanks him for loving her during that time and writing a book about what they had. This seems to be the end of their relationship, with both prepared to leave each other alone after having made peace with one another (a similar fate to that of the Hanabata Mitai couple). That is, until Jungo demonstrates one last time that he's unwilling to give up on them. I won't spoil how they get back together, but I respect this show for preparing the audience to accept either conclusion. I doubly respect this show for its stunningly tender and yearning end credit song, "Closer than the stars" by Fromm. Even as someone who's never known romantic love, the song almost (only almost!) made me cry. 

 

Getting back to the J-dramas, if I had to choose my favorite between 'Otto no Katei' and 'Umi no Hajimari', I'd have to admit that while the latter is better written, the former is my favorite because of all the mess, the scandal, and how willing the show is to take it there, you know? Off I go to find more Japanese film and television to review, and hopefully it won't take me another nine months to publish my next edition of The J-Drama Drop!

BOOKS! (Jesus Wept)

Today is Thanksgiving, and since Thanksgiving is November 28th this year, coincidentally today is also the one-year anniversary of my grandpa's funeral. To honor today, I visited Grandpa's grave this afternoon, and now I'm writing a short review of a book that used to belong to him. 

 

Jesus Wept: Trusting the Good Shepherd When You Lose a Loved One by Leroy Brownlow

By virtue of helping to declutter Grandpa's house this spring and summer, I am now in possession of his copy of Jesus Wept, a 47-page Christian gift book about grief that he received from a friend when his mother (my great-grandmother) passed away. This is one of those moments where life feels like one big circle, because this book meant to comfort Grandpa is now comforting me amidst Grandpa's passing, and because I'm pondering how similar my 2023 was to Grandpa's 1992 in terms of that juxtaposition between new life and death, or recovery and the lack thereof. Grandpa lost his mother in May 1992 and gained his first grandchild/only granddaughter (me) in December, whereas I watched my mom spend the first half of 2023 healing from a spate of hospitalizations and then watched Grandpa succumb to his own hospitalization in the second half.

It took me almost the entirety of the past year to finally read this little book; I tried and simply couldn't bring myself to do it before, but I finally managed it earlier this month. And although I did initially expect Jesus Wept to be fluff, I was surprised to derive a genuine sense of consolation from it. I thoroughly appreciate all the inclusions of poetry as well as Brownlow's frequent assertion that crying is beautiful and natural and not only appropriate, but necessary. These aspects are unexpectedly soft and evolved for a white man from the South writing Christian books in the 1960s. (Jesus Wept is a 1988 republishing of Brownlow's 1969 release titled With the Good Shepherd.)

 

What I find most compelling about Jesus Wept are its multiple analogies about life going on after certain phases end. Moving from one home to another doesn't mean a tenant's life is over, but that it will continue on in a new home. A ship sailing out of sight doesn't mean it's lost, but that it's all the more closer to arriving somewhere else. And my favorite, given Grandpa's career as an educator and a principal for over 30 years: a school year ending doesn't mean a student's life is over, but that they now get to rest and enjoy what they've learned. Grandpa gets to rest and enjoy what he's learned.

For someone like me who is both a believer and a critically thinking person, the last chapter of Jesus Wept is certainly an eyebrow raiser. The way it uses seeds as a metaphor to emphasize how death liberates us from this world and is a blessing from God, and how humans can't realize their full potential until after they die (entering the realm of limitless possibilities that is the afterlife), I couldn't help but consider how easy it's been for people to argue that Christianity is a death cult. At the same time, I couldn't deny how strongly this metaphor resonated with me, even though I'd heard it before. Reading it in this context reminded me of an animated short film I watched this summer called Ninety-Five Senses, which similarly suggests that death opens up an entire host of new possibilities (95 additional senses, for example) that we simply cannot fathom or access during our temporal lives here on Earth. And who wouldn't want to be able to imagine their loved ones experiencing and enjoying more on the other side than what life allowed them the first go-round? I know that kind of imagining has done wonders for me and my grieving process.

Obviously religiosity and flowery language won't be helpful to everybody dealing with loss, but if you were raised in church or simply have an interest in religious writings, then give this book a try. Once I stopped dragging my feet I finished Jesus Wept in two days, and it only took me that long because I was intentionally spacing the book out to help its ideas marinate in my mind.  

Favorite quotes:

"But he knows beyond the hills there is a valley where life is pleasant" (15). 

"For school to be out merely closes the classes—not the life of the student. It rather gives him a chance to rest from his studies and to enjoy his learning. So goes life in a world designed to be a preparatory school. In it we learn from many sources. And after the learner has finished his course, it is only natural for him to go home" (25-26).

"He considers the welfare of the dying as well as the living; and His calling one home is not to hurt us who remain, but to help him who departs" (32).

BOOKS! (Blackgentlemen.com + Sistergirls.com)

As promised, this is my second of two reviews I'm writing about finally reading the work of Zane, a Black erotica author whose books were especially prominent in the 2000s, when I was too young to read them. This review covers a pair of anthologies that Zane curated around the theme of Black online dating. Blackgentleman.com was published first, and contains five novellas by Black female romance/erotica authors (the first and last ones written by Zane herself), exploring how different characters approach finding love on the titular fictional dating site. Conversely, Sistergirls.com contains five novellas written by Black male authors. In other words, Blackgentleman.com is written by Black women for Black women, and Sistergirls.com is written by Black men for Black men (but in a way that still appeals to a female audience, since Zane is curating it all). When I found these two anthologies at my library's book sale back in the spring, I insisted on taking them home regardless of their contents simply because they each have the most unsubtle covers I've seen in a very, very long time! Kudos to illustrator Andre Harris for painting these beautiful, moisturized, and scantily clad trios of Black men and women, who are seductively posing in bodies of water for some unknown reason. The paintings seem out of sync with the .com theme of the books, but they're also so perfectly suited to the 2000s and the erotica genre that I can't even complain. Maybe chuckle at the unabashed lack of subtlety, but certainly not complain. Well done.

For the sake of brevity I will mostly be referring to the respective fictional websites as BG.com and SG.com from this point forward. While there was a real Blackgentleman.com presumably created to promote this two-book series (as referenced in the "About the Authors" sections of both BG.com and SG.com), it does not exist now, and there is no indication that Sistergirls.com was ever a real website. It's also curious that while BG.com opens with an acknowledgements section of paragraphs written by each contributing author, SG.com contains no acknowledgements at all. Was it a cost-saving measure, seeing as how SG.com has the same amount of stories but is 80 pages shorter than BG.com? Did the men not feel like they had anyone to thank or acknowledge for their support? I guess we'll never know. 

Blackgentleman.com by Zane

 

While I wasn't wowed by either of these anthologies as a whole, BlackGentlemen.com is definitely the more worthwhile of the two. It opens with "Duplicity" by Zane, a wild ride with a surprisingly scandalous dose of twin betrayal and a dilemma that, amusingly, could literally only be a dilemma during this specific moment in time. Among a pair of North Carolina sisters whom I referred to in my notes as "City Twin" and "Country Twin," City Twin has upcoming Christmas date plans with a man from BG.com (their first time meeting face to face). But she suddenly has to travel for work, so she entrusts Country Twin with emailing this online boyfriend to cancel those plans on City Twin's behalf. Country Twin gets a glimpse of how foine this man is via his BG.com profile, and immediately strategizes how to steal him for herself. The reasoning for why neither twin simply calls the man is flimsy; City Twin supposedly won't have time because of her work commitments, and she doesn't want Country Twin to say something rude to him over the phone due to Country Twin's wariness of internet strangers. But to the extent that that excuse is believable, this is a scenario that could only occur in the early 2000s, where digital communication is possible but the masses don't have smart phones yet, and people aren't yet expected to be accessible and responsive to each other 24/7. "Duplicity" is presumably set around 2002 (the year BG.com was published), but by 2008 City Twin would've absolutely been able to email, text, or message her online boyfriend, quickly, on the go, from her cell phone, by herself.

 

"Lessons Learned" is a harrowing yet sweet story about pivoting from colossal mistakes and taking advantage of second chances. Years after breaking up with her high school and college sweetheart due to a misunderstanding, an unhappily married woman in her late 20s named Clarissa happens to see her ex's profile on BG.com after her best friend mentions the site to her. With some helpful interference from her bestie, Clarissa is able to have a romantic reunion with her ex in New York, learn the truth behind how their messy break-up was orchestrated by her rebound-turned-husband, and swiftly move her life from Atlanta to NYC to start over anew with her true love, leaving the raggedy (and abusive) first husband behind.   

 

None of the women in BG.com are "catfished," as we would say today, but Zane does provide an entertainingly chaotic alternative to all the happily ever afters by closing the collection with "Delusions." Here, a DC area woman named Tasha meets her internet boyfriend for the first time when he visits from California, and while he is who he presented himself to be looks-wise, he's a much more terrible and terrifying person than she bargained for. The man's a liar and a temperamental one at that, but Tasha's too fixated on how good-looking he is to see it. In a matter of weeks, their in-person encounters literally go from him fingering her and banging her out on the hood of her car in the airport parking lot, to her needing to bite his penis hard enough to draw blood so she can flee for help after he assaults and abducts her for discovering his status as a murderous criminal wanted by the FBI. It seems much too soon and incredibly unhealthy for Tasha to then perform a singing telegram to ask a man she'd previously rejected on a date instead of, say, taking more time to heal from her traumatic experience and learning how to not be so consumed with finding a man. However, I can also appreciate Zane throwing a bone to internet-wary readers by giving them a story that confirms how they already assume online dating works: a desperate woman learns to leave dating sites alone the hard way, after getting taken advantage of and almost killed by a violent man she really didn't know as well as she thought.

But the real jewel here, the best novella in BG.com by far, has got to be "Your Message Has Been Sent" by J.D. Mason. A widow and single mom named Mo is a community center director in the Black part of Denver, and she brings on a handsome new volunteer named Kevin to substitute teach the center's photography class. They're interested in each other, but Kevin thinks she's married (because she still wears her wedding ring), and despite finally getting the urge to start dating again now that it's been three years since her husband's passing, Mo is unconfident about anyone wanting her. After her younger brother Troy encourages her to give BG.com a gander, she coincidentally finds Kevin on there and starts communicating with him anonymously, toying with him as a coy secret admirer online while being too scared to talk to him at work. "Your Message Has Been Sent" ends somewhat abruptly, but it is undoubtedly the best-written of all the BG.com entries, and there's a BDSM fantasy Mo emails Kevin about that comes to life in a clever way once Kevin realizes that she's his secret admirer. What's most impressive about this story is how it humanizes Mo's brother Troy as a love-obsessed gay Black man and drag queen, emphasizing the supportive relationship that Mo and Troy have (with Mo being a true and loyal ally to him since childhood). Troy isn't merely the tropic sassy "gay best friend" helping the female lead with her woes; he is a complex person surrounded by folks who love him, who are concerned for his safety, who support his performances, who value his insight, who are willing to fight for him. For something published in 2002, that is hugely progressive! 

 

I was so caught off guard by how good the story was that I looked up what else J.D. Mason had written, and realized that my mom already had a copy of Mason's novel One Day I Saw a Black King that'd been waiting to be read since 2003. Ma agreed to let me "borrow" it, I flew through the first half of the book in a matter of days (had to take a break to write these Zane reviews), and now I'm having Nowhere Is a Place flashbacks, newly discovering and devouring yet another masterpiece about Black women written by a Black woman, that I wish I would've known about sooner, that should've been heralded as a classic within the Black American literary canon but was not. So rest assured that I will be writing more about Mason at a later date, and that Ma will not be getting her copy back!

Read this book even just for a taste of J.D. Mason's writing. You're welcome!

 

Favorite quotes:

"You need to learn to be whole all by yourself, Mo... You were born alone and you're going to die alone. You ain't never supposed to make a man your whole world, 'cause he ain't nothing but human like you human and there's no guarantee he's always going to be there." ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 143)

 

"The tiny voice inside her begged, 'Please. Please, Mo. Do something before it's too late. Spoon me up something besides this rut you've been force feeding me all these years. Give me something to look forward to. I'll pay you back, Girl.' Her tiny voice sounded pitiful and it broke her heart to have to listen to it, which is why she ignored it most of the time. But not this time. This time, her tiny voice warned, 'If you keep ignoring me, eventually I'm going to stop talking to you, Maureen.'" ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 167)

"'What's supposed to work, Baby? Everything isn't all or nothing, Mo. How many times I gotta tell you that? It's not about working or not working. Shit, sometimes, it's just about checking it out. Sometimes, you just got to learn to make the best of the in-between.'

'Yeah, why can't you just do something for the sake of doing it, Sis?'" ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 190)

 

"Don't strangle [love]. Don't try to hold it down or lock it up. You need to let me be me."  ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 204)

 

"Yes, I saw him, and you know just as well as I do that fine don't mean shit when it comes to men. The finer they are, the louder their bark." ("Delusions," p. 284)

Sistergirls.com by Zane

I don't have many glowing things to say about Sistergirls.com, and in fact I'm tempted to say don't bother reading it at all. But let me tackle the negative before giving credit to what positive can be found here.

 

I skipped "Somewhere Between Love and Sarcasm" by V. Anthony Rivers. I just couldn't get into it, and it didn't seem worth my time. And Rique Johnson makes such bizarre choices in "Life Happens" that I honestly regret reading it at all. A well-substantiated distrust of men is repeatedly referenced as the reason why Jessie (the female lead) is slow to dive into the relationship she's been forming with Tyrone (a man who finds her on SG.com), only for Johnson to blame Jessie's lesbian experiences as the real obstacle to the couple's romantic progress. "I thought I was gay, but I was really just boinking my female boss because she was there for me after I annulled my marriage, and also because I wanted to get back at my ex-husband for cheating on me during his bachelor party. Now my boss won't leave me alone because she's obsessed with me despite being married to a man herself, but don't worry because I got the gayness out of my system, even though I only managed to properly break up with my boss just now. And I really do want to marry you, the man I've been dating for nearly 2 years and slept with for the first time 3 months ago and got engaged to today," is... perhaps not as unrealistic a narrative as it might sound, especially if a decade of hearing listener letters on The Read has taught me anything. However, in this context, the homophobia is loud. Tyrone even asks Jessie how she could've "turned that way" despite being so beautiful, and it's posited that Jessie wouldn't have considered having a sexual relationship with her boss if her husband hadn't cheated on her and also drugged her into having a non-consensual threesome with a woman. All of this furthers the idea that lesbianism is something thrust upon women due to circumstance or being preyed upon by other women; it's merely a temporary phase or an act of rebellion that scorned women resort to until they can get back on track and pursue men again. Make no mistake, people are allowed to be fluid, to experiment sexually and leave it at that, but it's so ignorant and dangerous to frame lesbians either as jealous and predatory (Jessie's boss and the threesome lady), or as wounded straight women who simply haven't healed enough to remember that they're straight yet (Jessie). 

Now, on to the somewhat positive."You're Making Me Wet" by Earl Sewell is eye-opening in its exploration of how older people might do online dating differently, mainly by cutting the "online" part very short. As 40-somethings who are disinterested in online dating and only try SG.com because their respective 20-something children are overly worrisome about them dying alone, Sam and Sandra don't waste time with a whole lot of back and forth, and to them meeting in person actually feels like a safer and more accurate way of getting a feel for a person. Their first interaction on SG.com leads to them staying up late conversing via instant messenger that same night, they exchange phone numbers and then make jazz brunch date plans over the phone the very next day, and by the weekend they're meeting for the first time at said date. They later find out, as the reader has known all along, that their children are also dating each other, which is resolved by the quartet basically shrugging (and I paraphrase), "Welp, we grown and we'll keep our business a secret." I know this situation isn't technically incest, but that doesn't change how unsettling it is that future implications are casually brushed aside just so the story can end on a happy note. Still the best-written story in this anthology though.

 

Also to this anthology's credit, to be fair to readers who have valid concerns about meeting people from the internet, SG.com ends with an example of that going criminally wrong in a similar way that BG.com does. "The Wanting" (Michael Presley) features a corporate guy named Ron who gives up his wife and kids for a woman from SG.com whom he has fallen in love with via chats and email, has sent money to, and even believes he shared a night with in a hotel room. Police have to be the ones to inform him that he was one of numerous victims of a teenage white girl's catfishing scheme, employing a ring of sex workers to cyber scam grown professional Black men out of tens of thousands of dollars each.

Once again, my first mind is telling me to tell y'all to leave this book alone. But I don't want to be a hater, so I'll just say read it at your own risk.

Favorite quotes:

"Missy Elliot was singing her hit 'Get Your Freak On'... Sandra got caught up in the music and began dropping her ass like it was hot. 'That's right, girl! Represent for the big women because we know how to get our freak on.' Sandra laughed out loud to herself. 'I got my freak on, damn it!'" ("You're Making Me Wet," p. 106)

BOOKS! (Sex Chronicles I and II)

Okay so yesterday was my grandpa's death anniversary, and I have a separate book review in relation to that already planned for next week. In the meantime, I'm writing two book reviews to pay homage to the author who helped me read the most consistently during this past year of bereavement, specifically over the past six months: Zane. I did not have reading or writing about Zane on my 2024 bingo board, but I also needed something escapist and unchallenging to keep my readerly self going, and her work showed up to meet that need. This review focuses on two famously salacious story collections of hers, The Sex Chronicles and Sex Chronicles II.

While I did grow up in a Black Expressions household (see my review of Victoria Christopher Murray's Joy for an explanation of what Black Expressions was), I was not one of those kids who snuck and read their mom's Zane books. But that was simply because my mom didn't buy Zane. So while I'd heard about Zane's reputation as "The Queen of Black Erotica" for the past 20-something years—her raunchy material having been adapted into TV shows and films and audio drama podcasts alike—I'd never read her work until May of this year. I was browsing at my local library's spring book sale when I found a dozen Zane books tucked together, donated by a Black lady in Pontiac who'd previously stuck address labels to the inside overs. I bought the four that intrigued me most. Now would finally be my opportunity to read Zane's work for myself and see what all the hype was about. I figured this experiment would either be amazing, or a cringefest.

And honestly, what I've read lands somewhere in the middle, leaning toward cringe but surprising me with how intentionally Zane pushes the limits of sex on paper, not only for shock value but also to coax her early 2000s readers beyond their comfort zones. I cannot say that I am now a fan of Zane after having read four of her books; her writing is... not my favorite. And even the supposed freakiest, nastiest, or most twisted scenes in the Sex Chronicles collections might be considered tame by today's standards. But if nothing else, Zane's work is accessible and entertaining (vivid scenes and direct, uncomplicated language), and I respect the significance of her encouraging Black women to expand and even live out their sexual fantasies when they had even less space to do so than they do today. Plus, thanks to her including other Black erotica authors in subsequent anthologies, I've been exposed to a different author whose novel I currently cannot put down! (More on that in the next review.)  

The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane

The Sex Chronicles is divided into three sections, meant to prime readers to more readily digest the stories as the raunch progressively increases. The highlights of these sections, according to yours truly, are as follows. Assume that all characters are Black.

The first section, "Wild," is the warm-up. A woman who is often aroused by water sounds gets railed in the rain, against a tree, on the side of the road during ridiculously slow traffic ("The Interstate"). A woman stalks a barber who works at the shop her brother frequents, eventually seducing the barber at the shop after hours and getting the business in his chair ("The Barbershop"). A woman's random security inspection by a customs officer quickly becomes a lesbian encounter, and then an FFM threesome including her man ("The Airport"). A woman pleasures herself with a baton in her grandparents' attic after reading about a sexual encounter in her grandmother's diary, which she found in that same attic ("The Diary").

The next section, "Wilder," is cooking with grease. An introverted and anxious young professional/recent graduate recalls the origin of "SHE", her alter ego who's been having quick, one-off, anonymous, and nearly wordless dalliances with countless men since seducing her first target in a university library basement during freshman year ("Nervous"). A woman who has camera anxiety but also needs a professional photo taken for work, becomes instantly and mutually infatuated with the photographer conducting her photo shoot at his home studio, and winds up pleasuring herself with her eyes closed in front of him as he takes photos of her before they have sex ("A Flash Fantasy"). A woman laid up in the hospital, depressed and in pain with an elevated broken leg, gets treated to a picnic and lovemaking session in her hospital bed when her man sneaks back in after visiting hours to help her feel better; they listen to each other's heartbeats with a stethoscope while copulating ("Get Well Soon"). A blues singer who is newly single after catching her boyfriend cheating, touches herself thinking about her longtime friend and piano player in the backseat of a cab (knowing the driver is watching), and later has sex with said bandmate atop his piano in an empty club while imagining an audience watching them ("Harlem Blues"). A bride celebrates the night before her wedding at a male strip club and is treated with a trip to one of the private back rooms, where a male stripper dances for her and then has sex with her in the same room where two other couples are already mid-coitus; in hindsight, she believes that the spontaneity and uninhibitedness of the experience made her a better lover for her husband ("The Bachelorette Party"). An undergraduate assistant to a chemistry professor gets caught pleasuring herself in a lab with a test tube by said professor, and he joins in helping her reach orgasm with it; a rare example of non-PIV sex in this book, the assistant describes it as making love, not masturbation ("Body Chemistry 101").

And last but not least, "Off Da Damn Hook" is where Zane takes the most audacious swings. An assistant district attorney in DC explains the structure and activities of Alpha Phi Fuckem, the secret sex sorority for educated and professional Black women that she's a member of; they have monthly, themed, meticulously planned sex parties and orgies with Black men who are specially recruited for each event ("Alpha Phi Fuckem"). The general manager of an underground sex mall called Valley proudly lists its variety of offerings, including strip clubs, massage parlors, bathhouses, individual sex show booths and custom porn studios, a sex toy shop, a porn shop, restaurants and bars that serve bodily fluids/food made with fluids/food shaped like genitals/food that's eaten off of employees, and a matchmaking service based on sexual compatibility ("Valley of the Freaks"). A woman who's just been dumped by her boyfriend because he doesn't find her freaky enough and thinks he can set her aside for later, gets her revenge by showing up to his college friend's masquerade birthday party and boinking the birthday boy in front of everyone before escaping unrecognized ("Masquerade"). A clearly bisexual woman, clocking how disengaged her man is, calls her female dominatrix roommate and sex buddy from college to put on a woman-on-woman show to entice her man instead of, I don't know, having that same woman-on-woman experience to gratify her own needs ("Wanna Watch?"). A proud nymphomaniac shares her sexual philosophies and her journey getting pleasured by sexually-skilled men whom she refers to as "mad fuckers," including one she seduced into railing her twice at a house party for all to see ("Nymph"). A woman who moved to Alabama for work meets two men at a juke joint who are first cousins (to each other, not to her), and proceeds to have sex with both of them at the juke joint, in their car, and at the apartment of one of the men ("Kissin' Cousins"). A new divorcée and her friends travel from Detroit to an all-Black sexual playground in an unspecified Caribbean country ("Sex Me Down Village"). A sex worker explains why she views herself more as a "dream merchant" than a call girl, describing a few clients for whom she fulfills fantasies in a way that those men's wives or girlfriends won't due to Madonna-Whore complexes ("Dream Merchant"). A women's university student waits desperately for three years to be visited by a mysterious man who sneaks into students' dorm rooms at night to pleasure them orally before escaping back out their windows each time ("The Pussy Bandit"). The same narrator from the "Alpha Phi Fuckem" story recounts recruiting her male "playmate" for the national convention in Atlantic City, where a gigantic private casino orgy precedes a spa sex session and a formal banquet ("Alpha Phi Fuckem—The Convention").

Of course, The Sex Chronicles does have some issues. With few exceptions, the sex scenes are heteronormative, penetrative (focusing on PIV), and raw. The acts described are rather repetitive, pulling out is rare, no one is explicitly on birth control, and there is zero exchanging of STI test results before coitus. Condoms are not mentioned until page 89 (in a story called "Wrong Number"), and then again in only two other stories. Granted, as irresponsible as it may be for Zane to overlook these things, the heteronormativity and the lack of safe sex practices are probably typical of that time. I'm also willing to cut her some slack for the fact that ultimately, this is a self-published book of erotica, the realm of fantasy, not a sex ed brochure or public health pamphlet. 

On the plus side, the leading ladies in this book always get exactly what they want sexually, exactly how they want it, and they always come away satisfied. In fact, most stories end happily ever after with the woman married to or in a committed relationship with the man who's pleasuring her, regardless of if the trysts were initially meant to be casual or singular or not. Even the stories where women commit infidelity end optimistically, because they believe they've gained the skills to please their significant others better, or at the very least to be more comfortable expressing and exploring what they desire.

And that last part is truly the most endearing commonality across these stories, male-centered though it may be: Women are often eager to be more sexually adventurous, eager to be the "freaks" men say they want, and would actually exhibit that if given the chance. That is to say, if men or situations made them feel safe enough to do so. If the men they wished to experiment with were to want them back, and also be open to what they have in mind without judgment. If men would pay more attention to the multitude of ways in which their women have already been repeatedly indicating an interest in shaking things up in the bedroom (or elsewhere). If men would listen to constructive criticism that would make them better lovers. If men would be receptive to women leading, making more brazen demands, and introducing them to something new. If women could access services and a sense of community that would allow them to enact their fantasies with support and anonymity. Black women in the year 2000 are not as prudish as people might presume them to be, and Zane clearly empathizes with their unmet needs and secret longings in a way that was groundbreaking when The Sex Chronicles was published.

If you need something easy, are already a fan of Zane, or are simply curious like I was, then read this book! 

Favorite quotes:

"For my loyal readers, I love each and every one of you, no matter what your race, no matter what your sexual persuasion. Making love is universal" (xiii).

"Glancing over at you sitting on the piano bench and watching all the passion from your soul escape through your fingertips, I began to fantasize about how it would be if we made love, what your passionate fingers would feel like all over my body. Would you play my body with the same intensity as you played the piano, would you make me forget all the shit Kendall had done, would you show me what making real love was all about? (123). 

"I told myself that once I hit thirty, I was going to take the sexual-prime theory to heart and let go of all my inhibitions... The sexual-prime theory must be true, because the day after I turned thirty, my pussy gained a mind of its own. I was daydreaming about dick all the time, masturbating every dayum day, and began asking myself one question: If I can't wake up to a bagel with cream cheese and a stiff dick, why wake up at all?" (149-50).

 

Sex Chronicles II: Gettin' Buck Wild by Zane

 

Published two years after the first book, Sex Chronicles II is divided into the same "Wild," "Wilder," and "Off Da Damn Hook" sections as its predecessor. What I consider to be the highlights are as follows. Assume that all characters are Black.

"Wild" is aight. As an example of how her boyfriend has helped her become more sexually liberated, a woman recalls having a very enthusiastic "train" ran on her by her boyfriend and his three friends when the friends came over to watch a football game one day ("Down for Whatever"). A husband and wife come home from volunteering as Santa and Mrs. Claus at a local hospital and commence to getting frisky, which includes playfully dancing for each other while stripping their costumes off, decorating each other with egg nog and frosting, and even using a candy cane as a penetrative object ("Under the Mistletoe").

"Wilder" is still mostly aight, and attempts to address queerness more than last time.  A woman who's been in a committed relationship with a woman for seven years and has been secure in her lesbianism for over a decade, starts craving penises again and blows up her relationship to act on that craving; she spends an entire night with a random man she spots while out one day, and after getting dumped and thrown out by her girlfriend, she dates bisexually with a preference for men ("Back to the Dick"). An exotic dancer and aspiring model/actress from Idaho is artfully seduced by a fellow female model from Kentucky, while they're waiting at a photographer's loft for a nude photo shoot to start; this is the Idaho model's first time with another woman, she absolutely loves it, and what follows is a threesome with the photographer and a pivot toward even more nude projects in her career ("Do You Really Want to Touch It?").

"Off Da Damn Hook" isn't as thrilling as in the previous book, but does delve deeper into the profession of sex work (emphasis on profession) in a way that feels ahead of its time. A woman discusses her job running Vixen Headhunters, Inc. an agency that sexually tests men out for career-focused women who want suitable mates but are too busy to date; she's blunt about most men and their appendages being unremarkable, but identifies one rare example that impressed her ("The Headhunter"). A doctoral student waxes fondly about semen's various properties and her passion for swallowing it; she goes on to describe her two "cum daddies," a younger man and an older man she regularly has sex with because she loves the way they reach orgasm (their respective "cum styles") and the way their ejaculate tastes ("Cum for Me Boo"). A sex worker boasts about her work having phone sex with male clients and then going a step further by collaborating with them to enact those same fantasies in real life, like boinking in an adult bookstore while other customers watch, or boinking on the Staten Island Ferry with waves crashing against the side of the boat ("Kandi Kan Make U Kream"). A female corrections officer brags about the secret sexual relationship she's been having for over a year with her favorite prisoner, whom she is newly pregnant by and plans to marry upon his release; she explains how this relationship started, and how she exchanged sexual favors with two other guards so they would be her lookouts during visits to her prison bae's cell ("Penitentiary"). A woman goes behind her lackluster boyfriend's back to pay $5,000 for an 8-hour foursome with a renowned and discrete trio of male sex workers, so she can finally experience an "earth-shattering orgasm" for her 30th birthday ("The Dick You Down Crew"). 

 

Whereas The Sex Chronicles was originally self-published, Sex Chronicles II came out after Zane secured a deal with a major publisher, as evidenced by how much the writing has improved in this collection. Ironically, however, I actually appreciate The Sex Chronicles more because it's more imaginative and daring than its successor. And this might be nitpicky, but even as an inexperienced 31-almost-32 year old who might be on the ace/aro spectrum, I can't abide by the "settle for a good-enough man but cheat and get a little extra peen on the side if you need to" message that Sex Chronicles II's final story ("The Dick You Down Crew") ends on. A man (the aforementioned lackluster boyfriend) literally tells a woman (the main character) that no one else is ever going to love her as much as he loves her, and she not only agrees with that statement, but also accepts his marriage proposal in that same moment. I thought we were telling the girlies not to settle in the first book, Zane! What happened?

 

There's also a perplexing contradiction that I noticed in The Sex Chronicles which is even more pronounced here. So many of Zane's characters seem so unapologetic about cheating on their men, having sex with other women's men, being ruthless about how they "get theirs," or even having sex for money, and yet those same characters insist that they're proverbially not like the other girls in some way or another. They have a wanton appetite for all varieties of sextivities, but they're not "hoes" or "whores" like other people are. They're resentful and hyperaware of being looked down on by women they deem to be prissy, self-righteous, possessive, or not as "uninhibited" as them, but they still take solace in the pettiness of, "Well, I still screwed your man at the end of the day." They have sex for money, but they're not "hookers" like other women who have sex for money. And so on. It's as if Zane has this beautiful mission to provide Black women in the new millennium with a playground to let their horny imaginations run wild, where they can mentally indulge in their desires in a universe that's largely free from concerns about judgment or infection or unwanted pregnancy... and yet, at the same time she feels compelled to reassure those same readers that they're still better than the next woman somehow. To be clear, I am against slut-shaming, but I also can't not notice the hypocrisy here. I'm not arguing that so-called sluts should be shamed or feel shame, I'm saying let the sluts be sluts! If Zane is determined to write sexually liberated women in their full glory and complexity, then why can't these characters proudly own being hoes (or own being perceived as such) without qualification or caveat? I understand that it's rare for people (even fictional ones) to never care what others think, but the defensive and insecure one-upmanship feels out of place in both The Sex Chronicles and Sex Chronicles II. True to life, perhaps, but still out of place.

 

Again, if you need something easy, are already a fan of Zane, or are simply curious like I was, then read this book!

 

Favorite quotes: 

"So imagine that I'm touching you. Imagine that I'm always around, always there for you. Just close your eyes and feel me. Feel my hands all over your body. Feel me inside you. Feel my love surrounding you... Will you try to do that for me?" (93).

 

"I'm not saying he was a manwhore like the guys from Deuce Bigalow when I met him, but he was surely knocking on whoredom's door" (105).

"It was like a scene from an old, romantic black-and-white movie, walking off into the bedroom to finish the feelings. The only difference was, we both had innies instead of outies. And what a nice, delicious, scrumptious innie Betty had... It was such a strange and wicked feeling, but I loved it from jump street; having my mouth bursting at the seams with the meat of another woman" (205-206).

"A sister can always fantasize, though, because what happens in a person's private thoughts carries no risk or judgment" (254).

BOOKS! (The Neighbor Favor + Afrekete)

Life is so funny. I was so looking forward to reclaiming my bookworm self in 2024, and life basically patted me on the head and said, "Aww, that's cute." After writing my last book review in February, I finished reading a romance novel in March, with hopes to finish the anthology I planned to pair it with and write a new review that same month, or in April at the latest. But then I had an interestingly ridiculous side quest as a bobarista (don't ask), and also had to spend two separate weeks in Louisville trying to declutter Grandpa's house. Which didn't leave me with the emotional capacity to read much other than fluff so I could still call myself reading something. So although I did finish two books of early 2000s Black erotica in the meantime (more about those in my next book review), I didn't actually finish the anthology until mid-August, as in two weeks ago. But that's okay! What matters is I finally made my way back here, ready to give y'all what I've got. First up, a Black romance novel (is there any other kind?) about two grown but adorably awkward book nerds in NYC, who fall in love once via email and again as neighbors, and who reignite each other's publishing industry dreams. Then, an anthology of Black lesbian writing from 1995 that illuminates how much Black women's relationships to freedom and desire (and the freedom to desire) have evolved, and how much the causes for their concern have largely stayed the same.

 

The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest

This was a Christmas 2023 present that I received from either my mom or my aunt; I sent them the same Amazon wishlist and at this point I can't recall who gave me what. I'm certain that I heard about The Neighbor Favor on Instagram, but I can't recall if I discovered it via Black Girl That Reads or if I discovered it on my own. Either way, I saw that it was about bookish Black people (my kind of people!) and that it would have a sex scene or two, so on the wishlist it went!

 

Lily, the youngest of three daughters from New Jersey, is a 25-year-old overworked and underpaid nonfiction editorial assistant who dreams of becoming a fully-fledged children's book editor. Her favorite book is an out-of-print fantasy novel about Black elves called The Elves of Ceradon, written by a mysterious, supposedly British author named "N.R. Strickland" who never wrote another book. On a sweltering day when Lily is stuck on a stopped MTA train, she googles Strickland as she's wont to do, happens to find his new website, and accidentally hits "send" on an email that she absentmindedly drafts to him before passing out due to the heat. Nick, an only child from North Carolina, is a 27-year-old recluse who got his first book published in college, but retreated into travel writing when that book (the aforementioned Black elf novel) flopped. He only entertains occasional flings wherever he happens to be on assignment, because a lifetime of witnessing his parents' toxic relationship has convinced him that he's unworthy of love, plus he's afraid of using and hurting people like his father did. (He created the "N.R. Strickland" alias and phony British backstory so his father can't track him down asking for money.) 

 

Nick only has a new website because his best friend and new literary agent Marcus created one for him, and he's shocked to receive Lily's email but responds in kind anyway. Cue eight months of correspondence wherein Nick and Lily become smitten with each other, even as Nick never divulges his real name or origins. But just when they make plans to video chat so they can see each other's faces and potentially move the relationship forward, he ghosts her out of shame for lying to her. Months later, Lily is temporarily living in a swanky new Union Square apartment building with her celebrity stylist sister Violet until she can save up enough for her own solo apartment. She's become infatuated with her "Fine as Hell Neighbor," with whom she shares elevator small talk since they live on the same floor and frequently cross paths, but she doesn't realize this man (Nick) is the author who ghosted her. And Nick, who stopped travel writing and moved into this building after Marcus secured a lucrative new book deal for him, doesn't realize she's Lily. However, when an invitation to discuss N.K. Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy (!!!) turns into a make-out session in Lily's (Violet's) apartment, Nick panics upon recognizing her rare male calico named Tomcat and the lily tattoo on her foot that were mentioned in their emails, and he literally runs away from her.

 

Lily respects Nick's insistence that they remain platonic but also asks him to help her find a date for Violet's upcoming wedding, because she's tired of her family always trying to set her up, and she's witnessed Nick help two of their middle aged neighbors get together. Nick reluctantly agrees, and they go on outings that are meant to help Lily snag a man, but are really dates that they don't realize are dates: a trip to IKEA where Lily helps commitment-averse Nick pick out a bed frame, a '70s-themed birthday party at Marcus's apartment in Brooklyn where they almost kiss again, a visit to Strand Book Store where they bond over an appreciation for science fiction and fantasy, and an annual birthday cookout at Lily's family home in Jersey. The two get hot and heavy in Lily's childhood bedroom, but Nick's insecurity and self-loathing (plus another interference from Tomcat) get in the way again. These introverted overthinkers are in love with each other, and a real relationship between them is possible, but first they have their own respective priorities to sort out. Lily must push through her shyness and get used to standing up for herself, which includes putting her boss in check, pursuing her dream job, getting her well-meaning family off her back, and being forthright about the man she truly wants. And amidst a resurgence for The Elves of Ceradon and the chance to finally continue writing the series, Nick must overcome his fears enough to confront his parents, go public with his real identity, and make amends with Lily after telling her the truth about everything.

I already decided that I would love The Neighbor Favor forever when I clocked four brief but significant Broken Earth trilogy mentions. Four! And yes I counted, because that trilogy changed my life! (If you haven't yet read my very lengthy reviews of all three books, which are partially reviews and partially reader's guides that I wrote for myself because I was in too deep, then do yourself a favor and read them here: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky.) Kristina Forest name drops a plethora of authors and book titles, but it's a desire to discuss the work of my queen, the N.K. Jemisin, that makes Lily and Nick's first kiss possible. Lily notices Nick carrying a copy of The Fifth Season around, she works up the courage to tell him that it's one of her favorite books (I literally wrote in the margins for this moment, "Jemisin making love and courage possible"), he works up the courage to invite her to talk about the entire trilogy sometime (my margin notes continued, "I WOULD MARRY THIS MAN! TODAY!"), and boom. Lips locking. You want to talk about impact? Jemisin's pen is so powerful that a fellow author made her work a key plot point in the romantic development between two fictional people. She's influencing authors in genres that she doesn't even primarily write in! That's impact! Anyway, as I was saying, the Broken Earth mentions made me ridiculously happy, I appreciate Kristina Forest for including them, and as a fellow Jemisin fan I will love The Neighbor Favor forever.

After the reading slump I've been in since the beginning of 2023 (bookending the year with your mom in the hospital and then your grandpa leaving this world will do that to you, I realize in hindsight), reading this novel was such a breeze. The Neighbor Favor reminded me just how warm and unencumbered reading can be; I felt like I was gliding through this one. The story is light and has relatively low stakes, but isn't shallow or hollow. If romance novels were desserts designated by drama and "spice" levels, and if Oniomoh's Just for the Cameras were the super rich banana pudding ice cream that I made for the July 4th spread last month, then The Neighbor Favor would be the yogurt parfait I occasionally make for myself when I need "a little something sweet." (That's plain yogurt, honey, granola, and blackberries, for whoever's curious.) Easily digestible, pleasurable but not too decadent, a bit of conflict to add texture, a little tartness to refresh the palate, and just sweet enough. Read The Neighbor Favor if you need something that's just sweet enough! Also if you love books, are estranged from and/or afraid of your father, need a vision of a male partner who actually reads (and especially reads fiction), have aspirations to be published or work in the publishing industry, or are perplexed by people pushing you to date more. 

 

Favorite quotes:

"Throughout the entire day he'd been asked if he were her boyfriend and he wished that were the case. He wished he'd grown up as a normal person with a normal family, without any stresses or fears. He wished he didn't have to hold Lily at bay, when all he wanted was to pull her closer. He wanted nothing more than to be worthy of her" (221).

 

"Lily couldn't believe that she was listening to one of her favorite authors read from one of her favorite books. She'd read the Dragons of Blood series when she was a shy, friendless teenager who wanted nothing more than to escape and have a real adventure of her own. She looked over at Nick... Bringing Lily here tonight was the nicest, most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her.

 

She was going to climb him like a tree later" (327).

Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney

The Neighbor Favor put me in a literary mood, so I reached for one of my more literary TBRs to read next. This is the third from a handful of books I bought at a paperback-focused indie bookstore called Carol's last year (along with Will to Love and Adèle). Having never heard of this anthology before, I mostly bought it because I was so surprised to see it there, in one of the back rooms of a store manned by an elderly white lady, in a run-down strip mall, in a very white, pretty conservative, suburb. Purchasing Afrekete in that situation felt so rebellious that I almost didn't care about whether or not I'd resonate with its contents. Fortunately for me, resonate I do! Also fortunately for me, as I progressed through the book this year I found the original receipt still tucked between its latter pages! Published in 1995, my copy of Afrekete was originally purchased in June of that same year, at the Dearborn location of a now-nonexistent bookstore franchise called B. Dalton Bookseller, for $14.00 (equivalent to about $29.00 today). I don't think I paid any more than $5.00 for it at Carol's.

 

Although Afrekete contains 20 pieces of Black lesbian writing in the form of short stories, poems, and essays, editors McKinley and DeLaney acknowledge in the introduction that while "lesbian" is an umbrella term they deeply respect, it doesn't necessarily carry the same meaning or relevance for all of the featured authors. Some entries regard lesbianism and feminism as intertwined, and proudly wield the term "lesbian" as an act of political and personal self-determination. Some feature characters who have never openly claimed the label, despite having had numerous female lovers, because of the times they grew up in. Some don't mention the word "lesbian" at all because the woman-loving depicted makes the lesbianism obvious, or because other words are used to describe the same orientation. Conversely, some don't seem to be, at least not too obviously, about queerness at all. Nonetheless, every entry is written by a queer Black woman who falls under that lesbian umbrella in some way, enough to merit being included in this collection. In that regard, I respect McKinley and DeLaney's judgment, and I especially respect the reverence they show for Audre Lorde. As further explained in the introduction, the book's title is the name of the last female lover mentioned in Zami, Lorde's "biomythography" that was an influential form of representation for Black lesbians in the 1980s and '90s. Fittingly, the first story included in this anthology is "Tar Beach", the chapter from Zami that relays Lorde's summer fling in Harlem with that same Afrekete ("Kitty"), amidst the Black lesbian club and house party scenes of the 1950s. And fittingly, the anthology closes with another work of Lorde's, a mournful yet exuberant poem titled "Today Is Not the Day" from April 1992 (seven months before Lorde's passing) when Lorde was knowingly dying from cancer and thinking about the children and life partner she'd leave behind, not "today", but inevitably.

 

Most of the entries are set in New York City, but Boston, Oakland, London, Gary, rural Texas, and even outer space are represented as well. Although there are a couple entries that I have no interest in reading again, I do believe that every single one of them deserves to at least be read once. It was difficult for me to narrow them down, and I'm leaving out quite a few favorites here, but I've decided to use the rest of this review to highlight the entries that have left the most lasting impact on me thus far.

 

"Tar Beach" (Audre Lorde) is such a strong opening for this anthology, and considering that I didn't even know that such a robust lesbian scene even existed in the 1950s, I appreciate how much Lorde's descriptions helped situate me within that time period. Imagine my shock and amusement to read mention of party platters of roast beef folded to resemble vulvas, and lovers in bed engaging in food play (the sexual kind) with plantains, bananas, and avocados. I truly had no idea women were getting down like that back then! But I digress. After previously dancing with Afrekete/Kitty at a house party in 1955, Lorde is mourning a break-up when she meets Kitty again at a club in 1957, and their summer fling commences that night. In addition to being a ravishingly beautiful and fashionable dark-skinned woman, Kitty is also a precursor to multiple women (both real and fictional) mentioned elsewhere in this anthology, who leave their hometowns behind in search of broader options for work and for living, dating, and expressing themselves as lesbians.

 

Having never done sex work, I did not expect to relate to Jocelyn Maria Taylor's "Testimony of a Naked Woman" as much as I do. In it, she discusses finding a balance between living out her radical politics as a Black lesbian feminist while also stripping to survive, since working as a stripper provides faster cash and more freedom over her time than a regular job. As a DC native and media activist who moved to New York in 1989, she describes stripping as an "exercise in detachment," leaving her politics at the door so she can focus on getting the money she needs to afford the activities and projects that mean the most to her. Despite the need to detach, Taylor also finds herself coming into her own sexual agency and erotic self through performing as a stripper. So even though the liberation to be gained from working in such a sexist environment is limited, the job becomes a jumping-off point for her to explore exhibitionism as a form of self-love and activism. This essay gave me so much perspective on my own survival job as a bobarista (again, don't ask), where I similarly had to turn my brain off and disassociate to help the time go by, but was also able to find those pockets of the job that fed my personal interests. (These included interacting with people more, making things with my hands, tasting and experimenting with new flavors, and even discovering new music via the Spotify playlists that my co-workers would put on.) I still think about this essay and feel greatly encouraged, and I wish I could find more about Taylor other than this bio, this video, and this blurb, because I would love to be able to write her and say, "Thank you."

Ooh, the drama and tragedy of "Water Call" by Helen Elaine Lee! A disabled older woman named Ouida remembers the sound of rushing water calling to her from the afterlife, as she almost died decades ago from blood loss on the ride home from a back-alley abortion. Described as still loving men while also being in a committed relationship with a woman, young Ouida cheated on her girlfriend Zella with two different men. After confessing to Zella and asking for help handling the resultant pregnancy, Zella got the money and information needed to arrange the only option they had, since young Ouida didn't want to disrupt the life she'd built, and abortion wasn't legal yet. Post-procedure, as Zella frantically drove around trying to find a doctor who wasn't too scared to help them for fear of legal penalty, young Ouida lost consciousness. In her mind, she came upon the entrance to the afterlife (described as a naturalistic, secret, "blooming place" with water spilling over rocks), which she could behold but was barred from entering just yet, because it wasn't her time to die. This was a vision of one's (would-be) final moments that I latched onto, given how much sorrow and curiosity I still have about what my unconscious grandpa's final moments were like as he died last November. Where did he go in his mind? Could he see the other side before entering it? Did he truly have to navigate that all by himself without a presence to comfort and guide him? I don't know the answers to these questions, but the vision Lee offers is still of immense comfort to me. 

Michelle Parkerson's "Odds and Ends (A New Lesbian Fable)" is a short, tragic, post-apocalyptic love story set in outer space in the year 2068, when white people cease to exist organically but continue warring for dominance and invading galaxies as clones. Amidst these clones prowling everywhere, secret girlfriends Loz (a lieutenant) and Sephra (a demolitions expert) are women warriors from rival Black factions, hailing from different sectors of the universe. Literal star-crossed lovers, who've just made love and then parted to serve their separate causes, already longing for their next rendezvous... not knowing that their last embrace was truly their last. When I made notes about this story on my phone, I enthusiastically declared, "This story needs to be on screen! Give me a short film at least!" But Parkerson's paragraph in the "Biographies" section of Afrekete has since informed me that she did in fact release a 28-minute sci-fi short film titled Odds and Ends (a New-Age Amazon Fable) in 1993. As far as I can tell right now, the film is only accessible online through The Criterion Channel.

 

In the essay "Wink of an Eye" Jewelle Gomez explains how despite having a shared history of oppression and a shared awareness of "The Movement" for Black liberation, those commonalities were not enough to sustain healthy platonic relationships with the straight Black men she would've liked to build solidarity with in the '90s. She describes witnessing how straight Black men had grown more bitter, more self-interested (read: misogynist), and more capitalistic since her father's time, and how she instead found the solidarity and community she was looking for with gay Black men. These men, her friends, saw her as an artist and a person rather than an afterthought or a lesser being to be dominated. Reading this essay made me uncomfortable because the notion of straight Black men becoming impossible to deal with sounds way too familiar in 2024, where social media has exacerbated inane "gender wars" arguments, emboldened Black incels, and given a platform to self-described "high value men" who make their living from constantly scrutinizing, demonizing, and demeaning Black women. Gomez's essay is a sobering reminder of how much progress we haven't yet made over the past 30 years.

 

"Kaleidoscope" (Jamika Ajalon) is a short story in which letters and journal entries reveal how a lesbian couple's insecurities about not being Black enough for their New York hotep artist community cause seemingly insurmountable conflict within their relationship. One woman is American, dark-skinned, and unambiguously Black, but is discounted for being gay and not adhering to expectations of how a "sista" should be. The other woman is British, biracial, moneyed, and light-skinned, but her gayness is overlooked in favor of her proximity to whiteness, which the male members of their community fetishize her for. Also included in this story are time-traveling dreams ignited by a supposedly magical stone, with appearances by dream versions of Black literary heroes like Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. I most appreciate this story for its more direct framing of Nella Larsen's Passing as the lesbian saga that it already is.

 

I cannot understate how vital Linda Villarosa's "Revelations" still is, even today, because religion-based homophobia within the Black community is still a problem, and Black LGBTQ people are still having to rebut the same tired arguments and the same misused Bible verses! Villarosa (a former executive editor of ESSENCE Magazine) uses this essay to lay out her trajectory from co-authoring two 1991 ESSENCE articles with her mom about coming out as a lesbian and the political implications of Black homophobia, to being thrust into the spotlight and booked for countless speaking engagements, to being verbally attacked by religious people (most painfully Black religious people) both in writing and in person. All of this led her to investigate the Bible verses most frequently being thrown at her, and contemplate her own spirituality to figure out where she stood on the issue of faith and queerness. She recounts eventually finding community at a gay Black church in New York, and also building up the muscle to gracefully shut down bigots who would use the Q&A portions of her public appearances to condemn her to hell in front of her audiences.

 

And then there's "Ruby" by Cynthia Bond. Lord have mercy. This story tore me up. After spending her adult life in New York City, and increasingly fearing that her unspecified mental illness will jeopardize her girlfriend's safety, the titular Ruby Belle moves back to what's left of her grandfather's land in rural Texas. Her mental state rapidly declines in the six years that follow, because the losses she has suffered are too great. Most of her grandfather's acres were sold off prior to her arrival, his house that she now lives in alone is dilapidated, she left her love and her artistry back in New York, her bodily autonomy has been violated by countless men since infancy, and she's miscarried multiple pregnancies as a result of local men repeatedly coming to her home and raping her since she returned to Texas. Ruby disassociates to the point of abandoning most social connections and bodily functions, spending her time in nature absorbing the earth's "knowing," and sensing herself transform into the rain, mud puddles, sugar cane, stones, red dirt roads, lakes, and trees that surround her. Ruby's psychosis reminded me so vividly of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, in which a South Korean woman stops eating meat, then eventually stops eating altogether and envisions herself turning into a tree, because she can no longer bear the cruelty of the world and the ways people (especially men) use and consume other living beings. And how could I not think about Toni Morrison's Beloved, Bernice McFadden's Nowhere Is a Place, and N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season when reading the passage about a newly fallen 400-year-old tree near Ruby's land that contains the secret memories of brutalized and enslaved women and girls, including memories of infanticide that women committed to protect their babies from slavery. Upon googling Cynthia Bond, I realized that "Ruby" was the precursor to a novel of the same name published in 2014. I'd seen the cover countless times but never took paid attention to it until now. And I certainly had no idea that Bond had been working on the novel for 20 years.  

 

Go on ahead and read Afrekete now. I'm not going to make any specifications for who you might be and what kind of material you might be looking for this time, just read it. It's the most important book I've read this year, and you need to read it as well.

Favorite quotes:

"Dancing with her this time, I felt who I was and where my body was going, and that feeling was more important to me than any lead or follow." (from "Tar Beach" by Audre Lorde, p. 7)

 

"Audre, I am learning not to sacrifice

belief, not to murder hope."

(from "What Has Yet to be Sung" by Malkia Cyril, p. 98)

"I'm used to regretting you now, it's a part of my peace now to wish I had loved you. [...] I love you Natalie, I love you now, I love you as I love the sea and as I love the great maker of the great accident. 'I do love,' said the old lady, the old black lady [...] 'Or at least I want..., at least I try..., at least I walk toward love in the way that I can.'" (from "The Old Lady" by Carolivia Herron, p. 123-24)

 

"The sharp ear of the grandmother catches missed notes, passages played too fast, articulation, passion lost sliding across the keys. The grandmother speaks to her of passion, of the right kind. 'Hastiness, carelessness, will never lead you to any real feeling, or,' she pauses, 'any lasting accomplishment. You have to go deep inside yourself—to the best part.'" (from "Screen Memory" by Michelle Cliff, p. 198)

 

"For Ruby knew many things. She knew the youth of the world that passed each day before her dim window. She knew the innocence of the trees, still naive enough to lace their branches toward the sun. She knew the hope of the path that wound by her door, still red and dusty and calling for firm feet  to track its length. She knew the generosity of the cane fields, the dreams of the stones that lined her worn yard [...] Ruby had felt it then. The audacious hope of rooted things. The innocent anticipation of the shooting stalks, the quivering stillness of the watching trees." (from "Ruby" by Cynthia Bond, p. 236 and 238)

 

 "He laughed quite a bit, Mr. Belle did. He laughed at things that no one else found funny. He laughed at funerals. He laughed at hurricanes and floods. He didn't laugh at the loss or misery, but at the way the hand of nature spun the world about like a woman at a square dance. He laughed at the foolishness of folks who kept getting huffy and indignant at the way they were getting spun." (from "Ruby" by Cynthia Bond, p. 244)

"Then I had to go. I had to get a table and think about the boys and Gabriel and their escapades. I wanted to be left alone to fantasize about the constant, abundant, orgiastic anonymous sex among men; and then to speculate on the sheer exhaustion of sex without love among men. How would it alter the state if women were to carry on that way, away from the 'bad girls' back rooms where so much was staged? Loving a nameless, faceless body full with lust? Instant intimacy without endless pity? Feeding the body the sin it deserves?" (from "Take Care" by Sharee Nash, p. 279)