Factbook

Boys Love (BL) is a popular Japanese genre of fictional media – mostly manga – that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between male characters, typically marketed to a female audience and usually written by female authors. 

The genre started in the 1970s, but really took off in Japan in the 1990s when bookshops started creating dedicated sections in their shops for the genre sometimes labelled Boy Love for Girls that included manga, fiction and light novels.

Japanese magazines like June, Kid’s and Gust also targeted the same segment and helped popularise the genre with marketing copy that brazenly declared: ‘now opening our eyes to dangerous love’, ‘an aesthete magazine for girls’ and ‘ a naughty girls’ comic’. 

The origins of the genre are, according to academics, rooted in the 1970s ‘golden-age of Shojo Manga,’ comic books published for young women or girls. 

Kaze to Ki no Uta, The Poem of Wind and Trees by Keiko Takemiya, which was published in 17 volumes between 1976-1984 by Shogakukan, is often cited as one of the first and a classic of the genre.

The genre is now known as BL or boizu rabu and sometimes as Yaoi in Japanese. The BL genre has become so well established that it has even become the subject of academic research. One such book includes Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan; and several papers including Boys Love in Anime and Manga: Japanese Subculture Production and its End Users have been published in international academic journals. 

BL titles are generally read by women, but are also enjoyed by some men. Currently, about 150 BL books and manga are published every month. Awareness and interest in this unique Japanese publishing genre is now starting to grow outside Japan.