BOOKS! (One Day I Saw a Black King + Sisters of the Yam)

This is my first book review of 2025! And when I tell you I've been planning to review these two books together nearly all year? Believe it! The first book in this review is also the first book I finished in 2025, and I previously teased it in my review of Zane's Blackgentleman.com last November. The second book came as a digital copy that an acquaintance gave me in February. But because it was a digital copy, not only did I have to take separate notes in my personal journal (whereas normally I make notes in the margins of physical copies), but also this digital copy had to compete with all the distractions on my phone. Hence why I didn't finish reading the second book until May, and I'm just now writing this review in June. But what matters is that I'm here and excited to finally share my thoughts! First up, a novel about two Black, 30-something lovers with abandonment issues in the year 2000, who messily learn to trust people again and reconcile with their respective families after meeting in Denver. And then, a 1990s self-help book and treatise on Black women's healing, written by a now-deceased preeminent academic from Kentucky who was based in New York at the time. 

 

One Day I Saw a Black King by J. D. Mason

 

By the time John King and Connie Rodgers meet in Denver in their late 30s, they're both intimately familiar with being hardened by abandonment and rejection. 

 

John's mother Mattie was impregnated by rape and died giving birth to him at age 14, so his grandmother Agnes raised him dutifully but not lovingly; she was too overwhelmed by grief to see John as anything other than a bitter reminder of her dead daughter and her long-deceased husband (Mattie's father Abe). Growing up in the fictional northeast Texas town of Bueller, John had friends, cousins, and a good-natured great-aunt named Dot (a former wild child and Agnes's younger sister) he could turn to, but he constantly weathered Agnes's coldness at home and was desperate for her to love him back. Then one day, after witnessing the death of a woman named Roberta who always demonized him (more on her later), 15-year-old John fled home and walked in on Agnes mid-coitus with their married neighbor. The shock and embarrassment of the moment prompted her to lash out in anger, violently kicking John out of the house. For 20 years since then he's been wandering the South. Along the way he's acquired both an El Dorado that carries him wherever work and women are available to the tune of soul music, in addition to a cavalier disregard for attaching himself to any one locale or sexual partner for too long. Until he decides to try Denver on for size at age 37, and while at a soul food restaurant he locks eyes with a beautiful woman, going to town on a rib, who later turns out to live on the same floor of the same apartment building he's just moved to. This is Connie.

 

Connie, similarly, learned too early that she couldn't trust anyone. Born and raised in a historically Black neighborhood of Denver called Five Points, she acted as a substitute parent for herself and her younger sister Reesy when they were living with their mother Charlotte, who resented being their mother and often butted heads with Connie. Subsequent events further cemented the idea that it was Connie against the world: Charlotte abandoned the girls to move to Memphis with her new boyfriend when Connie was 12, Connie was separated from Reesy when a couple adopted Reesy but not her, she was placed in a home where she was molested and raped by her foster father, and after running away she survived on the streets as a sex worker for a year. It wasn't until a soul food restaurant owner named Edwina caught 14-year-old Connie digging food out of Edwina's trash cans, that Connie finally found a safe place to land and a safe person to believe in. Recognizing Connie's need for love and structure, Edwina gave Connie somewhere to stay in exchange for working at the restaurant and abiding by a nightly curfew, and set Connie up to be able to live independently by the time she sold the restaurant and moved to Las Vegas when Connie was 17. Now at 36 and still in touch with Edwina, Connie makes a living as an independent jewelry designer (whose work is sold in an African art store owned by her business partner/best friend Yolanda), she's uninterested in dating after her first love cheated on her and gave her herpes two years prior, and for sentimental reasons she's living solo in the same apartment building she grew up in with her mom and sister. Connie and her new neighbor John (whom she mentally refers to as "Mr. Good-looking") cross paths more than once, but she doesn't start paying attention to him until he lets her into his apartment to relieve herself after she misplaces her keys one day.

As John and Connie slowly get to know each other, become sexually involved (after Connie explains that her status requires condom usage), and cautiously explore whether true love is possible for them, they each have their own familial reconciliations to make. Ever since Reesy sought Connie out when they were adults, she's eagerly tried to rebuild their sisterly relationship while folding Connie into her family. But Connie's guardedness extends to her sister too; she resists fully sharing her thoughts and emotions when conversing with Reesy, she can barely feign friendliness with Reesy's adoptive parents, and tensions later flare when Reesy disapproves of John and refuses to consider a revised arrangement for Connie to spend more time with her young "niece" Jade. (Connie gave birth to Jade when she was 30, and the sisters agreed that Reesy would raise Jade because Connie was ill-equipped to be a mother back then.) John, meanwhile, has been haunted by dreams and visions of his dead mother immortalized as a young girl, which he's always interpreted as his sign or excuse to breeze off to his next destination. When he sporadically calls Dot, she asks him to visit because Agnes's health is worsening, but John is resolute in his choice to never return to Bueller. Until his visions get stranger and scarier and... clearer. He realizes that his visions have been calling him home this entire time; rather than continuing to run away from the hurt of being rejected by his grandmother, and the guilt of being a child of rape who "killed" his mother by being born, he must return to Texas. What follows is a brief and awkward reunion with Agnes that warms into her showing him the affection he'd always craved from her: apologizing for how she treated him, telling him she loves him, calling him a blessing, caressing his face, kissing his forehead, and promising to have mustard greens (his childhood favorite) ready for dinner the next day. After a couple more events that I don't wish to spoil, the novel ends with the future of John and Connie's relationship up in the air, aside from John calling her to say he's on his way back to Denver (and back to her).

ODISABK's chapters alternate between John and Connie's perspectives, with most of the action happening during their tween/teen years in the 1970s, and their late 30s in the year 2000. The novel starts with John, and what an opening chapter! His traumatic birth in 1963 reads like a movie scene: a terrible storm raging outside, Agnes desperately trying to calm her frightened daughter, Mattie screaming in pain and begging for relief before bleeding out, all amidst hysterical commentary from Roberta, the local midwife/abortion provider/religious zealot/"crazy" woman whose birthing room is the site of this tragedy. Roberta is convinced that John is a "demon" from birth and treats him as such until she dies, but we later learn that she was triggered by John's resemblance to his paternal grandfather. (Roberta was previously married to a man named Charles, who fathered two sons via an affair, and Mattie's rapist Adam is the second of those two sons.) 

 

Even with losing his mother and keeping his distance from Roberta, John grows up in a world comprised mostly of women. As such, the Texas chapters of ODISABK put on full display something that I'd already sensed in the story J.D. Mason contributed to BG.com. Her writing reminds me so much of what I loved about Bernice McFadden's Nowhere Is a Place, in that they're both so genuinely invested in the grand and minute details of Black women's lives. Their mundane moments, their subtle expressions, their yearning and loneliness, their grief, their pain that is sometimes also rage but is still mostly pain, their social gatherings, their mental illnesses and PTSD, the advice they ignore from their mothers, their hushed yet open secrets. The scenes and dialogue that these two authors write for Black women make me visualize Mason and McFadden sitting in a corner of a room, intensely observing these characters in action, listening to them, empathizing with them, and taking notes. Case in point: although it's traumatic for young John to walk in on, that scene of Agnes riding her married neighbor is HOT! Mason thoroughly conveys Agnes's yearning to be touched and feel desired after being a sexless widow for over two decades, and how finally yielding to her neighbor's years-long advances—scumbag though he may be, plotting on her since they were in elementary school and taking her money to only halfway fix things around her house as an excuse to keep coming around—gives her a profound sense of relief. As a 48-year-old religious Black grandmother in the rural South of the 1970s, Agnes isn't supposed to let go and revel in illicit sex, to be on top of it (literally), to feel set free by it. But she does. Despite how guilt and shame are mixed in with the immense pleasure she feels, and how her reaction to getting caught causes further estrangement between herself and her grandson, that moment is still so powerful. And Mason's ability to empathize with a woman like Agnes allows her to write that moment with so much care. 

 

As much as I do enjoy the Texas chapters, I fear that ODISABK suffers from the same issue as the 2020 Black romantic drama The Photograph, where the plot set in the past (decades prior, in the South) is more interesting than the present ups and downs of the film's lead couple. This novel starts off so strong and inventive, and then seems to cool off into something more typical and seen-before. In other words, everything set in Texas is so well-written that Connie and John's relationship feels trite and typical by comparison. John's past is more fascinating than John in the present, who became more unlikeable to me the more his relationship developed with Connie. (Even though they both have commitment issues, as a supposedly "decent" dude for that time John is still somewhat insufferable as a boyfriend. Acting too smart or too cool to try, to be vulnerable and take a chance on their relationship to the same degree as Connie, to verbally respond when she confesses her love to him, or to admit to Dot that he's in love with Connie after he's already asked Connie to officially be his girlfriend.) And Connie's story is so raw and vast, but it ultimately takes a backseat to John's because the book is primarily about him. In a conversation where we were swapping romance novel recommendations, I recall messaging a friend, "I'm currently LOVING a novel from the 2000s called One Day I Saw a Black King (J. D. Mason), which also may not be a straightforward romance but does a lot to explore how trauma and abandonment shape the two romantic leads, and I think the world-building and character development are just great." I wish ODISABK could've made that enthusiasm last.

 

Nonetheless, I still have a fondness for this book and for J.D. Mason's writing, and my mom's still not getting her copy of this book back. I've learned that this is actually the first in a four-part saga that also includes Don't Want No Sugar, You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, and Somebody Pick Up My Pieces. And while I'm not in a rush to read those, I would recommend One Day I Saw a Black King to anyone who remembers the Black Expressions subscription catalogue, who wants to read about wounded people finding love, or who's curious about how people rebound from being traumatized by mother figures. 

 

Favorite quotes:

"Agnes knew Dot had given up the streets for her. Most of the time she was glad she had, but sometimes she saw sadness in her sister's eyes. Not the kind of sadness that came from losing a lover, but it reminded Agnes of the kind of heartbreak that can only come from giving up. Dot had chased after something her whole life and never seemed to be able to catch up with it. Whenever Agnes asked her about it, she'd just shrug her shoulders and say she was tired. Eventually, Agnes guessed that maybe the chase was all Dot had ever been after, anyway" (18).

 

"Ain't no limits, less you make 'em, Little Bird. Trust me, this time. I know what I'm sayin'" (91).

 

"He sensed it almost immediately. Denver, Colorado, lacked seasoning, and he'd grown accustomed to places with flavor, like New Orleans. Hot and spicy food, women, and music. Southern to a fault, dripping in molasses and cayenne pepper, burning and sweetening the tip of his tongue, reminding him that he was alive. Or Atlanta, Southern-fried, pecan-pied, funky soul thick enough for him to curl his toes into. Even Texas had a flair for understated, unmentionable drama. The kind of drama people openly wallowed in but turned a blind eye to, feigning indifference. Denver had none of that from what he could see, so he knew he wouldn't be here long" (103). 

 

"Agnes stared into his eyes. Dark, handsome eyes... She'd done everything in the world to keep from looking into those eyes when he was a child. Lord! How many more blessings had she let get away from her?" (291).  

 

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women an Self-Recovery by bell hooks

 

Reading more bell hooks has been a desire of mine since reading Bone Black in 2020 (coincidentally not very long before her death in 2021), but it wasn't necessarily a priority until a friend gave me a digital copy of Sisters of the Yam. Then, reading this work of hooks' took precedent over nearly all the other books I've been juggling this year. Drawing on her own personal and academic findings as well as interviews conducted with various Black women, hooks describes Sisters of the Yam as her attempt at a self-help book (a genre which I was surprised to learn she enjoyed so much). SOTY is geared toward helping Black women in the 1990s heal from their various traumas and estrangements from self, based on the premise that Black people can better fight for Black liberation as a collective the more that each of us accesses the means and does the inner work to be whole as individuals. The goal is to be engaged in healing processes for ourselves and for our community, while mindfully engaged in both, abandoning neither. And we make this goal more feasible by changing the way we treat each other and ourselves, but also by asserting our own affirming images and understandings of reality to counter harmful narratives that have been perpetuated by media and white supremacist ideologies.  

 

Consisting of 13 chapters, a 10th anniversary retrospective interview from 2004, and altogether less than 200 pages, the 2015 edition of Sisters of the Yam isn't too lengthy of a read. (pay no mind to the fact that it took me three months to finish), and I'm not very attuned to writing about nonfiction, even less so about self-help. So rather than attempting to break the book down as a whole, let me just touch on what I enjoyed most before explaining what I take issue with. First of all, while not a surprise given the Black American literary canon she's enshrined it, each time bell hooks quoted or referenced a Black woman writer's work to substantiate her point was especially delightful to me. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker were extremely familiar to me, but hooks' frequent name-dropping of her peers reminded me that there are so many greats whose work I still have yet to throughout dive into for myself. These include Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Paule Marshall. In fact, the title Sisters of the Yam derives from "Sisters of the Yam," a support group that hooks started for her Black female students in conjunction with teaching them Bambara's work (specifically the novel The Salt Eaters, which originates the phrase "daughters of the yam").

 

Naturally, I do have a few favorite chapters. I love that hooks acknowledges how doing work you hate makes emotional well-being nearly impossible in chapter 3 ("Work Makes Life Sweet"). I personally wasn't expecting a Black woman from Kentucky, born into poverty in the 1950s, who seems to idealize country life and acknowledges the inevitability of Black women having to work (because historically Black women have always worked), to also write so sympathetically about Black women having their spirits broken in workplaces that both exploit and stifle their talent. But that she does! She further advocates for a concept called "right livelihood"; rather than simply feeling luck to have any old job, people should feel empowered and deserving enough to consciously choose work that they feel called to and that they find meaningful. Relatedly, in chapter 4 ("Knowing Peace: An End to Stress") hooks encourages Black women to be and act more entitled to living well, and to redefine what makes them valuable instead of overworking themselves as the mules or "little worker bees" that society expects them to be. (And as someone who has work-related PTSD and who previously thought she'd be content being a good little worker bee, that part spoke to my soul!) Additonally, while I am among the contingent of people for whom positive thinking feels naive and scary, I can agree with hooks that worry, cynicism, and imagining the worst don't give us control or ward off disappointment like we believe they do. 

 

I related to chapter 7 ("Facing and Feeling Loss") for obvious reasons, but I was also surprised to derive a sense of pride from hooks' description of Black people being culturally predisposed to having a healthier approach to death than mainstream society. Historically, Black people haven't had the luxury of keeping tragedy and death at a distance, and our traditions instill in us an imperative to respect, care for, sit with, show love for, and surrender to our grief for the dead even after a person's body has passed. She regards mourning as a "growth experience" that reminds us how to live. I relate to chapter 8 ("Moved by Passion: Eros and Responsibility") for reasons that are nobody's business, but I will say that in addition to sex and sexuality (and eradicating homophobia!), hooks connects eroticism and healing pleasure to the ability to explore the world with all of our available senses. Feeling discouraged or disempowered from exploring in that way causes people to be touch-starved, and uncomfortable with expressing their their need for physical contact and care. And that feeds right into chapter 9 ("Living to Love"), where hooks argues that love is neither a waste of time, nor a luxury limited to the contexts of religion or romance, nor a distraction from our material survival. She also gently drags people like me (and admittedly herself) who are chronically critical and unloving toward their own image, and urges Black women to nurture our inner lives and get more comfortable with asking for help as "a loving practice of surrender." 

 

Now. To a certain extent I feel compelled to give bell hooks the benefit of the doubt, not because her work is precious to me—because it's not (yet); this is only the second book of hers that I've read, and unlike many millennials and Gen Z-ers I have neither read nor am I an evangelist for All About Love—but because she's from Kentucky like my folks are. And for the most part I greatly appreciate the reverence she has for "traditional southern black folk life," the ways that Southern Black people found to build community, sustain themselves, express themselves, heal each other, love each other, be spiritually empowered, care for the earth, and stay rooted in their Blackness amidst all the forms of lack that they were forced into (especially before the 1960s). Such reverence reminds me of In Love & Trouble, where Alice Walker similarly emphasizes the significance of various Black American traditions and survival methods (rootwork, home remedies, handicrafts, country ways of living, etc.). With that being said, bell hooks is clearly homesick in Sisters of the Yam (she repeatedly mentions feeling stressed by and dissatisfied with facets of her career as a professor in New York City), and I believe that her homesickness prompts her to write too idyllically about life in the South. This is most evident in chapter 12 ("Touching the Earth") where she asserts that The Great Migration wounded the Black psyche and caused us to partially lose our sense of identity. This assertion is more successful when she ties our disconnection from nature to our disconnection from our own bodies, and the waning ability (or the shear lack of time) for us to be still and behold our own beauty. She includes a stunning poem by William Waring Cuney ("No Images") to illustrate this point in a way that's incredibly resonant and effective. 

 

But then hooks claims that industrial urban life in the North turned us into tools or machines, consumed by work and reduced to our productivity... to which I'd rebut, is that really so different from people in the South who were relegated to working as sharecroppers, maids, wet nurses, and other subservient roles for white people during this same period? There were trade-offs for those who stayed and for those who migrated, and according to hooks, Black people in the South had more downtime "for silence and contemplation" outdoors and a stronger sense of community. But were they altogether better off than those who left? Thanks to watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS docuseries 'Great Migrations: A People on the Move' earlier this year, I'm aware that many Black people did indeed conclude that the sacrifices they'd made to relocate north or west weren't worth it in the long run, and during the 1980s and 1990s there was a wave of us moving back to the South seeking career viability and ancestral/familial/cultural reconnection. So bell hooks' pining for "down home" life is timely. But the vision of "down home" she pines for seems so steeped in nostalgia that it almost downplays the severity of white racist terrorism and lack of economic opportunity that pushed Black people northward in the first place.

 

Speaking of downplayed severities, while I can make allowances for bell hooks' nostalgia for the South, I cannot abide by her argument that Black people's reconciliation with ourselves must include forgiveness for white people in chapter 11 ("The Joys of Reconciliation"). That rather than being consumed by bitterness at those who've wronged us and supposedly allowing our self-reconciliation to be incomplete (by not also reconciling with others), we must include white people in that reconciliation and extend compassion toward them. I was so confused, aghast, and disgusted by what I read that I literally had to take a break and say out loud, "This is the author y'all have been hyping up all this time?! This is y'all's revolutionary theorist?!" 

 

I understand that bell hooks was aware of what white people have put us through historically; whatever rose-colored glasses she may have had for the South, she writes copiously in other SOTY chapters about the insidious and enduring tendrils of white supremacy, and how Black people must be "educated for critical consciousness" so we can fight against it. I also understand that as someone raised Christian who's embracing Buddhism and also looking to Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War-era multiracial coalitions as a compass, in the '90s hooks regards blanket animosity toward white people as an extension of the nihilism and despair growing among young Black people that she wants to course correct. However, I would argue that Black people (especially Black women) not only have a right to whatever bitterness, rage, grudges, or resentment they may have, however "poisonous" those emotions may be, but they also have a right to not let any of that go. It's one thing for Black people to choose, on an individual basis, to have cordial or friendly or loving relations with the literal/figurative/historical/financial/spiritual descendants of our oppressors (a.k.a. white people). That's an option each of us has. But it's downright irresponsible and insulting to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1 John 4 ("He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love...") in order to browbeat Black readers, and imply that forgiving or uniting with white people is a requirement for Black people en masse to be fully whole and capable of showing compassion. In a book focused on Black women's healing? Seriously, how dare you?!

 

Having laid out my frustrations with it, and although it has caused me to side-eye bell hooks a bit (I side-eye Alice Walker sometimes too, it's okay), I would still recommend for any Black woman to read Sisters of the Yam once. Just do what my therapist advises me to do when taking in others' ideas, especially of the therapeutic or self-help variety: keep the meat, leave the bones. 

Favorite quotes:

"And I thought we should call our support group 'Sisters of the Yam' to honor Bambara’s work and the wisdom she offered to us. I also felt the 'yam' was a life-sustaining symbol of black kinship and community. Everywhere black women live in the world, we eat yam. It is a symbol of our diasporic connections. Yams provide nourishment for the body as food yet they are also used medicinally—to heal the body" (6).

"In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering. Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still... I made up this story because I wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or dread... I held her hand,  just like my father’s father, Daddy Jerry, a man who worked the land, who knew the earth was his witness, had once held my hand in the darkest of summer nights and taught me that the blanket of night I was scared of was really longing to be my friend, to tell me all its secrets. And I reminded her, as he reminded me way back then, that those arms that first held us in that dark space before words and time hold us still" (59-60).

 

"Where is the love when a black woman looks at herself and says: 'I see inside me somebody who is ugly, too dark, too fat, too afraid—somebody nobody would love, ’cause I don’t even like what I see;' or maybe: 'I see inside me somebody who is so hurt, who is just like a ball of pain and I don’t want to look at her ’cause I can’t do nothing about that pain.' The love is absent. To make it present, the individual has to first choose to see herself, to just look at that inner self without blame or censure." (108).

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 for 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 identifying 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 are deserving of 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 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).