Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 are both early works by mangaka Takahashi Rumiko with many thematic similarities. One of them is that they are both “sex comedies” or, perhaps, more accurately, gender comedies. Ranma 1/2, in particular, was a sex comedy from the start, while Urusei Yatsura provides multiple examples of gender-based comedy through its episodic plot.

But, first and foremost, is there a way to define and conceptualize Rumiko Takahashi’s own peculiar brand of “sex comedy”? And what are its origins?

From a biographical point of view, sex comedy, defined here as a play around expectations about gender and sexuality, appears quite early in her work. As early as chapter 16 of Urusei Yatsura, lecherous protagonist Ataru becomes the target of a so-called “feminizing ray” that turns his soul into that of a woman, supposedly to decrease his attraction to women. It doesn’t work as planned, and, while it does make Ataru extremely effeminate in terms of mannerisms and use of language, in the end, he’s still attracted to women, just as he was before the “transformation”. While this can be seen as a gag mocking Ataru’s extreme obsession with women, it can also be a playful way to dissociate sexual behavior from gender identity or conformity. In this way, it provides the foundations for Rumiko Takahashi’s later sex comedy.

However, it’s only in 1982, with the introduction of Ryuunosuke, a girl raised as a boy by her father, that Rumiko Takahashi would begin to opt for the kind of character-driven, recurring-type sex comedy that would later feature heavily in Ranma 1/2. By that date, Rumiko Takahashi’s creativity was running out of steam, and she almost gave up drawing Urusei Yatsura as a result. It’s in this context that she came up with the idea of Ryuunosuke’s character. Since then, she has consistently said Ryuunosuke was one of her favorite Urusei Yatsura characters.

Otherwise, we have to look for interviews with the artist herself to delve deeper into the common origins of her characters and her motivations. A good starting point could be the following excerpt from a 2020 interview:

Q. In your works, there are several fascinating characters whose gender is not fixed, such as Ranma (Ranma 1/2), who changes from male to female when he is splashed with water, and Ryuunosuke (Urusei Yatsura), a girl who was raised as a boy. What made you decide to depict such characters?

A. Well, as for Ranma, I think his origin is via the story “Laugh and Forgive” (笑って許して) by Hikaru Yuzuki-sensei, which I read around my freshman year in high school, which I found interesting. Ryuunosuke is a character born from the fact that I couldn’t make a rough draft for that week and drew a completely different story from what I discussed in the editorial meeting. In Urusei, the male characters absolutely had to be ridiculous, but Ryuunosuke is a girl, so I was allowed to draw her in a cool way, but her existence itself is ridiculous, so I think it worked out well. Additionally, the process of swapping genders often makes the artist feel like they are fooling themselves, and it’s a lot more fun to draw.

Q. What sort of situation do you mean by “fooling yourself”?

A. There are a lot I suppose. For example, when I am drawing Ryuunosuke, I keep in mind that she is a girl, but I feel like I’m drawing a boy since the picture is of a cool guy. I get some satisfaction from that.

As it appears, the basis for Rumiko Takahashi’s sex comedy is the incongruity of characters in relation to gender norms and expectations. But there’s a catch: Ryuunosuke isn’t just a tomboy, and Ranma isn’t just a boy who “turns into a girl” for no reason. Ryuunosuke is forced to dress as a boy by her father, who wanted a boy but got disappointed when it turned out he had a little girl; and Ranma is a boy who “turns into a girl” because of a martial arts training accident (long story): otherwise, he would be a perfectly “normal” cishet boy.

As a matter of fact, characters that are openly LGBT are rare in Rumiko Takahashi’s works and are mostly present in her more recent work: for example, Jakotsu from Inu Yasha and possibly Matsugo from Rinne. This seems to signal an evolution compared to how queer themes were treated in her earlier work.

So, in Takahashi’s works, there are many characters that bend gender norms, but actually very few that are queer in an unambiguous and “realistic” way (and those who are tend to be more stereotypical than subversive).

There are several explanations for this apparent paradox. The first one is that Rumiko Takahashi herself tends to subscribe to a heteronormative view of storytelling. In a 1984 interview, she said: “The basis is a relationship between a man and a woman. The element of man and woman is absolutely essential”.

The second explanation, possibly tied to the first one, is that Takahashi has trouble dealing with queer characters because doing so would lead her to take a political stance, for or against the issue, and she is generally averse to it. As she once said, “I’m not the type who thinks in terms of societal agendas”. With homosexuality having become somewhat less controversial in Japanese society by the 2000s and 2010s (though only in relative terms), it was easier for her to include openly (if a bit formulaically) gay characters in her works.

With these different elements taken together, we begin to see a pattern. The basis of Rumiko Takahashi’s sex comedy is heteronormative because doing so ensures that it will remain “intelligible” (to quote Judith Butler’s word) to the audience and not delve into political considerations Takahashi would have trouble managing.

The main problem is that a perfectly (hetero-)normative relationship, because it is too ordinary, can’t be funny. In an interview with Shigesato Itoi in 1982, Rumiko Takahashi herself acknowledged this: “This goes a bit into the process of writing manga, but even when considering the story, I want some kind of barrier. I don’t want people just getting together because they love each other. Societal structures keep things from going the way we want, and we’re shackled down by any number of things. When things get tricky, naturally it becomes easier for the story to unfold.”

In the case of Takahashi’s sex comedies, a purely (hetero-)normative relationship is too ordinary, but a nonheteronormative one is too directly political and impossible to justify with traditional heteronormative devices. So what’s left?

One solution is to tweak things with often absurd and unrealistic situations. This is how Takahashi ends up with Ryuunosuke and Ranma. These are incongruous characters, not because they’re out of the norm, but because they’re, in fact, both in and out of the norm. Ryuunosuke was raised as a boy, so, in a way, it’s logical that she uses masculine language to refer to herself, despite her feminine gender identity. In the same way, Ranma was born as a boy, so it’s just as logical that he keeps thinking of himself as a man despite his sometimes “female” body. These are not the consequences of a rejection of the norm.

These characters also have a hypocritical and normative aspect. Ryuunosuke often feels guilty about her own gender non-conformity and isn’t too fond of it when she sees it in other characters. At the same time, Ranma keeps his personality as a cishet homophobic and transphobic man when he “turns into a girl”. Again, they’re both in and out the norm, and that’s what makes them incongruous.

The very existence of those characters also has consequences on other characters around them, on the way they view their sexuality and relationships, from girls crushing on Ryuunosuke to Ranma being engaged to Akane, out of the three Tendo sisters, specifically because she “doesn’t like men”.

Thus we can see that, under the guise of comedy, Rumiko Takahashi actually relies on thought experiments to let her readers reflect on issues of gender and sexuality, in quite the same way as science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once did in The Left Hand Of Darkness (though in much more explicitly political terms). As with Sigmund Freud before and Judith Butler in the same era, for Rumiko Takahashi, “it is the exception, the strange, that gives us the clue to how the mundane and taken-for-granted world of sexual meanings is constituted” (to quote from Gender Trouble again). Again, as far as we know, this is not politically motivated.

However, this is a powerful approach, because it leads to consequences that the author herself possibly didn’t anticipate. It allows us to challenge, in clear political terms, the very reality of “man and woman” that Rumiko Takahashi herself claims to champion. The possibility of a third sex/gender in fiction leaves open the possibility of its existence in real life. It draws attention to sex and gender as constructed phenomena, as phenomena that could be constructed otherwise and in a less violent way.

That’s why, if you want to write queer works but you’re of the view that, to cite Engels’ words, “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art”, then Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 remain indisputable references to this day because they are the works of an artist who not only always denied political intent about them, but even seemed to adhere overtly to a heteronormative view of storytelling.