Sexy comics feed Japan's role play boom
At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.
Welcome to Tokyo's first schoolboy cafe, the latest in a flurry of eateries in Japan where customers and waiters role play themes from manga comics.
In keeping with the schoolboy theme, waiters with manicured hands and soft voices pretend to be teenage students, chatting and flirting with well-dressed Japanese women playing the roles of benefactresses visiting the school.
On a Saturday in January, the cafe, which opened late last year, was packed with giggling customers.
"Most of our customers are office ladies in their twenties and thirties, women who are fashionable but normal," said Emiko Sakamaki, Edelstein's 27-year-old manager, herself dressed in a loose mini-dress over skinny jeans and knee-high boots.
Edelstein is based on one of Sakamaki's favorite comic books, a 1970s cult classic about romance at a German school.
Its visitors are united by a passion for such "boy-love manga", or comics about boy-boy romance for female readers -- a genre that is currently undergoing a huge revival in Japan.
Most boy-love manga feature dreamy, feminine-looking male characters. The same beauty ideal guides Sakamaki when she selects the waiters who talk about their pretend homework and studies at Edelstein.
"I'm in the flower arrangement club," whispers one girlish, long-haired waiter at the cafe, looking up from the book of German poetry he is reading.
RACY BOY-LOVE
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