Today in Japan, the genre is well established and popular, with hit series including Gravitation (with half a million copies sold, and that's not counting the anime adaptation) and Antique Bakery (which spun off into an anime series, a live-action TV drama, and a live-action Korean movie). Boys' love manga are manga that feature male homosexual romance, written (mostly) by women, (mostly) for women. The Heart of Thomas is, in fact, one of the seminal works in the boys' love subgenre of shojo manga (manga for girls). In case the implications aren't clear, that means that all the characters are boys, and all the romances are gay. Hagio's story is set in a German boarding school. There is one thing, though, that definitively and obviously sets Heart of Thomas apart from daytime serials. There are hyperbolically unrequited crushes, stolen kisses, vertiginous swoons, shocking secrets revealed, tragic death after tragic death till the protagonists can barely emote their way around all the beautiful corpses-and even, at the center of the plot, an improbable pair of distantly-related doubles, whose identical features spurn the dry touch of genetics for the sweeping caress of melodrama. At first glance, Moto Hagio's classic Japanese manga (or comic) The Heart of Thomas looks suspiciously like a serialized soap opera.
