How Just Like Mona Lisa uses speculative fiction to explore gender norms

Content warning: discussion of suicide, gender dysphoria, transphobia and homophobia

Spoilers for Just Like Mona Lisa Volumes 1 – 7

Speculative fiction has always been an effective space for messing around with gender, using imaginary worlds, metaphors, and sci-fi or fantasy elements to make statements about the audience’s reality. This genre has a strong history in manga, from classics like Marginal, which explores the reconfiguration of gender roles on a planet with no women, to contemporary works like Land of the Lustrous that pose questions about identity in a post-human future. Yoshimura Tsumuji’s Just Like Mona Lisa is a current work that follows in this tradition, using a fictive “what if?” to ponder very real quandaries about the gender binary and the way it’s normalized and enforced. 

The manga is set in a world recognizable as our own, but for one key difference: humans are born with no sex characteristics and only develop them when they hit puberty and choose to be male or female. The plot revolves around Hinase, an oddity who is still genderless despite being nearly eighteen years old. Caught in an unexpected love triangle between their two best friends, and informed that there is no record of genderless people surviving beyond twenty, Hinase is thrown into a spiral of questions about their identity. Can they make a decision and transform before it’s too late? Bundled in a melodramatic coming-of-age story, the storytelling sometimes falls into fraught tropes about genderqueer people, but it also raises some sincere philosophical questions and pointed commentary on the real world’s many gender paradoxes.

Gender identity vs. gender stereotypes

In a world where people can choose their own gender, the question “but how do you know you’re a…?” naturally comes up. Some characters explain that their transformation was involuntary and they accepted it without issue, but others make the choice based on a strong feeling. The narrative suggests that these characters, even from a young age, have an innate and intrinsic sense of gender, even if it doesn’t match how society might stereotypically perceive them. In its explorations of gender roles and gender identity, Just Like Mona Lisa seems to follow the notion that, to borrow from activist Alok Vaid-Menon, “Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.” Unfortunately for some of the characters, this sees them butting heads with the binary gender roles that reign supreme in the manga’s setting—the same roles and stereotypes that reign in the reader’s world, amplified by the speculative element.

An example is Hinase’s childhood friend Ritsu, the female perspective in the bisexual love triangle. Ritsu was a sporty kid so everyone from her parents to her classmates assumed she would turn into a boy. They began treating her accordingly, pushing masculine-coded gifts like boy’s running shoes and accessories featuring masculine-coded imagery like racecars, as opposed to the feminine-coded imagery of flowers. Ritsu, however, felt a deep discomfort when associated with all this boyish ephemera; a feeling of wrongness she can’t put into words, but which reads clearly as gender dysphoria. This is in contrast to the euphoria she feels when Hinase tells her she’s allowed to choose the florals, and says that she’s “cute” rather than “cool.” Despite the assumptions of the adults around her (and the kids who are parroting them), Ritsu feels intrinsically that she wants to be, and is, a girl, even before her hormones kick in and she begins her transformation. Most people (except for Hinase, of course) seem genuinely surprised when Ritsu makes this choice.

Despite the rise of professional women’s sports (and despite the benefit of sports as a fun activity for kids of all genders!), an interest in athletics is considered inherently masculine, associated with “unladylike” traits like physical strength. Toys, clothes, accessories, and their marketing, are also drenched in gender bias; even supposedly neutral imagery like cars and plants is definitively split into being “for boys” and “for girls.” The same is largely true for entertainment, which Just Like Mona Lisa also touches on. In another childhood flashback, Hinase’s classmate Aoi watches a super sentai show rather than his usual magical girl cartoons, prompting his older sister to immediately ask if he’s turning into a boy. Gendered assumptions about how boys and girls should act and what they should like are entrenched into everything, and pressed onto these children even in a literally genderless state.

Hinase’s other potential love interest, Shiori, also confused his parents when he chose to be a boy but kept his so-called “girly” hobby of painting. In a flashback to middle school, a freshly transformed Shiori warns a still-genderless Hinase that they should pick their gender based on what they want from their future: “If you want a cute job, like being a florist or a nurse, then people won’t laugh at you for it if you’re a girl. If you want a cool job, like being a pilot or a firefighter, it’s better to be a boy. That’s why my brother’s a boy, cuz that’s what doctors usually are.” (Shiori’s doctor brother is a recurring source of conflict in the manga; we will return to him soon.)

Just Like Mona Lisa’s setting has clearly doubled down on the stereotypical gendered split of these professions that exists in our world. It’s a more extreme version of the stereotypes that discourage girls from entering more typically male-dominated fields like STEM or supposedly manly and heroic careers like emergency services: not only are girls being discouraged from aspiring to these jobs, but they’re encouraged to not be girls if that’s what they want. The reader can assume this creates a cycle of self-perpetuating gender clichés that reinforces itself, generation after generation, in a sexist ouroboros. 

As Hinase tries to work out which binary gender suits them best, they try out different activities and aesthetics, only to run into paradoxes at every turn. Ritsu skews stereotypical femininity by being brash and sporty, and Shiori skews stereotypical masculinity by being artistic and sensitive. Hinase (and the reader) understands both these characters as completely certain in their genders, so why have they caught so much flack from their parents and peers for their choice? As the characters grapple with these questions, it draws the reader’s attention to the rigid and often hurtful binary gender norms that drive our own world and impact us since early childhood.

“I’ll make you a boy/I’ll make you a girl”: Gender and sexuality

The story’s inciting incident sees both Shiori and Ritsu confessing their love to Hinase on the same day, with Shiori promising to “make [Hinase] a girl” and Ritsu to “make [Hinase] a boy.” Both characters assume that experiencing romance will induce a gender transformation in Hinase, and that they will become the “opposite” to whoever they choose, forming a neat heterosexual couple. Thankfully, the story itself doesn’t seem to support the idea. Before Volume 1 is done, Ritsu is kicking herself for using that wording and forcing boyhood on Hinase by proxy of being her boyfriend. Shiori also apologizes, and we learn that he was motivated to say that by a secret that he knew, which I’ll discuss more in the final section. A few volumes in, and the characters are all putting their heads together to discuss the concepts of gender and sexuality, interrogating the assumption that a couple must be a man and a woman, and that Hinase’s gender transformation would “naturally” conflate to who they fall in love with.

While perception is slowly shifting, gender identity and sexuality are still largely perceived as being inevitably bound up with one another, often in a model where binary gender leads to (hetero)sexuality in a neat line. The truth is that gender, sex, and sexuality are all tied to one another, but in deeply complex and individual ways that are often much more fluid and nuanced than reductive, conservative commentators would assume. Sexual orientation is often considered an embedded, expected trait of gender identity—i.e., attraction to women is an intrinsic part of being a man, and attraction to men is an intrinsic part of being a woman—but this is not the case. Likewise, the assumption lingers that the ideal (or perhaps the only) relationship dynamic is a man and a woman embodying their normative, archetypal gender roles. The question “so, which of you is the man and which of you is the woman?” is still lobbed at same-gender couples, with many presuming that a romance simply can’t function without at least a facsimile of that power dynamic. 

Alongside the gender stereotypes noted above, the teens of Just Like Mona Lisa have also had these concepts impressed on them. As their classmates speculate on who Hinase will end up with, the question “but would you still date them if they were the same gender as you?” comes up. Shiori and Ritsu boldly declare that they would love Hinase regardless, but they both have baggage and complicated feelings that make this easier said than done. In this world where gender is a choice, yet the gender binary and all its stereotypes are enforced, it stands to reason that heteronormativity reigns supreme as well. It’s not like queer people don’t exist—as one student says, “you hear about them on the news”—but these teens have never had to grapple with the notion of their own sexuality when straightness is presumed. 

That said, some of them have. A fellow sporty girl admits to having a childhood crush on Ritsu, only for the affection to fizzle out once she perceived Ritsu as female; heterosexuality confirmed after a couple of confusing months. Meanwhile, Aoi realizes he has a crush on his (aggressively straight, boob-obsessed) male friend, and wonders if he should have chosen to be a girl instead. He falls into an anxious dream where he imagines himself as a woman, and immediately feels a sense that something’s off. “Like I thought,” he muses. “I don’t feel right in a girl’s body. This isn’t who I am.” He wakes up with his internal sense of gender reaffirmed, and acknowledges that he can like other boys without his own boyhood coming undone.

Over in the love triangle, Ritsu is initially freaked out by the notion of dating Hinase as a girl, though she can’t put her finger on why. When discussing this with Shiori, she realizes that her problem is less internalized homophobia and more a form of gender dysphoria. Ritsu’s idealized, imagined vision of Hinase-as-a-girl is much more feminine than her tomboy self, meaning that “naturally” she would have to compensate and be the “man” in the relationship. As aforementioned, Ritsu is deeply uncomfortable with masculine roles or aesthetics being thrust upon her, so she balks at this concept. When Shiori points out that she could date Hinase as she is, and that she doesn’t need to turn into a boy (either literally or socially), Ritsu embraces the concept much more readily. It’s a surprisingly nuanced deconstruction of her initial “but we’re both girls?!” reaction that speaks to the complex interconnections of gender identity, relationship dynamics, and the anxiety around the way these things are perceived in society. 

Shiori, meanwhile, shrugs the question off because surely gender isn’t a factor in his attraction to Hinase. But, prompted by discussions with Aoi, he begins to wonder: if Shiori doesn’t like the way Hinase looks as a boy, will his emotional attraction vanish too? And if Shiori did feel the same way about Hinase-as-a-boy, what does that mean for Shiori’s identity? Is he gay now? Has he always been gay? How does that impact his own sense of masculinity in a world where gender is considered so binary and oppositional? The storytelling makes it clear that none of these questions have clear-cut answers, reminding us that these topics are deeply personal and complex in life, too.

Poor Hinase, meanwhile, is just trying to work out where platonic love ends and romantic love begins, grasping for a clear definition of this “like” feeling that their friends keep talking about (in a crisis that will be familiar to any aro and/or ace readers, I’m sure—it certainly reminded me of my awkward teens). And what if they don’t want to choose between Ritsu and Shiori, and what if they don’t want to choose a gender, either? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be an option.

Conformity or death?

I’ve done some sleight-of-hand, reader: in the introduction I noted the time pressure on Hinase, as there are no records in their world of genderless adults living beyond their early twenties, implying that they, too, need to transform soon or risk dying. Hinase does eventually find this out, but other characters learn of it long before them, leaving Hinase in the dark about a crucial element of their own health and the stakes of their own story. Most egregiously, Hinase’s doctor, Shiori’s brother, tells Shiori about Hinase’s hormonal test results, and about their statistical risk of death, long before he has this conversation with Hinase themself.

This blatant malpractice makes for a potent analogy about the way “abnormal” bodies are pathologized and the vulnerability and lack of agency these patients experience in a normative medical system, so if Yoshimura is commenting on this or trying to instill a sense of horror in the reader, it’s successful. However, the handling of this plot device is at times messy, and makes me wonder what Hinase’s ultimate fate, and the series’ ultimate statement about gender, is going to be.

As much as the doctors speculate (again, everyone talks about this ages before Hinase is allowed to know), there is no clear linked causality between being genderless and dying young. It just seems to happen, whether by illness or accident, implying that it’s the nebulous hand of fate at work. Dr. Takayama spouts a metaphor about caterpillars dying if they don’t become butterflies, suggesting that these deaths are a consequence of simple biology: if you can’t grow up “properly” your only option is to perish. In this binary-obsessed, heteronormative world where gender roles are enforced and entrenched, a genderless adult simply is not allowed to exist. But does the narrative buy into this, or reject it? To try and answer that, we need to examine how it treats Hinase and other genderless characters, and that’s where some of the more fraught elements of the manga rear their heads. 

Hinase is at the heart of the story, but they’re not always an active participant in it. The storytelling perspective expands to encompass Ritsu, Shiori, and side characters like Aoi, fleshing out an ensemble cast of teenagers using Hinase’s dilemma as a jumping-off point to philosophize about their own unique relationships to gender. This spectrum of perspectives provides a broad and nuanced range of character studies, but it also takes the focus away from Hinase for chapters and chapters at a time. The reader spends a long time looking at Hinase, trying to puzzle them out from another characters’ point of view, as opposed to the time allotted to Hinase’s own interiority. Sometimes they feel more like a walking thought experiment than the main character—an issue amplified by their lack of knowledge of the story’s bigger stakes, and their lack of agency to make any significant plot-changing decisions about it until Volumes 6 and 7, quite late in the series. 

The storytelling also loves to tease the reader with the notion that a tragic fate is creeping up on Hinase, featuring many melodramatic cliffhangers, including but not limited to implying that they’ve been hit by a truck. Hinase survives this near miss because they’re rescued by a woman named Nao, who ends up introducing the characters and the reader to the story’s only other genderless character. While studying abroad in her early twenties, Nao met a genderless seventeen-year-old named Lisa. Lisa, unfortunately, does not get to tell their own story, as they fill the role of Nao’s tragic lost love from her youth. 

While it makes sense to frame Lisa as a mystery since genderless adolescents are so rare, this unfortunately makes them less of a character and more of a concept. To Shiori (who, again, finds all this out before Hinase gets involved), Lisa is a clue to be investigated, a potential boon in his quest to save Hinase’s life. To Nao they fit the cliché of the free-wheeling, sexually confident, mysterious, and ethereal queer person who opened Nao’s naïve eyes to the world and then died in tragic and intriguing circumstances. Lisa also repeatedly hangs out in the nude and flashes Nao to “prove” their genderless state, dates multiple men and women, and is the one who initiates their sexual relationship with Nao. The trope of the free-loving and sexually insatiable queer person is the bigger issue here, but I will mention again that Lisa is seventeen during this flashback.

Lisa’s death seems to prove Dr. Takayama’s hypothesis that genderless people are all doomed to die young. However, the reader sees a few crucial panels that complicate this. It’s implied that Lisa’s hormone levels began to change before they committed suicide, and their lovers started to pigeonhole them as a man or a woman, rather than a fluid combination of both, which is how Lisa told Nao they preferred to be understood. The onset of sex characteristics seemingly caused Lisa so much dysphoria and distress that they chose to end their own life rather than live in what society deemed a “normal” body. So it’s not that being genderless somehow magically gets people killed—being genderless was what made Lisa happy, and the encroachment of binary norms drove them into depression. 

So where does this leave Hinase? Throughout the manga, their desire for “everything to stay the same” is conflated with immaturity and a longing for the simpler days of childhood before romance and gender roles got in the way. Logically, the core of their coming-of-age story is accepting that things must be different and accepting that they must choose to walk the path to adulthood… even if it means shaking up their friendship dynamic forever and abandoning the body and gender identity they seem genuinely fine with. Lisa’s story is, I presume, intended as a tragic contrast to Hinase’s, hinting that they will find a way towards a happy ending of some kind. However, at time of writing the series is still ongoing, with its English-language release set to conclude in mid-2026, so it remains to be seen how all this will wrap up. 

Can this oppressively binary world possibly let Hinase be themself? Can the story actually grant Hinase the autonomy to make a meaningful choice? Is this all going to end up as one big metaphor rather than an emotionally-satisfying character arc? Time will tell.

Inconclusive conclusions

Just Like Mona Lisa is a fascinating example of a speculative work messing around with gender, using its imagined element to amplify and interrogate the hurtful, absurd, and intriguing ways that binary gender norms work in our own world. I have my gripes with how it sidelines Hinase, and how they are all too often the jumping-off point for other characters’ musings on their own gender, sexuality, and identity. Likewise, it feels reductive to hinge so much of Hinase’s identity struggle on a high school love triangle, especially when—if we believe Dr. Takayama—their life is literally at stake. Still, those musings from the ensemble cast are often incredibly interesting, surprisingly nuanced, and emotionally meaningful, right up there with some of the most poignant ruminations on gender I’ve personally read in manga.

This series contains some powerful subplots about gender identity, dysphoria, and society’s rigid gender bias. It also contains some painfully tropey, borderline offensive portrayals of a genderqueer character, and risks turning its own protagonist into an embodiment of its “what if?” rather than a person. While I’d obviously prefer if this series didn’t give me such whiplash, I can admit that both of these statements can be true, and I have to admire the story’s ambitions even if it fumbles sometimes. It will be difficult to parse the series’ grand statement about gender (if it even has one) until it’s finished, but for now I want to celebrate Just Like Mona Lisa for its use of genre to try and explore these topics.