Throw the Man Away With Me: Rejecting heteronormativity in Run Away With Me, Girl

Content warning: Discussions of homophobia and hate crimes, pregnancy, and domestic abuse

Spoilers for all three volumes of Run Away With Me, Girl

I first came across Bottan’s Run Away With Me, Girl under its Japanese title, Kakeochi Girl, tucked away on the near overwhelming shelves of a secondhand store in Fukushima City called Mansaido. This was an entrancing labyrinth full of UFO catchers, bundled, freshly cleaned Gameboy games sleeved in plastic containers, and used manga. It was there that, one day, full of conveyor belt sushi, I found all three volumes of Run Away With Me, Girl, on a chipped wooden shelf with yellow pages. It smelled like paper and palms and someone else’s home, and it immediately felt special to me.

While only three volumes, the series would stay with me, its influence stretching taffy-like into mid 2023, defining a time of immense turbulence and my own decaying relationship to romance with the silver lining of sapphism. Its story of two former high school girlfriends meeting again as adults, their reunion fraught with heterosexual expectations, spoke to me on a level I was not at first expecting. I wanted to be devoured by something, to feel that something click within my heart to help me feel like everyone else when it came to relationships. I eventually found that in simply accepting my aromantic, asexual nature and finding joy in romance on a page. 

But first, there were two women who were once girls.

Run Away With Me, Girl is the fantasy of reality: two girls, black haired Momo and light haired Midori, once lovers, once in love, meet again a decade later in their late twenties, only to experience that whirlwind romance again. I say fantasy because reality is rarely so magical in its realism: far flung romances from when we’re young often don’t turn into a Cinderella story with a HEA romance ending, but here, within this sacred text, they do, and it all starts with Momo meeting Midori at her place of work.

Their reunion is, like so many times you meet a friend from high school or college, both sincere and awkward. They’ve grown: Momo is in graduate school and Midori is now engaged, living a “proper” life. Unlike Midori, who gave up dreaming about the safe space of their all-girls high school, Momo has continued to love her, and love women. Even as an adult with a job at an optometric clinic, she still remains a bit left behind, locked in that final moment of Midori’s teenage betrayal.

It seems like these two former lovebirds are doomed to go their separate ways again, but then Midori playfully kisses Momo under the sparkling night sky. It’s an intentional switch from playfulness to purposeful queerness, and it’s cruel in the way it feels like a prank— yet so enticingly hopeful. Here, in Momo’s point of view, the reader feels her realistic pain, a bittersweet beauty, and the tension where she wants to believe this is real, yet doesn’t dare to get her heart broken by Midori a second time. At this point in the story, Midori seems to embody the heteronormative life path that marks a “proper” adult. What becomes clear, however, is that while she seems to be hitting all of society’s expectations, she’s equally—if not more—trapped by them than Momo is. 

Midori plays at being flighty and airheaded, fawning instead of fleeing or fighting. She takes in the world with a laugh that’s too loud and bright, and a smile that immediately seems pasted on, especially for her partner Tazune. It is, in so many ways, a reasonable defense: she’s always been the pretty girl from an absent family with air beneath her feet and a smile that makes her seem completely unassuming. It seems written in the stars that she’d stay with someone who, on the outside, seems kind and affable but privately, gets revenge for childhood bullying by belittling his fiancee every chance he gets. Midori, convinced that this dynamic is what a “proper” relationship should be, lets all this wash over her—including an unplanned pregnancy, escalating verbal abuse alongside an instance of stark, physical abuse, and an increasing sense of isolation from everything she truly loves. 

On the other side is Momo, who receives a constant string of comments about being “normal” from her family. Her mother demands grandchildren, begs her to lead a normal life, which equals getting married and having children. Marriage is the expectation: Momo being nearly thirty and unmarried is thus an aberration in the eyes of society. But Momo is a lesbian who doesn’t crave a heterosexual life. Kids, maybe, but marriage and a life with a man? That’s just not happening. This pressure feels ever more ridiculous as the reader sees the toll it’s taking on Midori, who is living out this fantasy of “normal” wife- and motherhood and suffering immensely for it. 

From my perspective, for the birth giver, pregnancy turns the body into a vessel, but also, something of a neutral burden. Your diet changes: you can’t have caffeine, can’t imbibe spirits, can’t eat certain types of cheese, fish, or meats. Sleep comes sparingly, and your relationship with your central nervous system becomes that of two people with a knife to one another’s neck, daring the other to lean into the blade. You give your nutrients to a collection of cells, and you also give away your identity, too, as strange and unknowing hands reach to touch the swell of a belly, to feel an errant hand or foot, to feel what rests inside you, eliding any recognition that they’re touching you nonetheless.

Midori’s personhood risks vanishing into her motherhood, something the narrative frames as tragic and tense, her pregnancy a frightening liminal space with a foreboding end point on the horizon. Society says she should be so happy, yet the storytelling validates her feelings of fear. There’s a constant tension: shouldn’t she do the right thing and settle back down, even if her husband mistreats her? Even if she knows that one swift hit from her fiancé’s briefcase will lead to another?

Much of Run Away With Me Girl is spent on the push and pull of Momo and Midori’s fraught situation. Midori calls their reunion destiny, and to some degree, it’s easy to call it that from outside the story. So many queer connections feel writ in the stars, feel like mundane magic, feel like real magic. It makes sense, when these two queer women meet, that those feelings Momo still nursed—that is, that her active queerness and her lingering love for Midori—comes blooming to life. It’s a combination of the fact that Midori is a queer woman performing heterosexuality as she was expected alongside the fact that that spark never went out. You can bank a fire but sometimes, an ember still remains, even a decade later. So much of Run Away With Me, Girl is focused on that: that small ember and how heteronormativity so often cruelly forces queer people to diminish who they are. Thank goodness that the story envisions so much more for them.

Partway into the second volume, Momo and Midori turn the title from a mere thought to actuality, fleeing the city to stay at an inn. Their time there is unfettered by the boundaries of work and responsibility: for just a while, they are them, and they are two women who are in love with each other. “Girlfriend,” Midori declares to one of the inn’s staff. It feels like a battle cry.

But reality, as it so often does when you’re queer, comes rushing back in: Tazune finds Midori, only this time, Midori resists. Head held high, she finally reveals the side of herself kept secret from Tazune. Gone is his internalized image of a girl so flighty she barely knows what to do: Midori declares that she can’t possibly love him, that she’s not living with Tazune, that she’s not turning her back on being queer. Her voice shaking, her eyes pinned straight ahead, she rejects him outright. He claims his trauma made him mistreat her, but he’s not let off the hook for the damage he’s done, for the casual misogyny and power-tripping that he’s used to squash Midori’s confidence and harm her body physically. If Tazune represents normative society and what women are expected to put up with for the sake of being “normal” and “proper,” Midori rejects all of that in one fell swoop.

The ending of the central story—there is a follow up chapter about Kon, Midori’s child—is everything and more, a celebration of queerness dressed in lace and veils and ribbon as Midori and Momo find wedding dress and go out into the streets, taking pictures before one final declaration of “Run away with me!” fills the air. And now, they do: to a life together, to a future that only they can build, and to the joy of waking up next to each for forever and ever.

Queer love is one of the most radical things that can be done, especially in societies like Japan where public sentiment is overwhelmingly pro-LGBTQAI+ while the government makes tepid half-steps forced by its citizens. In the wake of two sapphic Japanese women claiming asylum in Canada and the rising tide of transphobia in Japan, the radical queerness of Run Away With Me Girl stands out even more as a story about running towards your solution instead of shying away. Leaving a marriage arrangement, kissing a woman at midnight, having the child you never dreamed of together—that is the biggest middle finger to social expectations, to productive birth rates, to enduring abuse. The future might be uncertain within the boundaries of Run Away With Me Girl and real-life Japan, but… there’s just something so powerful about saying fuck it, we’re going to do it anyway because why die unhappy?

Why live a life where we can’t be?

I spent a lot of 2024 having to recover from severe suicidal ideation and sickness. It cost a lot, it made me endure a lot, and I had to turn a mirror on myself but in the end, I’m sitting here on Yuri Day (this article was finished on 6/25) alive and sweaty and vaguely hungry—three things I didn’t think I’d be around to experience this year. Ironically, because of treatment and adequate medication, I find myself with a surplus of genuine optimism that, at times, I worry sounds disingenuous when, for Americans of all walks of life, the government is actively praying for our downfall. It’s strange to have hope in the midst of a hostile ecofascist regime, but maybe, that’s what I was running away from myself: the power of hope and how it fills me, making the world take on a specific twinkle that I swear isn’t my astigmatism but the invisible ties that bind us all and make our world better. Rather, it’s the magnificent shine of existence, of hope, that allows me to write pieces like this.

Because you see, they might legislate my body, might say the gender marker on my documents is wrong. They can even say that I have to keep my breasts, that my uterus is necessary for the comfort of others, that my ability to possibly bear children is the most important and defining thing about me. They can say we can’t love who we want, that Pride and accurate representation of queer history is DEI bullshit isn’t worth a damn. Hell, they can call me “Miss” and “Ma’am” and try to put me in a box, but I’ve got teeth and nails and fist of my own. I’ll devour the stars before I bend to legislation that says my body is wrong or unethical or a threat. The radiance that is me is beyond what we remember we once could be and they can never stop me from believing in queer love, from embracing my community and what it means to be me. 

Just know that we’re out here, those of us who love girls in the daylight, who crave them in the moonlight, who seek to kiss and hug and embrace and long for them all the time. We’re here, with she/her, he/him, they/them, and a plethora of magnificent signifiers that say we exist. And me personally? I’m here for the dolls, for the girls serving cunt, for the girls serving feminine and masculine and androgyny and themselves up on a silver platter meant for solely them to consume. I’m here for it all, and together, they cannot defeat us. 

They cannot make us disappear.