Manga Focus

By Dov Sherman


In the distant future, the discovery of warp propulsion and anti-gravity pushes humanity's movement into space, colonizing fifty-one planets over the next two centuries. Independance and culture varying from planet to planet, minor skirmishes between colonies break out but, when the ruins of an alien civilization are discovered, humanity is united under the single flag of the Pan-Terran Government, soon to join the other galactic superpowers in the InterStellar Alliance.

Cosmo Academy, originally formed by the Pan-Terran Government but now open to all members of the Alliance, accepts only very best and brightest of its applicants. The passing rate for the preliminary exam is only 0.1%. The rate for the second exam is 3.5%.

As our story begins, ten cadets gather for their final exam. Sent to a derelict spaceship with no instructions, they must survive for 53 days. Their teams consists of both humans and aliens. At any time, they may choose to abort they exam by pressing the panic button to summon a rescue ship but, if any single applicant in their team fails, all fail. However, within moments of entering the airlock of the ship, they discover that their team consists of eleven members. From this premise, shoujo manga artist Moto Hagio weaves a tale of paranoia, suspicion, and intrigue as the cadets scrutinize one another, wary that the unknown eleventh member may be a saboteur, intent on causing them to fail.

Tadadathos, a young Terran with a strong power of intuition, is unable to identify any single member as an imposter. When Tada is involved in causing an accident during ship repairs, suspicion slowly begins to turn some members of the team against him. But Tada finds himself drawn into an awkward friendship with Frolbericheri, a fellow applicant.

Frol's appearance is delicate and feminine and the other applicants are, at first, surprised to find a woman on their team. But foul-mouthed, ill-tempered Frol responds angrily, declaring that he is male and considers women to be a waste of space. In manga terms, Frol is the bishounen, the beautiful young man, a common device in shoujo manga, manga for young girls. His androgynous, leaning toward feminine, appearance provides a character with which female readers can identify and often challenges gender roles within the story.


When the shower in the room shared by Frol, Tada, and Amazon goes haywire, Amazon sees Frol naked from head to toe and runs to the bridge to tell Tada that Frol really is a woman! But the embarassed Frol explains that he is neither male nor female. On his planet, children are born sexless and only become male or female at adulthood. As the youngest of ten children, Frol would normally become a woman and sent to become one of the many wives of a neighboring lord. But, if he passes the exam for Cosmo Academy, the honor of passing will allow him to be given male hormones and become a man in his strongly patriarchal society.

However, sabotage aboard the ship endangers the chances of any of them passing the exam. A series of explosions drives the ship off-course and out of its orbit. As the ship moves slowly toward a blue sun, the temperature slowly rises, as does the tension between the cadets. In the drive room, the conductive ivy, used to replace old-style wiring, responds to high temperature by forming a crystalline shell which can breed the deadly Dell's Red Spot Disease. When the ship's temperature reaches 40 degrees centigrade, they will all be infected. During his stay aboard the ship, Tada slowly gathers memories of his own unknown past and eventually comes to realize that he was aboard this very ship as a small child when an accident caused the crew to be infected with Dell's Red Spot Disease, killing almost the entire crew. While a weakened strain of the disease taken from mice can be used to innoculate them against the disease, no mice are now available aboard the ship. But Tada is immune and, in desperation following a second accident involving Tada when Gunga, a cyborg from a plague planet, is injured, members of the team turn against Tada, deciding that, if he truly is the eleventh member, they can kill him and extract the vaccine from his blood.

Following an intense chase, Tada is captured and imprisoned in one of the elevator shafts with Frol left to guard over him. Frol, having actually seen exactly how Tada caused the accident, is heart-broken to be turned against Tada. In a brief struggle, Tada takes Frol's gun but, when Frol declares that he would rather die than have the others know that he had been disarmed and shown fear, Tada returns the gun and tells Frol to have the others meet him in Gunga's recovery room.

Gunga is revealed to have already started to develop Dell's Red Spot Disease but, since his cyborg body was designed to fight the plague on his homeworld, he is already recovering and the weakened form of the disease can easily be extracted to innoculate them all. However, the vaccine can not be extracted until Gunga has recovered fully and it is unclear whether he will recover before the temperature reaches 40 degrees and the rest of team become infected. Tada proposes that, although the ship has no working engines, they can still correct the orbital course of the ship and bring the temperature down if they locate the remaining explosives, place them on the upper deck, and detonate them, using the explosive force to push the ship back on course. Already certain that Tada is a saboteur, the others agree to his plan but insist upon locking Tada up for the duration. But without Tada's intuitive ability, they would never be able to locate the hidden explosives. Gunga then declares himself to be the eleventh member, certain that, as a living vaccine, they could not afford to kill him and that Tada is innocent.

The operation is a success, the temperature drops, and everyone is innoculated against the disease. Tensions drop and everyone happily celebrates their survival through 45 days of the test until Frol is discovered to have early symptom's of the disease, apparently unaffected by the vaccine. After overcoming so many obstacles and now faced with the choice between pressing the panic button and allowing Frol to die of the disease, they decide, against Frol's tearful protestations, to press the button since they can always take the test again in three years time.

Frol, however, so close to adulthood, will not be able to take the test and so must become a woman upon returning to her homeworld. Ashamed of her failure, her weakness, and the burden she has now placed on the others, Frol runs from the room in tears with only a dismal life as the youngest wife of a neighboring lord. But Tada offers her an alternative. Tada's people are monogamous. In a touchingly romantic scene, Tada offers Frol the chance to come to his world and marry him. And so the gentle, caring Tada and the swaggering, rambunctious Frol, having come through such hardships during the exam and having experienced friendship, betrayal, and compassion, find themselves irrevocably bonded to one another, their love transcending gender in a way impossible outside of science fiction.

They Were Eleven, originally written as a stand-alone science fiction short story manga, has been adapted into a full-length anime movie. The English adaptation of the movie is distributed in by Central Park Media with the translated manga distributed by Viz Communications in the compilation Four Shoujo Stories. It is a story which is both exciting and heart-warming, showing the range of human expression from its most selfish and paranoid to its most compassionate and caring.

And if you think I gave away the whole story, you have yet to see the surprise ending in which the true eleventh member is finally revealed!



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Jyuuichinin Iru is copyright 1986 Moto Hagio and Shogakukan