Yohan's homosexuality

Yohan's homosexuality is a defining and deliberately persistent state in the story: it governs whom Yohan desires, how he presents himself, and how he understands the apparent contradiction between his identity and his marriage to Kazumi Lhynx Valeres. His heterosexual marriage and parenthood do not erase the fact that he has long identified as gay; instead, they force the narrative to distinguish sexual orientation, romantic attachment, gender expression, family responsibility, and social labels.

Identity and Self-Understanding

Yohan is introduced through Kazumi Lhynx Valeres as the openly gay chief executive of the most successful and famous company in the country, with Kazumi serving as his assistant. His homosexuality is not treated as a newly discovered condition or a temporary disguise. Yohan and Kazumi have known each other since sixth grade and remained best friends through college, yet the earlier history of their relationship is presented as friendship rather than suppressed heterosexual romance. Kazumi also rejects the surrounding assumption that Yohan's attractiveness makes his sexuality a waste, insisting that his choice is his own and that outsiders have no right to interfere in his life.

Yohan's own account is emphatic rather than tentative. When a later article questions whether he is genuinely gay or merely pretending, he reacts with disbelief and reiterates that he wants men, not women. When questioned directly about whether he is gay, he answers affirmatively and treats the answer as final. These repeated declarations matter because the plot places them beside his marriage, pregnancy narrative, and public image; the story repeatedly makes his identity visible precisely when other people try to make those facts cancel one another out.

Desire, Gender Expression, and Social Labels

Yohan describes his attraction in strongly gendered terms. He says that he cannot love a woman, that he feels repelled when women flirt with him, and that male attention produces excitement instead. For Kazumi, he draws a firm boundary between romantic and platonic attachment, explaining that he can regard her only as his best friend. His response makes clear that his refusal is not simply reluctance to enter a relationship with one particular woman: within the period he is describing, his desire is directed toward men.

His homosexuality is connected in the narrative to an explicitly feminine mode of self-presentation. Yohan has dreamed of becoming fully a woman and enjoys making himself look like a girl. Even years later, he continues to wear dresses, apply makeup, and beautify himself. At the same time, he does not complete the planned sex-change procedure and chooses to keep his penis, fearing that removing it might bring bad luck. The story therefore keeps gender expression, bodily traits, and sexual orientation in contact without making them identical. Yohan can present himself femininely, retain a male bodily feature, and continue to identify as gay.

Marriage, Parenthood, and the Apparent Contradiction

Yohan's marriage to Kazumi does not begin as proof that his homosexuality was false. He proposes because he does not want their child to grow up confused if either parent later has a beloved partner whom the child does not know. He also frames marriage as a way to uphold his responsibility as a parent. His explanation is practical and protective, but it disappoints Kazumi because she had hoped the proposal meant that he loved her romantically.

The wedding intensifies the tension between institutional language and personal identity. The ceremony asks Kazumi to take Yohan as her lawful husband, and she accepts him in the formal language of lifelong marital fidelity. Yet the narrative retains the mismatch in its terminology: Kazumi identifies herself as Yohan's wife while noting that she is not his husband. The marriage thus supplies a conventional legal and familial structure while leaving Yohan's sexuality unresolved rather than overwritten.

The birth of their child adds another public marker to the same contradiction. At the hospital, a nurse addresses them as Mrs. and Mr. Laroses and returns with their baby, whom Yohan takes into his arms with intense parental excitement. The scene confirms Yohan's role as a husband and father in the social and medical setting, but it does not convert him into a heterosexual man. His parenthood is an additional responsibility and relationship, not a replacement for his sexual identity.

Change, Exception, and Later Continuity

The narrative eventually acknowledges uncertainty in Yohan's feelings toward Kazumi. He had previously regarded her only as a friend, and the account stresses that he had no interest in women. Later, however, he no longer understands what he feels for her. Kazumi is presented as the possible exception to his established pattern, not as evidence that his earlier self-knowledge was fraudulent. The story even qualifies the claim that he has no interest in girls with the possibility of Kazumi alone.

This shift develops over a long relationship rather than through a sudden public renunciation. Yohan and Kazumi meet twenty years before the later-life scenes, marry, and are said to fall in love ten years afterward. Their history allows the story to preserve both facts: Yohan has remained gay throughout his life, and his bond with Kazumi has become emotionally and romantically significant in a way he did not anticipate. His homosexuality therefore functions less as a puzzle with a single corrective answer than as the continuing condition against which this exceptional attachment is measured.

Ten years after their marriage and romantic transformation, Yohan is thirty-eight and Kazumi is thirty-nine. He still dresses, wears makeup, and presents himself in a feminine manner, while their child sees nothing wrong with it and understands it as Yohan being true to himself. The family ending consequently treats continuity as important: marriage, love, and parenthood have entered Yohan's life, but his feminine self-expression and gay identity remain present rather than being disciplined into conventional masculinity.

Narrative Significance

Yohan's homosexuality organizes the book's central conflict between private identity and public interpretation. Rumors and articles attempt to read his marriage and pregnancy as evidence against his declarations, while Yohan insists that these events do not change his attraction to men. The resulting tension exposes the limits of labels such as husband, wife, mother, and father when they are used as automatic proof of heterosexuality.

The character also separates gender expression from sexual orientation in concrete, recurring ways. Dresses, makeup, the dream of becoming a woman, the decision to retain his penis, attraction to men, marriage to Kazumi, and devotion to their child coexist in the same life. That coexistence challenges the assumption that appearance determines desire or that family structure determines identity. Yohan's homosexuality remains the story's durable baseline, while his relationship with Kazumi becomes the difficult, surprising development that the baseline makes meaningful.