A showcase of Zheng Rui's favorite garage kits, professionally manufactured model toys imported from Japan. Zheng spends more than 2,000 yuan a month collecting his favorite anime characters. A kit seldom costs less than 600 yuan. [Photo by Zheng Rui/China Daily]

Fujoshi fantasies

Shang Xin, 29, like many others about her age drawn to nijigen, came to it in primary school, but took a different route. Many Chinese youngsters have been drawn in by the best-selling manga series Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue, but Shang's entry came through an offshoot doujinshi, a self-published version written by manga lovers, of the series.

"I was scared and threw it away at first," Shang says. "But for some unknown reason I picked it up again and started reading. That's how I embarked on this journey of no return."

That journey has led Shang to become a fujoshi, a woman who fantasizes about male-male romance among straight men in yaoi or BL (boy's love) cartoons. Many nijigen followers regard fujoshi as a subgroup.

Shang says her fujoshi fantasies have now transcended the comic page to the point where she imagines males she sees being attracted to one another.

"When I dine with a bunch of guys, the first thing I do is fantasize about what it would be like if they were together."

She has been married for three years and says she enjoys crying and laughing out loud as she reads BL stories late in the night and until dawn. However, that will happen only once her husband is sound asleep. Her husband cannot share her hobby, but seems to be OK with it, she says.

"All the characters I like inhabit the nijigen world. The thing is that I can't touch them. When I meet a three-dimensional human who has no sense of nijigen, I simply don't want to talk to them. In my mind I turn their face into a mosaic."

Shang is also dismissive of cosplayers, regarded by many as part of the nijigen cosmos. She sees them as "2.5-dimensional".

"Essentially, humans are three-dimensional. No matter how hard they try to pretend, they're ultimately human," She says.