Beauty & the Beast in Manga: The Human as Beast

The Beauty & the Beast trope shows up everywhere!

In manga, however, it often shows up as an everyday gal/guy paired with a monstrous human.

So in Beast & Feast by Akira Norikazu, Hyoudou is often drawn with animal ears and a tail, but he is fully human. The problem? He is yakuza, the possible heir to head of the family. He just happens to be smitten with beautiful, straight-laced, and hard-working police detective, Detective Kazuha.

In Rabbit Man Tiger Man, one of my favorite series that I had to buy directly from Amazon.jp after the first two volumes, the protagonists are continually shown as a rabbit and a tiger, including a very funny image of the rabbit and his family as nesting dolls. The "tiger" once again is yakuza though connected to his boss not by blood but by loyalty--and by his insights into political game-playing within the group.

"Cute Beast," a short by Amayo Tsuge, takes the idea to the nth degree. Onizuka is "6 foot 2. Long hair, stubbly beard, and big glasses. No one has seen his true face but you can see his sharp glare. On top of that, he barely speaks."

It turns out, Onizuka is a sweetheart with an astigmatism. Without his glasses, he keeps running into walls. The narrator, Kisaki, in classic Beauty fashion, forms an attachment. However, when the narrator convinces Onizuka to undergo a makeover and Onizuka turns out to be hot, the narrator wonders if revealing Onizuka's hotness to the world was such a great idea. 

After all, when the Beast becomes a prince, doesn't that mean a whole bunch of people will come to visit for diplomatic missions and balls and political conferences and flirtations and whatnot? Depending on their personalities, Beauty and the Beast might decide, "Hmm, can we go back to the good days when nobody came around?" 

Of course, Onizuka only has eyes for Kisaki.