of Banana Fish have been produced in 2005, 2009, 2012, and 2021. According to Yoshida, film rights for a live-action film adaptation of Banana Fish were at one point granted to Ryuichi Sakamoto, but no film was ever produced. Shogakukan, which published the Banana Fish manga, has published several art books related to the series, Including the art book Angel Eyes in 1994 and the companion book Rebirth: The Banana Fish Official Guidebook in 2001. The company also published New York Sense in 2001, an art book credited to "Eiji Okumura" and marketed as a book of photographs taken by the character. Themes and analysis Homosexuality Banana Fish depicts homosexuality both in the text of the story through representations of male-male rape, and as subtext through the ambiguously homoerotic relationship between Ash and Eiji. Male homosexuality is a recurring motif in manga; while works created in the 1970s by artists associated with the Year 24 Group formalized manga featuring male homosexuality as a distinct subgenre known as , homoerotic themes and subjects had long been a feature of manga. Banana Fish would come to represent a shift for depictions of homosexuality in manga, towards older protagonists and realist writing and artwork, and away from the schoolboy romances and melodramas that had previously defined the genre. Some manga scholars such as Yukari Fujimoto consider Banana Fish as belonging to a continuous artistic canon that includes works by the Year 24 Group, while others such as James Welker argue that Banana Fish is narratively and stylistically closer to the boys' love genre of male-male romance manga that emerged in the 1990s. Despite Banana Fishs influence and prominence as a manga depicting homosexuality, the central relationship between Ash and Eiji is never rendered as overtly romantic or sexual. Critic Ted Anderson argues that a romantic dimension to Ash and Eiji's bond can be readily inferred from the subtext of the story, writing that "the astute reader understands the unspoken elements of Ash and Eiji's relationship". Manga critic Jason Thompson similarly describes the series as a "love story" expressed "so subtly as to be invisible", noting how "the sensuality in this manga is in Ash teaching Eiji how to shoot a gun, or Ash and Eiji's friendly, teasing, couple-like dialogue." The non-physical nature of Ash and Eiji's relationship mirrors manga romances broadly, which commonly focus on a chaste relationship between a man and woman