Sakura of DOOM

(original title: うさぎドロップ)

Daikichi's grandfather has just died, and at the funeral, his entire family discovers that the strange child in the garden is his grandfather's illegitimate daughter, and no one knows where her mother is. No one wants to take care of Rin (the child), so Daikichi steps up to the plate, despite many misgivings.

The first two volumes are about Daikichi adjusting to having a young child in his life, and I love the manga for how it looks at parenting. Daikichi finds that he has to make quite a few sacrifices, such as going with a lower-paying job with less chances of promotion so he can make it home on time to pick Rin up from day care. I also like him reflecting back on his mother and the difficult choices she had to make, as well as how his father never had to make those same choices. It's not necessarily a feminist work, but I think it takes a real look at the inequities in parenting and how society in Japan (and I think in the US too) is not set up to help single parents and is set up so that parenting is solely the mother's responsibility.

Rin is a cute six-year-old, but she also comes with her fair share of problems, which I didn't feel as though the mangaka trivialized. Daikichi gets frustrated with her, but you always get the sense that he cares for her, and my favorite part of the manga is watching the two of them bond and watching Rin slowly learn to depend on Daikichi for the support she never really got.

So far, the art is charming but a little rough around the edges; I especially felt as though the mangaka was still figuring out how to use screentones. Sometimes the stark black-and-white art works, but more often, it feels empty and unfinished to me.

Cute, and I will keep reading it. I wish there were more stories about single fathers out there. I also like how the series hasn't been demonizing single mothers, from Rin's missing mother to other mothers Daikichi meets along the way.

Asami Shio has it all: looks, money, talent. Midorikawa Moe doesn't. Neither of the two realize that they will be rivals in the quest to become Japan's greatest opera singer.

I keep wanting to read Ichijo Yukari's work because she's a fairly well-known mangaka, but I bounced off this hard. The volume I read reads like more old-fashioned shoujo with lots of glamour, tragedy, and overall drama. Unfortunately, with the glamour comes a ton of class issues. Shio's father ends up losing all their money, so we get her poor-little-rich-girl story, which I am actually guiltily fond of.

However, what's extremely annoying is the portrayal of Moe. She's introduced as a sweet girl, which fits right into the poor-but-hard-working-and-cheerful stereotype, but once she realizes she doesn't have half the advantages Shio does, she chooses to do whatever it takes to get to her goal. I feel this could have read as class commentary on how difficult it is to combat generations of privilege (Shio's mother was also a famous opera singer), but instead, the series paints Shio as cold and impractical but essentially trying her best in a cruel world, while Moe schemes, deliberately sabotages people, and may be driven to murderous impulses. Also, to hit all the stereotypes, Shio is drawn with light hair (blond on the cover), while Moe has dark hair.

Pass!

(Original title: 愛すべき娘たち)

This is a collection of interlinked short stories, all of which have some connection to the main character, whose name I cannot remember and now cannot look up because I returned the book. I think it is Makimura Youko? Anyway, the first story is about her and her mother, who has recently battled cancer and is now marrying a man a few years younger than Youko. The second is about a high school student who sort of and sort of doesn't force herself on her high school teacher (a friend of Youko's), the third is about another friend who has been told to treat all people equally, the fourth is about two of Youko's middle school friends, and the last is about Youko and her mother again.

I cringed my way through most of the second story, although it's not quite as bad as the premise (I am very squicked out by teacher-student relationships, particularly those below college level). Even though having the student decide on the relationship instead of the teacher makes it slightly more palatable in terms of power differentials, I still find the depiction problematic, especially since the threat used ("I'll tell people you forced me!") is one so often used as an urban legend to discredit rape victims.

The third story ends on a rather odd note, which is too bad, because I liked the exploration of a relationship between two very nice people, one of whom just happened to be differently abled. I liked that it wasn't a big deal to the main characters, even though it was still discussed, particularly in terms of marriage potential. It felt fairly realistic and not heavy handed. And then there was the ending, which was... odd. The heroine takes her grandfather's advice to treat all people equally to heart, so much so that she realizes she can't truly be in love with any one person, as that would mean she values that person above other people. So she decides to... become a nun! As one does? This would have been so much more believable had the heroine actually been religious or thought about taking vows before or if there had been some sort of foreshadowing whatsoever.

The stories that contain Youko are excellent, and I now have much more faith in Yoshinaga as a feminist author. I love how she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters and how they harm and heal, how Youko's mother was hurt by her own mother constantly calling her ugly, how Youko's grandmother did so because she didn't want her daughter growing up vain like the girls she hated most when she was young, how sexism and systemic misogyny is passed down from generation to generation, always taking different forms. And I love that Yoshinaga understands that understanding does not always mean forgiveness or healing, nor does it make wrongs right. I love that Youko's mother (I think her name is Mari) has found love with a much younger man and that despite some initial awkwardness with Youko, the relationship looks like a healthy one that will continue.

I love the fourth story in particular, which has a recently-married Youko examining her attempt to be a working woman and a wife. I would have cheered just for the mention of the fact that women are expected to do the housework and that when they do, they are rarely acknowledged for it, whereas if a man does, it's a big deal, and how the amount of work men and women put into keeping house is respectively overestimated and underestimated. But no! There is more! There's the story of Youko's middle school classmates, one of whom was full of feminist zeal while the other two were not, and what happens to the three of them. It's sad and bitter and lonely and heartwarming at the same time.

This isn't my favorite Yoshinaga (Ooku takes that spot easily), but I enjoyed it a lot. Also, it's so rare to find manga centering on female relationships, much less overtly feminist manga, that I desperately wish someone would translate this into English so I could make people talk about it with me.

I first heard about this when it won a special prize from the Japanese Sense of Gender award (awards SFF works that examine gender); the people behind the SoG have been going to Wiscon regularly, which is how I heard of the award. Ooku (pretend there's a macron over the first "o") is an alternate history of Japan where a strange pox ends up killing three quarters of the men in the early 1600s. Because of that, the role of the shogun, like many other roles in Japanese society, ended up being matrilineal. The ooku was a harem formed for the shogun; with a female shogun, it was converted to hold about three thousand some men.

The story begins with Mizuno Yuunoshin's entrance into the ooku, but it also jumps back and forth in time to tell the story of how the role of the shogun ended up being female, along with how the disease affected Japanese history. When I first picked it up, I was afraid it wouldn't meet my expectations, as I've found Yoshinaga's work to be excellent but also uneven in terms of power differentials. I think Ooku is an excellent work of fiction so far; Yoshinaga carries off the broad scope and many time periods and characters with aplomb. As a work examining gender, I think it is awesome.

Why is this not licensed? Why why why?

At first, I was put off by the fact that we're following Mizuno's story. It's the same problem I have with Y: The Last Man; in a world where men are scarce, I still have to read something that's all about the guys? (I like Y and the women in Y, but it still irks me.) I was further put off by Mizuno taking on the more aggressive role with his childhood crush Onobu, as indicated by him kissing her and by the body language: he grabs her and pulls her in, she's slightly bent over backwards during the kiss, and he pushes her away to end it. I also wanted to know why all the women were still dressed in tightly wrapped kimono and obi when they were the ones running errands and doing business. While I love kimono, I think switching over to hakama might have been more practical! Similarly, the male dress in the first few pages is much less flowery than female dress; it looks like Edo in our history, with no hints of the changed male and female roles.

But! Yoshinaga is much, much better than that. Questions of clothing haven't entirely been resolved, but they've been brought up in the ooku already. And while we start with Mizuno, Yoshinaga does something very interesting: she switches between several POV characters, almost all male, and only has minor POV female characters. Yet the effect of this is to remind us how unstable the men's lives are; the shogun's favorites in the ooku may rise and fall, but the shogun and the women in power remain constant and dependable. There's a wonderfully claustrophobic feel to the ooku, a sense of limitation and constriction. I may have evilly cackled to myself and thought, "Bwahaha! See how it feels?"

Yoshinaga is also doing very interesting things with Japanese history; if I had known more about the Tokugawa shoguns, I would have picked up much earlier that she's following the exact same history as our own, only with female shoguns starting from Tokugawa Iemitsu. I particularly love that one of the greatest Tokugawa shoguns, Yoshimune, is a main character (and female). There's a wonderful scene in which Yoshimune meets with a Dutch captain: the pox hasn't spread to the rest of the world, and Yoshimune wants to know why only men are allowed on the Dutch merchant ships, which I read as a critique on how people will sometimes use feminism to justify nationalism or racism (I am not sure if it is, but whatever). And I particularly love what Yoshinaga's doing with Iemitsu, who began Japan's period of isolation, so disparaged by history books.

And there's so much more I'm not even touching on! The looks backward in history are even more fascinating, as they show a country struggling with changing gender roles. I would so suggest an Ooku book club panel for Wiscon, only given the lack of an English translation, I think it would be in vain.

To conclude on a completely random note, aside from being made of win, this manga also contains rodent death (traumatic only to me) and, more importantly, cat flinging as a form of affection.

(Please license this, someone!)

So, I read vol. 13 a few months ago and have unsurprisingly forgotten everything that happened in it. This made reading vol. 14 very odd, as vol. 14 reads more like an epilogue and less like a conclusion.

Quickly re-skimming vol. 13 makes things make more sense...

( Spoilers for both volumes )

In conclusion: though I like this series, I don't quite love it, and the same applies to the ending. I love that it addresses a lot of issues most series don't, but this is also its drawback, as I keep wanting it to go farther than it does, and it's frustrating seeing that.

Heh, and you all thought you wouldn't have to read me babbling on even more about Honey and Clover when I finished watching the anime.

But no! I managed to get my hands on some of the manga in Chinese while I was in Taiwan, and I have been laboriously making my way through them.

The plot so far has been nearly identical, with the exception of the meat-guy story actually being in vol. 1 instead of being in one of the anime specials. For anyone who doesn't know, the series is about five art students sort of getting through college, getting jobs, worrying about what they're going to do with the rest of their lives. It's a lovely, quiet little series, and it reminds me a great deal of Nana, which is high praise indeed.

Also, I am totally biased because the anime is one of my favorite things ever. I finished watching it a couple of months ago, and I have already rewatched bits of it, and I've actually rewatched certain episodes at least five times. And this doesn't count my pimping it out to others.

Anyway, it took me a while to warm up to the manga, just because I love the voicework and the animation and the music of the anime so much. But the anime gets pretty much all of its brilliant moments right from the manga and just adds voicework and animation and music; aka, the core of why I love the series is right there in the manga. The art's very sketchy and loose, unlike most manga art that I tend to like, which runs toward clean and strong lines (think xxxHolic and Saiyuki and Nana). But I really like it, and it works with the story.

I'd be raving about this more, except I've seen the anime, which I've already raved about plenty, for nearly the same reasons. So I will just say that the manga is just like the anime, I still love all the characters, and this series makes me so very, very happy.

Reading five volumes in a row may have been a mistake, as nothing much happens and the interaction does get a little repetitive at times. On the other hand, I still love the Momo-Sumire relationship so much.

I'm also sad that this can't be my Rocking Feminist Manga, given the gender-role-reversal with Momo and Sumire and given that the series really looks at Sumire in the workplace and how she has to deal with being a Harvard and Tokyo University grad who is smart and competent and obviously threatening to both the men and the women at work. I wish Ogawa had a more nuanced portrayal of the women Sumire works with; instead, almost all of them seem to be jealous of Sumire because of her boyfriend, her intelligence, her school pedigree, and her competence.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be, but it would be nice if there were a larger range of reactions and an exploration of why some of them might feel this way and the societal values and gender role expectations that feed into this. Instead, almost all the women in the series, with the exception of Sumire's housewife friend Yuri, are portrayed as jealous of Sumire, while the men tend to play off as understanding (Hasumi and Momo) or as complete horndogs (everyone else). I wouldn't be arguing as much about the gender portrayal, since pretty much everyone except Sumire, Yuri, Hasumi and Momo seems pretty evil, but the series spends much more time on the Momo-Sumire and Hasumi-Sumire relationship, and aside from a few chapters, the Sumire-Yuri relationship isn't given nearly as much weight.

Still, I am embarrassingly happy to have this anyway, just because at least there is some acknowledgement of the difficulties of breaking out of gender roles, even though the difficulty is positioned more as an individual problem, rather than a societal one.

Also, while I feel like I should have more a problem with the passivity of Sumire in her romantic relationships and how both Hasumi and Momo are more aggressive sexually, I think at least Ogawa somewhat examines it and looks at it critically, unlike most manga I've read. It's not set in the context of gender roles, which would make it much more interesting, but at least it's a "this is a personal problem for Sumire that she is attempting to overcome and something that really influences her relationships."

And I hope I'm not putting readers off the series by saying it's anti-feminist. I don't think it is anti-feminist per se, but it's also not feminist. But then, it still examines gender roles and expectations and how they play into relationships much more than most manga series I've read, and I suppose it could be read as a very accurate portrayal of what happens to people who break out of their traditional gender roles when they aren't doing it on purpose and don't have the tools to deal.

( Spoilers start here )