One of the manga conventions that came up in discussing YKK was the Perfect Girlfriend. The first volume presents Alpha as the sort of single girl readers might desire, though later volumes might shoot me down. Either way, she fits the ideal: demure, bright, beautifully plain.
This type shows up enough in manga for males, often played for romcom laughs. Boy meets girl through wizardry, tear in reality, adminstrative fiat. They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, “it’s almost like we’re a married couple” as his nose erupts with blood. Video Girl Ai, Oh My Goddess, etc etc… I think it’s an 80s/90s trend, though the teenage wish, “If only everyone else in the world were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, then she’d have to love me, or just have sex with me, I’m not picky,” that’s probably eternal.
The sexual dynamics are usually very 50s, the plots wish fulfillment. So the chief pleasure’s in seeing wishes unfulfilled as the genre’s twisted into new shapes. The strangest shape of all, and the preemptive last word, Minami’s Sweetheart (?????) appeared from 1985-87 in Garo and elsewhere. The first work by Shungiku Uchida (????), it hints that she would become a key feminist author of comics like We Are Reproducing and the autobiographical novel Father Fucker. In Dreamland Japan, Fred Schodt profiled her work and unconventional personal life– each of her children has a different father, none Uchida’s lover.
Minami’s Sweetheart, her first major work, takes the fantasy for what it’s worth, more or less. Minami’s a high school senior and nerd with a six-inch girlfriend.
They live together in his room “like a married couple,” he says, as his would-be wife’s mother-in-law yells at him to study harder. Chiyomi, his sweetheart and several years his junior, shrank for no good reason one day. Now he keeps her in a doll house by his bed, sneaks her food when his mom’s not looking, and takes baths with her. For vague reasons he keeps her a secret; I’m not sure if her family’s contacted Missing Persons.
Their interactions teeter between sweet nothings and adolescent drives. He cares for her, makes her clothes (including an Iowa State sweater, go Cyclones!) and at one point thinks of her as his kid. Then they get into an argument because her breasts are growing and she wants a bra. His fantasies of them as equals make do when he’s not fretting about the tactical impossibility of sex. When it gets really bad and everyone’s asleep, he sneaks in some “onanie,” the Japanese-via-German-via-Genesis 38:9 loanword for masturbation. His real trouble, though, is not his tiny girlfriend: it’s that he’s awful with the ladies. When faced with a much cooler couple who talk of marriage after graduation, he squirms. Back home, Chiyomi greets him cheerfully, far from the complications of a the adult world.
Its complications include his mother, always hidden behind a nagging word balloon, and Nomura, a sensual classmate who toys with him. By comparison, Chiyomi is his very own toy. In fact, he imagines her as a doll in an early nightmare, pulling her limb from limb. Later, he says “you’re my toy” while thinking out loud. She agrees, teasingly calling him a pervert.
This is a female character roundtable, and at first glance Chiyomi’s not much of a character. She’s quite two-dimensional, just as Minami would imagine her. And the trick is that he’s imagined by Uchida. Men often enough have trouble writing believable women; here Uchida writes an adolescent boy who’s kind of pathetic with great sympathy. She lets him create Chiyomi, a Perfect Girlfriend so perfect reading about her is almost viscerally painful– since I’m convinced she’s his elaborate way of avoiding real interactions with real women.
In the ending (yes, I’m ruining it for you), Minami ventures out into the world with his sweetheart. They hop the train for the hot springs. Chiyomi, happy and bright, peers out from his shirt pocket at the view. A series of older women wonder why this kid’s walking around talking to himself. After they climb a mountain, a car of young punks rounds the bend and knock him off the road. You can fill in the details. On the last page, some time later, he walks past a young mother with her kid, asking why her pet bird died. “Because it was small.”
I read somewhere that Uchida wept on drawing the last chapter. Reading the blog reviews and so forth, most people read it as a “Pure Love” story, which is how I guess the two TV versions played it. Others in the genre feature young lovers whose feelings stay pure forever thanks to the sweet embrace of tuberculosis, war, etc. The only tragedy in Minami’s Sweetheart is adulthood. Put away childish things, like a boy’s elaborate fantasy of a doll that’s his girlfriend. Still, you could read it as a magical romance, though what a strange one it is. The story’s strength is that Uchida never commits either way, never judges.
Dovetail: The name of Uchida’s first baby? Alpha.
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Update: the critic Adam Stephanides drops by in the comments (scroll past all the Victorian lit), and notes his own fine review of Minami’s Sweetheart.
That’s wild. To me the story sounds like it has to be satire. Is it? You say Ucihida sympathizes with the poor dweeb. Of course that doesn’t have to rule out satire. How does Uchida compare with Doris Dörrie? (She directed a film called Men that came out a couple decades back; don’t know how salient people still consider her.)
They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, “it’s almost like we’re a married couple”
Whoa, that’s kind of sad.
You’d think it would be satire.
Here’s my dashed-off translation of the blurb from my manga encyclopedia: “Their life of love can be read as Pure Love, the incarnation of his obsession, or even a fetish story. But because of its tender, graceful style and exceedingly sad end, it won the hearts of readers.”
This was the first thing of hers I read; the other’s bits of We Are Reproducing, read in the store. I expected satire, but it’s not. It is critical, though I haven’t read about her intentions. Not that they matter– I think the work took on its own life, if the reception’s an indication.
I’d love to see reviewers struggle to deal with it should it get translated, just so I’m not alone.
I don’t know Dörrie– she’s a feminist filmmaker? What’s Men about?
(Also, if I don’t respond, I’m on a business trip all weekend– so Tom, you’re in charge.)
All right, I’ve got to check out the miniature-girl story. Meanwhile, We Are Reproducing wins for best title.
Men is a comedy about a cuckold who stalks his cuckolder and winds up becoming pals with him. There’s no fantasy element, but it’s a satire of the male psychology, at least as the movie’s writer/director sees men. For some reason this film was the only example I could come up with of a work by a woman satirizing men.
Not to cross threads…but anything by Jane Austen would qualify as a woman satirizing men. So would Middlemarch (Casaubon is definitely a satire.) Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” also.
Yeah, one recognizes that. I meant satirizing men in general, as a sex, not satirizing individuals who are men. As the title indicates, Men was meant to say something about the male psychology thru the characters on screen.
FWIW, I read that Eliot chiefly considered Casaubon a satire on herself.
Ha! That’s awesome. I find it very difficult to believe that it wasn’t a dig at certain kind of men as well, though.
Same with To the Lighthouse; it’s definitely about male psychology in general, as well as about the the main character in particular.
I think there’s not as much of a distinction between men-in-general and satirical portraits of particular men as you’re suggesting, I guess. The self-important parson in pride and prejudice for example, or Darcy himself; their conceit seems to me to be definitely about male privilege and self-regard, as well as about their individual foibles.
I think in literature gender politics (and satire) are generally embedded in particular characters; that’s what makes them literature. There’s lots of great female deconstructions of male psychology in general, but they tend to be theory rather than literature (Kate Millet’s an example; her writing is even rather satirical.)
there’s not as much of a distinction between men-in-general and satirical portraits of particular men as you’re suggesting
Yeah, those are definitely two categories that bleed into each other. But, after all, a particular man is not just an example of men; he’s also himself, and that can take in all sorts of qualities that aren’t especially male. So we get a Casaubon who’s very much, in some ways, like George Eliot.
There’s lots of great female deconstructions of male psychology in general,
That’s more what I’m thinking of. In fiction (including movies) all that come to mind are Men and Colline Serreau. There’s got to be a lot more.
Bonus Austen point-scoring round: Rev. Collins felt entitled because he was a male heir, but he also adored his patroness and sucked up to her. Male privilege on the one hand, but also abasement before privilege in general. Same guy with both traits.
When I read Minami’s Sweetheart, it never occurred to me that Chiyomi might be a product of Minami’s imagination. And I confess that I cried when I read the ending. (Here’s the review I wrote, if you’re curious.)
In the afterword to the ’93 edition of Minami (reprinted in a collection of her essays), Uchida says that while the story was being serialized, she called it “small beautiful girl porn” [kobijin poruno], and that she was sick of people who called Minami and Chiyomi’s relationship “Platonic love” just because they couldn’t have intercourse. But she also says that for a while after drawing the last chapter, she really felt like she had killed someone.
Incidentally, if you’re looking for Minami, or any of Uchida’s other comics, in a Japanese bookstore, check the fiction section first. In my experience her comics are usually filed there rather than in the manga section.
Adam, thanks for dropping by! I should have known you’d have already written about the book, and that’s a typically fine review.
I don’t know if she’s imaginary, but it’s the most satisfying way I have of reading it. Given what you mentioned in your review about Uchida’s personal life, there are parallels to someone struggling to break away from the family. I’ll slant “family” into “home,” which works in Japanese, and note that almost the whole book takes place inside his room in his house, and the one time he takes Chiyomi out he builds a room for her in a box and puts her in that. The only times it moves outside are when Nomura drops by to toy with him and the last chapter, where he finally breaks with family/childhood by taking the trip that kills Chiyomi.
I keep thinking of Peter Pan, too.
I did find that full page image of her head floating over him where she says, “Minami, I love you!” while he’s weeping next to her dead body very affecting, even if I was rooting for someone in a bad relationship to move on for the rest of the book.
Incidentally, I’ve got the issue of Garo with “Fun Bath” (????????as the leadoff story. Read alone, it’s kind of a shocker– to call that a Platonic relationship, kind of a stretch.