I Am Completely Serious

Who thought it was a good idea to make a shitload of Harlequin manga in the first place? Why does it comprise like 3/4 of the josei catalog? Does anyone under the age of sixty even read Harlequins? It just seems like a huge demographic mismatch.



(those facebook like boxes)

Look at these awful titles:

The Italian Playboy's Secret Son

Sale or Return Bride

The Italian's Passionate Revenge (oh, no! Same Italian?)

The Sheikh's Reluctant Bride

The Sheikh's Contract Bride (the sheikh is keeping busy)

The Billionaire's Virgin Mistress

Married By Mistake! (okay, yeah, that sounds like a manga)

Purchased For Revenge (that, too)

The Forced Bride (this fucking genre, my god)

Cowboys, Babies, and Shotgun Vows (well that sounds crazy fucking romantic)

The Italian's Token Wife (you know it is exactly this sort of behavior that got you guys stuck with Silvio Berlusconi for like nine years)

The Billionaire Boss's Forbidden Mistress (no one forbids the Billionaire Boss! Mistresses, that is. No one forbids him mistresses.)

Pregnant by the Millionaire (she should have held out for the billionaire)

Royally Bedded, Regally Wedded (or maybe whoever this guy is)

The Sheikh's Ransomed Bride (geez sheikh how many of those do you even need)

The Spanish Duke's Virgin Bride (new nationality here, so this story must be completely different from every single one of the others)

The Millionaire's Pregnant Mistress (is this the same as that other millionaire-baby one but retitled? No, it looks like it's different.)

A Date With a Billionaire (she gets a look at his cell phone while he's in the bathroom and the address book is just "virgin one," "pregnant one," "forbidden one," so she walks out and calls up the cowboy. The cowboy is such a good listener.)

Mistress Bought and Paid For (goddamn we are purchasing a lot of fucking women in these stories, what the hell is wrong with Harlequin)

To Marry a Stranger (the stranger has an eyepatch, so yeah this is basically a manga, sure)

Marriage Scandal, Showbiz Baby! (the scandal is that the baby is a reincarnated vengeful alien ghost, right? Because it's manga. Right?)

Claiming His Pregnant Wife (this sounds like a tagline given to a murder by an awful local news station)

Public Wife, Private Mistress (that's generally how it works yeah)

Traded to the Sheikh (I'll bet it was the Spanish Duke initiating this arrangement, I never trusted that guy)

The Billionaire's Secret Baby (oh we all know the billionaire sucks at keeping secrets)

A Wife in Time (I'm unfortunately pretty sure that this isn't about time travel, how are these even manga)

Princess of Convenience (that doesn't even make sense)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed IV - An Officer and a Princess (oh god so someone felt there needed to be three other manga about the royalty of someplace called Stanbury getting married over and fucking over? I bet there are white horses with frilly tack involved.)

Wife By Agreement (well, that's a pleasant first)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed II - The Blacksheep Prince's Bride (there's supposed to be a space in "black sheep" you terrible prince)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed III - Code Name: Prince ("dude that is the shittiest codename" "look do you want to have a goddamn frilly horse wedding or not")

To Woo a Wife (this is really fucking progressive for these things)

The Stanbury Crown, Royally Wed I - The Expectant Princess ("i am expecting to give birth to a secret fucking agent")

Billionaire Bachelors: Stone (maybe the billionaire bachelors are like, elementally-themed, and they're a team of chosen warriors who fight evil together? Because it's manga.)

In The Arms of the Sheikh ("oh baby i have three or four wives already" "that is so hot")

The Celebrity Doctor's Proposal ("oh baby i want to surgically alter your vulva to be more symmetrical, and also marry you maybe" "no i am going to go see if the sheikh's got any spots open")

Million Dollar Men II - Millionaire Husband (these guys are the Monthly GFantasy knockoff of the Billionaire Bachelors)

Million Dollar Men III - The Millionaire's Secret Wish ("man i wish i was a billionaire bachelor, they have that cool elemental thing going on and takahiro sakurai voices one of them in the anime")

Million Dollar Men I - Expecting the Boss's Baby (there are three dudes on the cover of this one, I'm confident that it's mpreg and not just an establishing shot of this crappy hero team together)

Angus's Lost Lady (gonna pretend this is about some cows)

Daniel and Daughter (uh)

Ooku 2-4, Fumi Yoshinaga

(Yes, I did read volume two more than a month ago.)

Ooku volume 2 is set about one hundred years before volume 1. It's a stronger book, I think, but it's clear why it needed to be the second volume in the series. The flawed but relatively functional matriarchal Japan of Yoshimune's reign needed to be established and made to feel convincing, to give the decisions made in Chie/Iemitsu's time the gravity they need to feel real.

There's this sort of story that I think of as a "negotiable narrative" - one where, for some reason, the reader is compelled make comparisons between the narrative presented, and an alternate narrative that is in some sense more "real." In this case, if volume 2 were read before volume 1, the alternate narrative - with which most Japanese readers would be at least somewhat familiar - is the actual historical narrative of the early Edo era.

When volume 2 is read after volume 1 and framed as a story that Yoshimune is reading, however, Yoshimune's own alternate Japan becomes the basis for comparison. We read it wondering what she and the people around her might think of it, not what the historical Iemitsu might have thought.

This is a good choice for the kind of alternate history Yoshinaga is writing here. It's sort of a suspension-of-disbelief issue, but it's also partly a question of tone. The first kind of alternate history always runs the risk of feeling didactic, even when that's not the author's intent (though I think it often is). It's easy for even innocuous decisions on the author's part to feel like criticism, or advice. By beginning the story in a Japan radically different from the real one, then moving backwards to one that is just beginning to diverge, Yoshinaga defines the story as one taking place in another world, which makes the criticisms that she is sneaking in - and I would say that she is making some criticisms here! - seem more organic to the story.

(Incidentally, I feel like Jacqueline Carey did something very similar to this with Kushiel's Dart. She gives the reader a kind of permission to buy into the fantasy by introducing the floating world of the Night Court first - and not making it clear until further in that, oh, by the way, this is all happening in a fairly close approximation of Europe. It just works better.)

Volume 2 and the first portion of volume 3 are the sort of story Yoshinaga is good at - several smart, unhappy people make a lot of understandable bad decisions and hurt each other, slowly coming to terms with the unfairness of the world.

I'm not sure what happened with the second part of volume 3, but it started to fall apart. ( Cut for an infinitesimal spoiler. )

My response to this manga is a string of little hearts.* My favorite is the chapter about the girl who has a crush on Yamane. I want more stuff with Yamane in it. She is perfect and I love her.

This particular Yoshinaga manga’s Horrible Relationship is so deep into horrible it comes out the other end. It’s like Edward Gorey or something. I can’t figure out whether to cringe or laugh at it. It’s very, very horrible.

* But I’m not putting them here because I’ve developed an anal-retentive habit of avoidance of special characters due to fear of problems with my WordPress database. Though I feel that this dysfunction has on occasion damaged the integrity of my writing, it persists nonetheless. There is a small fearful twinge close to my heart when I switch on the Japanese IME, an almost tactile thing, as if UTF-8 character encoding was a physical organ within my body.

(I have such awesome problems.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)