Reviewing is My Job!

[recognito]

This review took forever to write because, in the process of writing it, I decided I needed to rewatch/review all of Maria-sama ga Miteru… and that in itself was so much fun that I kept rereading my favorite bits and then when I did that too much, I went back to the beginning and started rereading from there. I read a short paper that got a bit deeper into the current state of girls' novels in Japan, and it seems like Cobalt magazine, which published Marimite and other works of girls' fiction, stopped print publication and now only releases series online. The news does make me a bit sad... in any case, reading Marimite is really fun, while reading this series here was lmao less so... as such, I have not bothered to write beautifully... I can only ask for your forgiveness after the fact. 

Yuri is My Job!, ongoing - I had pretty conflicting feelings towards this one—like, there's something inherently absurd about the idea of a themed cafe where all the workers pretend they're lesbian high school students in order to sell you hot chocolate and sausages, but in a world where season four of Maria-sama ga Miteru had a Pizza Hut sponsorship, it's a surprisingly apt piece of commentary. Yuri sells. Would you like tea with your pizza?

 

A one sentence summary of this manga would be "a riff on Maria-sama ga Miteru, with a more direct exploration of sexuality and theatrical performance." Everything about Yuri is My Job! is a parody, sometimes gentle, sometimes pointed, of the Class S world Maria-sama ga Miteru reintroduces to anime: the sister system, school uniforms, tea, flowers, random European words, and basic character archetypes are all Maria-sama riffs. Not to say that it's all parody. The series develops its own emotional core, centered around explicitly romantic feelings around the halfway mark and makes its own answer to the question of lesbian desire and the sister system. Maria-sama ga Miteru's response to queerness and the sister system is, "They're different things with different purposes in your life; you cannot substitute one for the other," more or less. Yuri is My Job's response is closer to… uh, hmm……… let's get into a broad discussion of the premise and take it from there.

The basic premise of Yuri is My Job! is that Hime is a first year in high school who puts on a facade of being a cute, lovable, and selfish girl who only cares about bagging a hot millionaire husband. Her whole deal is avoiding commitment: she's not in any clubs, she doesn't have any friends (except one), she lives in total fear of being seen as duplicitous and manipulative even though she's surrounded by people who like and enjoy her company… until one day, she bumps into a woman on the street and knocks the woman over. The woman breaks her wrist and presses Hime into working at the woman's yuri-themed cafe. The cafe's theme is pretty much Maria-sama ga Miteru, although in the universe of the series, it's based on an old book. The workers are expected to act out their characters while serving their customers—including forming schwester (sister) bonds with their fellow workers. This being a yuri manga, people start falling in love for real.

The themes of Yuri is My Job! hold together surprisingly well when you list them out. It blends together the classic theatrical question of the performance of love on stage versus the actual love of the actors, which segues into the question of genre: what's the difference between yuri/Class S and lesbian desire? The problem of the series is, obviously, that this is still a yuri manga……… I found the way it tries to manage both pleasing the audience, who wants both Class S AND real lesbian relationships on the page, to be both fascinating and kind of depressing.

Hime has a traumatic memory of being shunned by her entire elementary school after another girl accuses her of being a two-faced liar. When Hime meets Mitsuki, another worker at the cafe, she's upset that Mitsuki doesn't fall for her charms the way that everyone else has and decides they must become schwestern/sisters. Mitsuki is a master performer, kind to Hime in the cafe, but rude, critical, and harsh with Hime backstage. Hime uses the set up of the cafe to lasso Mitsuki into a schwester pair—only to find out that Mitsuki is the same girl from elementary school who accused her of being a liar. Mitsuki's aggression towards Hime is fueled by her indignation that Hime doesn't remember her and by her long-time crush.

Mitsuki's confession of romantic feelings kicks off ten chapters of pretty tedious manga, where Hime and Mitsuki have different versions of the same conversation: Mitsuki wants Hime to respond to her confession, Hime doesn't want to hurt Mitsuki by refusing her and tries to quit the cafe, Mitsuki asks her to not do that, Hime doesn't want to hurt Mitsuki by refusing her and keeps saying she's going to quit… ten chapters!!! It's ten chapters of this!

In the end, the series resolves with Hime and Mitsuki deciding they both want to keep working at the cafe together and be sisters. They may have different feelings for each other, but being sisters means they can be honest with each other without any facades. They'll be honest with each other's feelings and talk to each other about what they really want.

I'm a pretty normie protagonist enjoyer for most series, but I never really got into Hime as a character. Her fundamental problem is that she has a protective facade, created out of a desire for total security. The elementary school incident was traumatic for her precisely because of the scorn she experienced when her persona was exposed as a performance. Instead of deciding to drop the persona and be genuine with people, Hime doubles down on it, this time justifying it as a tool to marry a millionaire. And, lol, in the right hands, this could be really funny, the source of an ever-growing contradiction in Hime's behavior. She says she wants to be the wife of a millionaire, but she wants to smash her face in Mitsuki's boobs so bad.

Hime is a liar. She lies out of convenience, she lies to make people like her, she lies out of fear. Her relationships with others are not genuine because she cannot accept that being liked and loved for who she really is means both being hurt and hurting others. This is a basic and straightforward theme, and I was really puzzled by how the series seems to land on Hime's facade being… fine. It's fine! She should not lie to Mitsuki because they're sisters, but it's fine for her to lie to herself. It's fine for her to lie to her classmates. She lies, but it's for a good reason. There's nothing to interrogate here. And I'm like, okay. If we don't tackle this liar problem, then what is this series doing? "It's fine to lie to people if it makes them like you and as long as they're not your close friends. It's fine to never know what love is as long as you might marry a billionaire someday. Romantic feelings are scary and inconvenient for the person receiving them." But the thing that makes them scary is the threat of having to be genuine; the thing Hime's storyline needs to resolve is the difference between lies and performance, truth and reality. Getting tangled up in "Yano's [Mitsuki] like is not the same as my like………" and I guess the angst of your friend having romantic feelings for you when you don't reciprocate is lmao getting distracted. You've taken the wrong thematic turn.

All of this sounds pretty bad, but this isn't even getting into the Kanako, Sumika, Nene, and Youko plot, which makes up the next thirty or so chapters of the series. This is lmao a total shitshow—like, if the Hime and Mitsuki plot is a dropped ball, the Kanako-Sumika-Nene-Youko plot is more of a spiked flail to the face. It's a direct look at the inherent romantic/erotic tension of the sister system, lesbian identity, and triangulated desire, but I also find it kind of impossible to recommend as a read. Like, on one hand, yes, it's fascinating to see how Nene and Youko intentionally use the sistership and romantic relationship to hurt Sumika's feelings and make her jealous; on the other hand, that then extends into a predatory lesbian story line. Youko's involvement ends after Youko takes Sumika's new girlfriend, Kanako, to a love hotel, pins her to the bed, strips off her clothing, and threatens to rape her unless Kanako says, "Kissing and sex are important parts of love. Please don't take them away from me." … The whole thing lmao is pretty bad. The sexual assault is clearly staged to titilate the viewer: Youko's lacy lingerie, the dialogue, the composition of the shots, which linger on Youko's large breasts and Kanako's fear and helplessness with equal avidness. It's a textbook depiction of a predatory lesbian, here to manipulate, threaten, and assault people into understanding their "real" feelings.

What exactly is the role of romantic love in this series? Almost every major romantic relationship involves unrequited love, love triangles, and jealousy. Each major arc in the series (Hime-Mitsuki, then Kanako-Sumika) resolves with characters committing to their sisterships despite the mismatch in their romantic feelings. The sistership relationship is presented to us as basically a holding ground, a way for people to have emotional intimacy despite this mismatch, to affirm that they're "special" to each other in a way different from normal friendship or romance.

What narrative and thematic purpose does romance have in a narrative? And ultimately I think the series can't figure out how to square the circle. In some series, romance is the stage to enact the themes of the narrative--like, we understand what characters get out of romantic and sexual love. Despite addressing sexuality, sister systems, and romance directly, it feels less clear to me what Yuri is My Job! is trying to say about each topic. They're all tangled up in each other, and not in a way that feels dramatically compelling--you can say that it's thematically consistent (what IS a sister????) but let's be real here: the series doesn't understand how to integrate its interest in romance with the themes laid out earlier. The fantasy Marimite offers its viewer is pretty easy to identify (your onee-sama is a beautiful horse who can only be tamed by your gentle touch, etc.), but what's the fantasy that Yuri is My Job! offers us? Your after-school job is really cool and fun! Your high school crush is agonizing! Uh, hmm… I probably won't revisit this one.