Shimura Blogging, part 2: Koi-iji/Love Glutton

[recognito]

Shimura posting continues, this time with Koi-iji (Love Glutton).

Koi-iji (Love Glutton), (2014-2018) - While listlessly refreshing Shimura's Mangadex page, I saw this series had been scanslated and was finished and decided to treat myself. I'm glad I did! Koi-iji is Shimura writing in a comic mode. It's a self-indulgent, fun, and speedy series that at once returns Shimura to a familiar mode romantic comedy feat. complicated romantic entanglements. Shimura comments that she put out chapters for this series really fast, so clearly, something about themes and characters really spoke to her.

Our protagonist is Ohara Mame, a 30 year old woman who's been in love with her neighbor, Akai Souta, age 35, for the last twenty years (?!?!). Souta owns a cafe next to the Ohara's bathhouse. His wife, Haruko, has recently died after a long illness; he has a ten year old daughter, Yu, who's very attached to Mame; his first love is Mame's older sister, Yume. Did I mention that Mame's confessed her feelings to Souta at least three times and was rejected each time? Or that, in chapter one, Mame confesses AGAIN and Souta tells Mame bluntly that he was hoping Shun or someone else would marry Mame because, he says, "In the back of my mind, I always thought, 'It doesn't have to be me.'" Ouch!!!? Or that Souta has a little brother, Shun, whose first love was Mame? Or that dead wife, Haruko, was Yume's best friend? And, and, and, and—and! And then!

The actual narrative of Love Glutton is pretty simple but wildly entertaining if you're a lover of romance narratives: It's been one year after Haruko's death. Mame has just turned thirty years old and is still nursing her crush. After seven chapters of watching her friends get married, welcoming her beloved sister back from Brazil and then seeing Yume reawaken Souta's potential for romantic feeling, and getting shot down by Souta AGAIN, Mame decides she's had enough of this pathetic twenty year love! he's going to move out of home and put some distance between her and Souta. Shimura doesn't let us entertain the idea that this will represent a new era full of new people and chances for Mame: we then find out that, years ago, after being rejected by Souta, she moved away from home and got an apartment on her own. Her quest to start anew takes her back to nice divorcee Kawada, the same realtor she used to find her first apartment. She starts dating him and, before long, Kawada's tangled up with Souta through real estate.

Looking at it objectively, it's all pretty standard stuff trussed up in the usual Shimura touches: pretty art, strong paneling, great comedic beats, and brutally real moments. I really love, for example, how Souta and Mame's mid-series break up plays out: Yu realizes Souta's seriously interested in Mame and runs over to Mame and begs her to break up. Souta comes over to break up with Mame in person; Mame's so distressed by the end of this relationship that she hyperventilates and has to be put to bed. She hides under the covers until Souta leaves the apartment, then crawls out of the futon and sobs on her hands and knees. Next page: she's hungry after crying and fucking l m a o, Souta's in the same restaurant she's decided to go to for dinner, drinking coffee to calm down after the stressful break up. We go from feeling absolutely horrible for poor Mame to laughing at her and Souta both going, "AHHHH" at the sight of each other so soon after their break up. 

There's something kind of janky about Love Glutton's structure no matter how you look at it. There's a whole bit where Shimura moves Mame and Yume to Gunma, then, barely three chapters later, moves them back to Tokyo. "We're just like tumbleweeds!" Yume says cheerfully, but one can't help but think that Shimura moved them out to a new city only to realize, oh no… I'd have to introduce more characters…? Go down to Gunma to do more location scouting and research? and backed off. 

The biggest indicator to me that Shimura had a mid-series "ohhh I need to course correct" is with her portrayal of Kawada. I know Kawada's plotline isn't a favorite among readers, but I actually think the retcon makes a huge amount of sense for the narrative as a whole. We're introduced to him as a recently divorced man who's split from his wife and sees his daughter once a month. Then we learn that he's still seeing his ex-wife using the daughter's visitations as a pretext. Then we learn that he and his ex-wife were never married, only fake married, and that they were stepsiblings, and then not stepsiblings after their parents divorced, and that the stepsister's husband has suspected there's been an affair between the two for a long time, so much that he worries that the daughter is Kawada's. Suddenly, Kawada's gone from a romantic comedy act 2 boyfriend to a typical Shimura type: Dude With Quasi-Incestuous Baggage. What makes it really kind of crazy is that Mame, hearing about Kawada's long-running affair with his stepsister, says, "It looks like you're even deeper in it than me because your sister returns your feelings!" And then she and Kawada uhhhh agree to date with the intention of marrying… The whole arc of it is totally bonkers: lying, cheating, and then pulling out a proposal?? The reader knows it's doomed, but Mame sure doesn't.

Part of why Mame keeps getting stuck with Kawada is because Souta's still thinking of his dead wife. Shimura's really interested in the narrative tensions and problems that come out of strict adherence to monogamous fidelity, not from a material standpoint, but an emotional one. If marriage means giving all your love to someone, does that person get to keep that love until death? Moving on from the death of your partner is not like breaking up with someone or being broken up with, yet it manages to recreate the pain of both experiences: I don't want to have to be someone who doesn't love you, but you can't love me anymore.

Shimura has two dominating writerly impulses for this series: monogamy problems (elaborated above) and exploring the way past relationships affect a person's present romantic and sexual proclivities. From these three elements, we can understand why Shimura mirrors Souta and Mame's relationship with Kawada's quasi-incestuous one with his stepsister instead of Shun and Chika's love at first sight arc or Yume's emotionally cold string of affairs. Kawada and his stepsister, Akie, meet as a couple of teenagers when their parents marry. It has all the themes and beats of an arranged marriage narrative (the pre-marriage meet up, the wedding, the merging of households). Two teenagers who are strangers yet siblings and caught in a marriage that's not their marriage? That's Shimura catnip.

Souta and Mame aren't literally siblings or stepsiblings, but they're tied in their personal relationships, the net of relationships around them, and through business: Souta and Haruko set up their cafe next to the Ohara bathhouse so they could share customers. That's why Mame's attempts to flee Souta never work: they're connected through familial bonds, not just romantic ones. Souta says it explicitly in chapter 45:

Souta: She's like a sister but not my sister at all.
Souta: It's obvious.
Souta: And the truth is I always knew, but I pretended not to notice.
Souta: It's not that I didn't know what those looks she gave me meant.
Souta: But I felt like I couldn't let myself notice.

We revisit his early wish for someone else—his brother, his best friend, the weird, cheating Kawada—to take care of Mame so he doesn't have to, and, in this light, we can see that it's straight up Shimura pointing to the sign that says "Souta is worried about violating the incest taboo."

It's really, really funny to me that Shimura spends the back half of volume 9 and the first part of volume 10 reinforcing Souta and Mame's sibling and familial bonafides, right at the point where most romance authors would want to pull away from the incest theme and try to convince us that they're NOT like siblings, not at all. To Shimura, the sibling incest echo is a huge plus. I really like that for Love Glutton. It feels like a more honest resolution to the problems set out in the start of the series.

Souta and Mame can only be together when they confront the secret they've been trying to avoid: Souta realizes he's always known about Mame's feelings and felt some attraction for her. Mame, on the other hand, has long felt anxiety around her relationship with Haruko in life. She gets along with Haruko's family and cared for Haruko while she was ill, seeing her even when Haruko didn't want to meet Souta, but she was wildly jealous the whole time. Even in death, Mame remains tormented by the ugly emotions of jealousy and fear and can't confront Haru's place in Souta's life directly. Mame's happiness is only possible because someone else has died, and she feels awful about it. 

Mame, after reading Haruko's last wish for Souta to wait five years, says she's willing to wait for Souta during the remaining two years, and it's honestly a surprise when Souta says he doesn't want to make Mame wait any longer. He wants to go out with her for real. He propositions her knowing that he's breaking his unspoken promise to Haruko, a mirror to the breaking of his marriage. Wierdly enough, it works for me as the climactic romantic gesture of Love Glutton: Mame, no stranger to sacrificing time, offers to give Souta even more years, not because she's impatiently waiting out a rival, but to mourn her with Souta. Instead of taking Mame up on her offer, Souta chooses to love her.

The series ends with Kawada unable to stay away from his stepsister, eventually chooses to be with her, making his daughter so upset and disgusted with the two of them that she refuses to see them; Shun and Chika are happily still together; and Souta moves his coffee shop across from the Ohara bathhouse again and finally allows himself to be with Mame. Yume ends up marrying some guy she met in Brazil in a flashback and naming her baby Haruka… there's a running motif of Yume and Souta wishing Haruko could be reborn. Welcome, baby Haruka!

So, is it possible to have a fresh start after years—decades, even—of being stuck? Yes, it is. You might lose your daughter, your wife might think you're hung up on another woman, and it might take you like eight tries to get together, but the wheel still turns, and the world around the wheel still changes.

Love Glutton is a nice, fun, and enjoyable series and, unlike some Shimura series, pretty easy to recommend to a wide audience. I like it a lot, though on a reread, I feel like it doesn't have all the things I like in a Shimura manga… not because it centers heterosexual romance, but it feels a little less thematically built up than I'd usually expect… the plot zigzags all over the place, too. But you can also sense the energy and excitement she had while creating this series, and it's hard not to get swept along with her. I bet I'll be thrilled to reread this again in three years.

Okay, bullet point time:

• Love Glutton was published in Kiss magazine, a josei magazine notable for publishing Nodame Cantabile and Princess Jellyfish. It's a bigger and more mainstream venue than both Sweet Blue Flowers (released in Manga Erotics F, now defunct) and Wandering Son (Comic Beam, an artsy seinen magazine). Love Glutton is a pretty natural fit for Kiss, and Shimura has done two more series for them: Even Though We're Adults (it's getting a write up, too) and a direct sequel to Koi-iji, Hatsukoi no Tsugi (What's Next After First Love, perhaps one of the more pointed editorial responses to feedback I've seen in a minute), focused on little brother Shun and his wife, currently being serialized as of writing.
• There are multiple characters who explicitly say, "I love my stepmom! She's great." One cannot help but see Shimura a little tired...
• Shimura has a thing for including allusions in her titles: Runaway Girl's chapters were all references to popular songs (really fun to listen to the songs while reading the chapters), Sweet Blue Flowers had a number of classic Japanese and European literary references, and Love Glutton's references all come from American and British romantic comedies.
• Really interesting to see how Haruko gets multiple chapters of flashbacks in her POV. Shimura really stepping in with her ensemble cast and deciding that if there has to be a dead wife, she's going to get the standard treatment. You ARE going to understand her!
• Yume is an odd character here... I'm still not sure what to make of her arc in the series. I think she's there to be someone who has trouble finding happiness because she keeps leaving the entanglements instead of staying and getting deeper in them?  
• As the volumes go on, Souta joins the ranks of Shimura's crybaby romantic protagonists… I think she really likes drawing crying people? Her crying panels are always really good. 
• Souta's daughter, Yu, plays a prominent role in the series, but she is soooo far from being my favorite example of Shimura writing kids. Shimura's unusually skilled at depicting both the wonder of childhood/adolescence right alongside the frustration and powerlessness. Yu spends the first half of the series actively advocating for Mame and Souta to get together, and it's only in the second half of the series, after she's begged Mame to break up with her father, that Shimura seems to take greater interest in Yu's interiority. It feels odd that Yu's essentially a nosy plot device for half the series and then an actual person in the second.
• Really can only assume Shimura did a ton of research photography in Hakone. Sweet Blue Flowers also has a Hakone getaway. "Oh, we're here again!"
• One of my favorite moments in the series comes during the Hakone trip when Kawada and Yume meet Kawada's father and stepmother, who run a souvenir shop there. They start talking about their childhoods and adolescences; then Kawada, curious, asks Mame straight up: you've had a crush with the same guy for the last twenty years! Have you ever fucked? Mame gives a totally honest answer:
  
  Mame: A long time ago… I did get halfway one time, but I was mostly dating the guy because Sou-chan had rejected me and I ended up not being able to go through with it.
  Mame: [thinking] Yikes! Stop it, self! This is humiliating!
  Mame: [thinking] I came all the way to Hakone for this?
  
  I love this moment. Kawada pushes too far and regrets it, but Mame, perhaps feeling the need to be honest in the wake of their previous conversation ("I don't think lies are always a bad thing. Sometimes you lie to spare someone's feelings and sometimes you lie to try to give up on something" FOLLOWED ALMOST INSTANTLY by "You and I are like old friends. Maybe a marriage like that isn't a bad thing," an indirect way of saying they have no romantic chemistry?!), blurts out a confession that she instantly regrets. I came all the way to Hakone to be interrogated about my virginity…? Damn. I guess you did!

I'm really excited to do my write up of Even Though We're Adults. Please look forward to it!