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Shimura posting, part 3 part 1 (Even Though We're Adults/Otona ni Natte mo)
Even Though We're Adults/Otona ni Natte mo (2019-2023) - First love/childhood friends were major themes of the last two Shimura posts. Now we're introducing some new elements: adultery! divorce! blame! Wahoo!
This is a really fun one, with a number of inventively awful dinner parties/gatherings and a real upgrade in how Shimura shapes her narrative arcs over time. Of the series I've written up, this one is probably my favorite as a total package… but this post lol is broken in two parts largely because, lol, while skimming through the reviews, it became clear to me that it's the least understood of Shimura's longer series on a thematic and narrative level. The subject matter is somehow so inflammatory or the audience expectations are so misaligned that she's catching one star reviews for 1. writing a story about cheating (obvious if you read the backcover) 2. biphobia (opinions expressed by characters in dialogue) 3. too many subplots (they're all thematically relevant) 4. I Hate This One Character (okay??) 5. it's boring (genre mismatch) 6. not radical enough (maybe nothing ever will be?). Some of these are Goodreads problems, some of these are reader problems, some of these are the problems created by reviewing translated manga released solely in full volumes over the course of several years, but it annoyed me so much that I wanted to do my best to explore the series, Shimura's style, and her evolution as a writer and artist over the 20-ish year span covered by Sweet Blue Flowers, Love Glutton, and Even Though We're Adults… will I get to it this post? Let's see!
Even Though We're Adults starts with a question: "What kind of adult do you want to be?" The question, posed by teachers to a class of children, gets the standard set answers popping into the panel, but the one that gets its own panel is, "Someone like you, sensei." With this set up, you'd be forgiven for wondering: Will this be a series about the wretched hypocrisy of adults? Waylaid hopes and dreams? Creepy teachers? Weirdly enough, no: the protagonist, Ayano, is an exemplary elementary school teacher. The kids like and trust her, she handles their problems with delicacy and discretion, her colleagues respect her opinions and enjoy having her around. All these things remain true over the next ten volumes.
The most flattering way to describe Ayano's problem is that she hasn't lived a life true to her real desires. At the start of the series, she's five years into her marriage to Wataru, a man she chose because he was nice, friendly, and easy to talk to—hardly the stuff of deep passion or love. The second Ayano meets Akari, she understands what she's denied herself and what Akari could be to her, and she wants it bad. She and Akari share some passionate kisses, then say goodbye, promising that they'll see each other again. Their next encounter, however, throws some cold water into their romance: Ayano and Wataru show up at the restaurant Akari's working at. Ayano's cover is blown.
This could quickly become a sneaking around, cheating on the husband series, but Shimura's not one to move slow. Ayano tells Wataru she's fallen in love with a woman almost immediately. "Isn't that funny?" she asks Wataru (what?!), who responds, confused and upset, "No… it's not funny at all." At the end of the first volume, Akari, apparently something of a social masochist, invites Ayano and Wataru to a barbecue held by Akari's now married ex-girlfriend. Ayano initially plans to turn Akari down, but Wataru insists on attending (huh?!). At the barbecue, Wataru confronts Akari: Excuse me!!! How far have you gotten with my wife?!
It's fascinating to see what the series considers to be faults in Ayano's behavior. The problems that come out of the affair (Wataru's anger, humiliation, and shame; the way Wataru and Ayano's family treat Akari as a lesbian seductress homewrecker when Akari didn't know Ayano was married; her students' parents overhearing a conversation at a diner about Ayano's affair, which leads to a parent-teacher conference so bad that Ayano has to transfer to a new school) are pinned to Ayano's impulsive behavior in the personal sphere: Ayano shouldn't have kissed Akari on the first night they met (physical infidelity); Ayano shouldn't have announced her feelings to her husband without informing Akari or considering his feelings (reckless and humiliating disclosure to both her husband and potential affair partner); Ayano shouldn't have continued to seek contact with Akari after she moved in with her in-laws and before she earnestly went for a divorce (emotional infidelity). Reading through the list above, I'm like, damn, Shimura, you're fine with incest, age gaps, and student-teacher relationships, but this is where you decide to draw the line? But Shimura remains firm on these points: the step-brother fantasies of Happy Go Lucky Days are one thing, the simmering incestuous undertones of Love Glutton are another thing, but Even Though We're Adults occupies a different sphere, one where correct behavior is suddenly of concern. Ayano might have married Wataru for the wrong reasons, but, even after realizing she no longer wants to stay in the marriage, the relationships she's created with his family cannot easily be abandoned.
In a rare move from Shimura, Even Though We're Adults makes an explicit critique of patriarchal family structures. Divorce, in this series, is explicitly a way of breaking the chain of women who must care for her parents until her marriage, then going on to care for her husband's parents, her children, and finally, her husband when he grows ill, a chain explicated by Wataru's mother, Yoriko, as she thinks on her own life in chapter 44, chronicling her ambitions to leave home and live apart from her parents, only for her new husband to ask her to move in with his parents instead. "Family is so futile," Yoriko thinks to herself in chapter 50, depressed by the break up of her son's marriage, her youngest daughter's embarrassing affair, and the dark shadow of dissatisfaction over her own marriage. Shimura undercuts Yoriko's grim pronouncement on the same page. At the bottom of the page, a panel of narration lets us know that "the Okubo and Miyake families continue to be connected in surprising ways." We cut to a scene of Ayano's little sister referring Yoriko to her therapist. I don't think Shimura is against family, per se—we can see how much she likes the criss-crossing familial bonds in Love Glutton—but she does agree with the basic feminist critique of marriage as an institution.
If Yoriko embodies the old ways, Ayano's journey shows the push-and-pull of new and old. Ayano asks for a divorce in chapter 8 and is promptly shot down. "You don't get to decide that," Wataru says. (In classic Shimura style, on the next page, we see Wataru and Ayano's things in a moving truck parked in front of his parents' home.) I was initially confused why Ayano couldn't separate from Wataru and date Akari until the divorce is finalized, but I think there must be some legal elements that make it better for them to stay apart: Ayano, in volume 5, the halfway point of the series, realizes she really, really, REALLY cannot do marriage any longer and gets a lawyer, who tells her that, unless both parties agree to the divorce, it could take up to five years, and there's a mindfuck of a subplot about the wife of a cheating husband suing her husband's mistress. In Love Glutton, when Kawada breaks things off with Mame, her parents are enraged, then confused. Is Kawada in breach of contract? Or is it Mame? And I was sitting there thinking, Huh??? You can get sued for breach of contract for an engagement?? All the talk of getting sued for damages or being in violation of contract made me go, Oh, wow, getting divorced in Japan seems totally fucked. Not only are cultural tides working against women trapped in relationships and families they actively resent, the law, too, makes it easy to punish them.
It all sounds pretty heavy, right? But it's quite a funny series with a lot of charm, romance, and wit. I love the way Shimura layers flashbacks and monologues into a scene. One of my favorite sequences is from chapter 10, where Ayano goes looking for a gym teacher around a school and encounters two girls hiding behind a curtain in the nurse's office.
The flashback is almost ten pages long and covers three years of a high school not-relationship. ("I wonder what those embraces meant to Nao…") At the end of the flashback, we learn Ayano's going to get drinks with her high school classmates, including Nao. Nao's pregnant, and she's getting married. We're not surprised by how this announcement leads us to a panel of Ayano's high school self in the big coat Nao asked for her to wear on their Christmas date, looking to the side, or by the direction Ayano's thoughts take her: "My first love that I couldn't say was love might have been Nao. … I knew what heartache felt like, but I boxed it up and hid it away. And then I went and did it… I fell for Akari-san." Boom! End of volume 2.
The whole sequence really works for me as a way of showing Ayano as a teacher; often, occupations are signifiers of the types of qualities the protagonist is meant to have rather than something that shapes the way the protagonist thinks and behaves. She picks up the romantic undertone to the two girls' relationship, even if she can't bring herself to think it straight out, and the way that we go from the Nao flashback to the Nao in the present day works better than the other way around and lets Shimura layer visual motifs into the reunion. The narration at the end neatly shows us how Akari is on Ayano's mind, directly or indirectly. Though volume 2 technically ends on a separation for Ayano and Akari (Ayano's moved in with Wataru's family to work on their marriage, Akari's decided to give up on Ayano), the emotional affair goes on.
I don't think of Shimura as a particularly romantic writer, but she really brought it with Ayano and Akari. The parts of romance Shimura likes best are its seedy origins (often rooted in a childhood memory), the first move, the doubts, the dissolution, the growing jealousy/unease once they're apart, and the return to one another—upon which we can restart the cycle at pretty much any point after "first move." I feel like Shimura felt freer to indulge in the romantic elements of their relationship because Ayano and Akari were both trying to not have a relationship, despite both acknowledging their strong attraction to one another. There's a really funny running theme of Akari looking up at the sky and going, I don't need romance in my life. I don't need Ayano. I'm hot. I can get a nice, single woman, easy!!! and then, two panels later, getting herself face-to-face with Ayano and folding instantly. During first half of the series, prior to Ayano's divorce, they're constantly working within a framework of plausible deniability. It's not cheating if we just happen to be walking along the same route; it's just a coincidence that they're running in the same mini-marathon; nothing's happening if they happen to see each other in the train station and get coffee together.
We've seen Shimura construct parallels and narrative foils in her long series before, but Even Though We're Adults is her most deliberate and considered effort yet. In addition to the story of Ayano and Wataru's failing marriage and subsequent divorce (messy!) and Ayano and Akari's growing love for one another (they don't officially call each other girlfriends until volume SEVEN of ten???), we get two subplots that parallel the Akari-Ayano-Wataru storyline: sister-in-law Eri's ill-fated affair with Akari's boss, Morita (absolutely bonkers and kind of sad), and, one of the real highlights of the whole series, the really, really amazing friendship drama between elementary schoolers Ikka, Yuka, and Mana, who are collectively referred to as the "It's Complicated" girls in the cast introduction at the start of each volume. Of the two subplots, I think the It's Complicated girls is one of the strongest running threads in the series, while the Eri subplot is slkdfmgn effective but it ends on a note I didn't like at all. They both serve important narrative functions and run through a long chunk of the series, but… you know, I have clear favorites.
I'll start with the Eri, Morita, and Mizuki subplot, which requires a little less set up to explain. Eri is Wataru's little sister. She dropped out of high school, lives at home, and cycles between being able to leave the house and hiding in her room. Eri is thirty years old, the same age Ayano was when she married Wataru, and feels stuck at the age she dropped out of high school. She's embarrassed by dropping out of school, her lack of employment, and her dependency on her parents. The callback to the title feels rather pointed: "even though we're adults," she hasn't achieved the standard marks of achievement her peers have. Her mother wants her to get married, while her siblings gently pretend that nothing is wrong with her. The affair with Morita is a bad idea from the start: she knows, early on, that he's married, but continues the affair anyway. Morita's a new figure in her life, entirely separate from her family. He's attractive, attentive, and listens to her without any expectations of marriage, jobs, or improvement. He's a safe target for her affections precisely because he's unavailable. The sexless affair comes to a crashing end when Morita's wife, Mizuki, confronts Eri and demands that Eri pay damages. Eri, terrified, sends her mother in her place.
All this would be kind of a standard Shimura bad idea romance, where one party needs basic affection and care and the other party is mindlessly indulging in flirtation, if not for the details of the Morita marriage: Morita makes an awkward disappearance for part of the series because Mizuki pushes him down a flight of stairs after she finds out about the affair, and it's outright stated the Mizuki is verbally and physically abusive. The whole thing is played almost entirely for laughs. It feels like Shimura presenting us with an example of a genuinely broken marriage to contrast with Ayano and Wataru, where Ayano has "just" fallen out of love, but it feels really jarring to go from caring a lot about Wataru's emotional pain and his struggles dating again after the divorce to Morita getting pushed down the stairs being treated as a joke.
Looking through the reviews, people really, really hate Eri and her subplot, and it's not hard to understand why. Eri's dependency on her parents, her sexless affair with Morita, and unemployed shut-in existence contains nothing of the adult existence that many children think they'll obtain on adulthood: independence, sexuality, a sense of purpose in life. The anger Eri attracts is the anger directed at the "terminal losers" of society, and it bothers me that we see people who live with family, don't have a steady job, and are quite dependent on others as deserving of ridicule, scorn, and shaming. Eri embodies perhaps uh none of our fantasies or ideals of being an adult, but does that make her deserving of hatred? In any case, she serves a clear narrative purpose: her affair and the Morita's marriage bring a new depiction of marriage and cheating to the narrative, and Eri, as a character, makes us think of just what our expectations of adulthood are.
Okay, well… we're almost at 3,000 words… let's continue this in another post.
Coming up next!!! Fleshing out how the "It's Complicated" girls work narratively and thematically with the main romance. Shimura often writes about first love. What does it mean in this series, which deliberately focuses on a romance between (as the Japanese volume 1 wrapper puts it) "slightly bitter" adults? And the ending! It's a weird ending! What does noble, suffering recognito think of the ending?! And what of his bullet points???
All this coming up next in. Shimura blogging part 3 part 2. omfg
This is a really fun one, with a number of inventively awful dinner parties/gatherings and a real upgrade in how Shimura shapes her narrative arcs over time. Of the series I've written up, this one is probably my favorite as a total package… but this post lol is broken in two parts largely because, lol, while skimming through the reviews, it became clear to me that it's the least understood of Shimura's longer series on a thematic and narrative level. The subject matter is somehow so inflammatory or the audience expectations are so misaligned that she's catching one star reviews for 1. writing a story about cheating (obvious if you read the backcover) 2. biphobia (opinions expressed by characters in dialogue) 3. too many subplots (they're all thematically relevant) 4. I Hate This One Character (okay??) 5. it's boring (genre mismatch) 6. not radical enough (maybe nothing ever will be?). Some of these are Goodreads problems, some of these are reader problems, some of these are the problems created by reviewing translated manga released solely in full volumes over the course of several years, but it annoyed me so much that I wanted to do my best to explore the series, Shimura's style, and her evolution as a writer and artist over the 20-ish year span covered by Sweet Blue Flowers, Love Glutton, and Even Though We're Adults… will I get to it this post? Let's see!
Even Though We're Adults starts with a question: "What kind of adult do you want to be?" The question, posed by teachers to a class of children, gets the standard set answers popping into the panel, but the one that gets its own panel is, "Someone like you, sensei." With this set up, you'd be forgiven for wondering: Will this be a series about the wretched hypocrisy of adults? Waylaid hopes and dreams? Creepy teachers? Weirdly enough, no: the protagonist, Ayano, is an exemplary elementary school teacher. The kids like and trust her, she handles their problems with delicacy and discretion, her colleagues respect her opinions and enjoy having her around. All these things remain true over the next ten volumes.
The most flattering way to describe Ayano's problem is that she hasn't lived a life true to her real desires. At the start of the series, she's five years into her marriage to Wataru, a man she chose because he was nice, friendly, and easy to talk to—hardly the stuff of deep passion or love. The second Ayano meets Akari, she understands what she's denied herself and what Akari could be to her, and she wants it bad. She and Akari share some passionate kisses, then say goodbye, promising that they'll see each other again. Their next encounter, however, throws some cold water into their romance: Ayano and Wataru show up at the restaurant Akari's working at. Ayano's cover is blown.
This could quickly become a sneaking around, cheating on the husband series, but Shimura's not one to move slow. Ayano tells Wataru she's fallen in love with a woman almost immediately. "Isn't that funny?" she asks Wataru (what?!), who responds, confused and upset, "No… it's not funny at all." At the end of the first volume, Akari, apparently something of a social masochist, invites Ayano and Wataru to a barbecue held by Akari's now married ex-girlfriend. Ayano initially plans to turn Akari down, but Wataru insists on attending (huh?!). At the barbecue, Wataru confronts Akari: Excuse me!!! How far have you gotten with my wife?!
It's fascinating to see what the series considers to be faults in Ayano's behavior. The problems that come out of the affair (Wataru's anger, humiliation, and shame; the way Wataru and Ayano's family treat Akari as a lesbian seductress homewrecker when Akari didn't know Ayano was married; her students' parents overhearing a conversation at a diner about Ayano's affair, which leads to a parent-teacher conference so bad that Ayano has to transfer to a new school) are pinned to Ayano's impulsive behavior in the personal sphere: Ayano shouldn't have kissed Akari on the first night they met (physical infidelity); Ayano shouldn't have announced her feelings to her husband without informing Akari or considering his feelings (reckless and humiliating disclosure to both her husband and potential affair partner); Ayano shouldn't have continued to seek contact with Akari after she moved in with her in-laws and before she earnestly went for a divorce (emotional infidelity). Reading through the list above, I'm like, damn, Shimura, you're fine with incest, age gaps, and student-teacher relationships, but this is where you decide to draw the line? But Shimura remains firm on these points: the step-brother fantasies of Happy Go Lucky Days are one thing, the simmering incestuous undertones of Love Glutton are another thing, but Even Though We're Adults occupies a different sphere, one where correct behavior is suddenly of concern. Ayano might have married Wataru for the wrong reasons, but, even after realizing she no longer wants to stay in the marriage, the relationships she's created with his family cannot easily be abandoned.
In a rare move from Shimura, Even Though We're Adults makes an explicit critique of patriarchal family structures. Divorce, in this series, is explicitly a way of breaking the chain of women who must care for her parents until her marriage, then going on to care for her husband's parents, her children, and finally, her husband when he grows ill, a chain explicated by Wataru's mother, Yoriko, as she thinks on her own life in chapter 44, chronicling her ambitions to leave home and live apart from her parents, only for her new husband to ask her to move in with his parents instead. "Family is so futile," Yoriko thinks to herself in chapter 50, depressed by the break up of her son's marriage, her youngest daughter's embarrassing affair, and the dark shadow of dissatisfaction over her own marriage. Shimura undercuts Yoriko's grim pronouncement on the same page. At the bottom of the page, a panel of narration lets us know that "the Okubo and Miyake families continue to be connected in surprising ways." We cut to a scene of Ayano's little sister referring Yoriko to her therapist. I don't think Shimura is against family, per se—we can see how much she likes the criss-crossing familial bonds in Love Glutton—but she does agree with the basic feminist critique of marriage as an institution.
If Yoriko embodies the old ways, Ayano's journey shows the push-and-pull of new and old. Ayano asks for a divorce in chapter 8 and is promptly shot down. "You don't get to decide that," Wataru says. (In classic Shimura style, on the next page, we see Wataru and Ayano's things in a moving truck parked in front of his parents' home.) I was initially confused why Ayano couldn't separate from Wataru and date Akari until the divorce is finalized, but I think there must be some legal elements that make it better for them to stay apart: Ayano, in volume 5, the halfway point of the series, realizes she really, really, REALLY cannot do marriage any longer and gets a lawyer, who tells her that, unless both parties agree to the divorce, it could take up to five years, and there's a mindfuck of a subplot about the wife of a cheating husband suing her husband's mistress. In Love Glutton, when Kawada breaks things off with Mame, her parents are enraged, then confused. Is Kawada in breach of contract? Or is it Mame? And I was sitting there thinking, Huh??? You can get sued for breach of contract for an engagement?? All the talk of getting sued for damages or being in violation of contract made me go, Oh, wow, getting divorced in Japan seems totally fucked. Not only are cultural tides working against women trapped in relationships and families they actively resent, the law, too, makes it easy to punish them.
It all sounds pretty heavy, right? But it's quite a funny series with a lot of charm, romance, and wit. I love the way Shimura layers flashbacks and monologues into a scene. One of my favorite sequences is from chapter 10, where Ayano goes looking for a gym teacher around a school and encounters two girls hiding behind a curtain in the nurse's office.
Ayano: They weren't playing basketball.
Ayano: So then…
Ayano: What were they doing in there?
Ayano: Telling secrets?
Ayano: Napping together?
Her thoughts snap back to the teacher concerns that brought her to the nurse's office ("The older kids do seem to be picking on the younger ones…") on the next page; we see her from behind, now wearing a coat and on her way home. Bottom panel: two girls' hands, one reaching for the other, everything washed out in half tones. Next page: three panels divided into thirds, top panel a midshot of Ayano seen from the front, the wind blowing leaves on a diagonal; middle panel a close up of her eyes, nose, and hair blowing; a black bottom panel with a screentone transitioning to white from left to right and white text in the black portion: Something like that happened to me, once. Next page: black bordered page, two panels. Top panel: long shot of two girls in a stairwell, one Ayano with her back against the wall, the other girl unknown and holding tight onto her. Bottom panel: a close up of their upper torsos. "You try it, too, Ayano."
The flashback is almost ten pages long and covers three years of a high school not-relationship. ("I wonder what those embraces meant to Nao…") At the end of the flashback, we learn Ayano's going to get drinks with her high school classmates, including Nao. Nao's pregnant, and she's getting married. We're not surprised by how this announcement leads us to a panel of Ayano's high school self in the big coat Nao asked for her to wear on their Christmas date, looking to the side, or by the direction Ayano's thoughts take her: "My first love that I couldn't say was love might have been Nao. … I knew what heartache felt like, but I boxed it up and hid it away. And then I went and did it… I fell for Akari-san." Boom! End of volume 2.
The whole sequence really works for me as a way of showing Ayano as a teacher; often, occupations are signifiers of the types of qualities the protagonist is meant to have rather than something that shapes the way the protagonist thinks and behaves. She picks up the romantic undertone to the two girls' relationship, even if she can't bring herself to think it straight out, and the way that we go from the Nao flashback to the Nao in the present day works better than the other way around and lets Shimura layer visual motifs into the reunion. The narration at the end neatly shows us how Akari is on Ayano's mind, directly or indirectly. Though volume 2 technically ends on a separation for Ayano and Akari (Ayano's moved in with Wataru's family to work on their marriage, Akari's decided to give up on Ayano), the emotional affair goes on.
I don't think of Shimura as a particularly romantic writer, but she really brought it with Ayano and Akari. The parts of romance Shimura likes best are its seedy origins (often rooted in a childhood memory), the first move, the doubts, the dissolution, the growing jealousy/unease once they're apart, and the return to one another—upon which we can restart the cycle at pretty much any point after "first move." I feel like Shimura felt freer to indulge in the romantic elements of their relationship because Ayano and Akari were both trying to not have a relationship, despite both acknowledging their strong attraction to one another. There's a really funny running theme of Akari looking up at the sky and going, I don't need romance in my life. I don't need Ayano. I'm hot. I can get a nice, single woman, easy!!! and then, two panels later, getting herself face-to-face with Ayano and folding instantly. During first half of the series, prior to Ayano's divorce, they're constantly working within a framework of plausible deniability. It's not cheating if we just happen to be walking along the same route; it's just a coincidence that they're running in the same mini-marathon; nothing's happening if they happen to see each other in the train station and get coffee together.
We've seen Shimura construct parallels and narrative foils in her long series before, but Even Though We're Adults is her most deliberate and considered effort yet. In addition to the story of Ayano and Wataru's failing marriage and subsequent divorce (messy!) and Ayano and Akari's growing love for one another (they don't officially call each other girlfriends until volume SEVEN of ten???), we get two subplots that parallel the Akari-Ayano-Wataru storyline: sister-in-law Eri's ill-fated affair with Akari's boss, Morita (absolutely bonkers and kind of sad), and, one of the real highlights of the whole series, the really, really amazing friendship drama between elementary schoolers Ikka, Yuka, and Mana, who are collectively referred to as the "It's Complicated" girls in the cast introduction at the start of each volume. Of the two subplots, I think the It's Complicated girls is one of the strongest running threads in the series, while the Eri subplot is slkdfmgn effective but it ends on a note I didn't like at all. They both serve important narrative functions and run through a long chunk of the series, but… you know, I have clear favorites.
I'll start with the Eri, Morita, and Mizuki subplot, which requires a little less set up to explain. Eri is Wataru's little sister. She dropped out of high school, lives at home, and cycles between being able to leave the house and hiding in her room. Eri is thirty years old, the same age Ayano was when she married Wataru, and feels stuck at the age she dropped out of high school. She's embarrassed by dropping out of school, her lack of employment, and her dependency on her parents. The callback to the title feels rather pointed: "even though we're adults," she hasn't achieved the standard marks of achievement her peers have. Her mother wants her to get married, while her siblings gently pretend that nothing is wrong with her. The affair with Morita is a bad idea from the start: she knows, early on, that he's married, but continues the affair anyway. Morita's a new figure in her life, entirely separate from her family. He's attractive, attentive, and listens to her without any expectations of marriage, jobs, or improvement. He's a safe target for her affections precisely because he's unavailable. The sexless affair comes to a crashing end when Morita's wife, Mizuki, confronts Eri and demands that Eri pay damages. Eri, terrified, sends her mother in her place.
All this would be kind of a standard Shimura bad idea romance, where one party needs basic affection and care and the other party is mindlessly indulging in flirtation, if not for the details of the Morita marriage: Morita makes an awkward disappearance for part of the series because Mizuki pushes him down a flight of stairs after she finds out about the affair, and it's outright stated the Mizuki is verbally and physically abusive. The whole thing is played almost entirely for laughs. It feels like Shimura presenting us with an example of a genuinely broken marriage to contrast with Ayano and Wataru, where Ayano has "just" fallen out of love, but it feels really jarring to go from caring a lot about Wataru's emotional pain and his struggles dating again after the divorce to Morita getting pushed down the stairs being treated as a joke.
Looking through the reviews, people really, really hate Eri and her subplot, and it's not hard to understand why. Eri's dependency on her parents, her sexless affair with Morita, and unemployed shut-in existence contains nothing of the adult existence that many children think they'll obtain on adulthood: independence, sexuality, a sense of purpose in life. The anger Eri attracts is the anger directed at the "terminal losers" of society, and it bothers me that we see people who live with family, don't have a steady job, and are quite dependent on others as deserving of ridicule, scorn, and shaming. Eri embodies perhaps uh none of our fantasies or ideals of being an adult, but does that make her deserving of hatred? In any case, she serves a clear narrative purpose: her affair and the Morita's marriage bring a new depiction of marriage and cheating to the narrative, and Eri, as a character, makes us think of just what our expectations of adulthood are.
Okay, well… we're almost at 3,000 words… let's continue this in another post.
Coming up next!!! Fleshing out how the "It's Complicated" girls work narratively and thematically with the main romance. Shimura often writes about first love. What does it mean in this series, which deliberately focuses on a romance between (as the Japanese volume 1 wrapper puts it) "slightly bitter" adults? And the ending! It's a weird ending! What does noble, suffering recognito think of the ending?! And what of his bullet points???
All this coming up next in. Shimura blogging part 3 part 2. omfg