License Request (sort of) Day: Soap Girl Moko, Vols. 1 & 2

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By Naruo Kusugawa. Released originally in Japan by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Young Champion. Rights now owned by (and reprint put out by) Enterbrain. Not available in North America.

Content warning: this review will be discussing explicit sex, which appears throughout these two volumes. If you aren’t of age to read about it, don’t.

It has to be said, there are certain things that are very popular in Japan that, with the odd exception, just haven’t sold here, for all sorts of reasons. Sports manga is one of the most obvious, as is the huge amount of series involving ‘delinquents’ or youth gangs. And then there’s sex comedies. No, not the sort you get in typical shonen magazines (though those also don’t seem to sell well lately, unless there’s a supernatural element. Strange as Ranma, Love Hina, and Oh My Goddess were the big thing in the mid-late 1990s.). No, I’m talking actual comedies, written for adult guys, with lots of actual sex. We’ve only really seen this attempted here with Tokyopop’s aborted attempt to release Futari Ecchi (aka Manga Sutra), which bombed partly due to the economy but more due to the dullness of its leads.

It may come as a surprise to hear that there are a lot of these. They aren’t quite as common as they were back in the late 80s-early 90s (the era of the title I will eventually be talking about), But they’re still definitely there, in the pages of Big Comic Spirits, or Manga Action, or virtually anything with the word ‘Young’ in its name. A lot of them are essentially the same shonen harem comedies only written for grownups, with the heroines all now being a lot more successful in their efforts to get into the heroes’ pants. I have a certain fondness for seeking out these titles… not for the sex itself, necessarily, but simply as they tend to be very, very STRANGE. Titles like Kobayashi Makoto’s Chichonmanchi, with its virgin’s hell of flying penises and various grotesqueries. And even current fare like Ecce S, a Spirits title by Taku Kitazaki about a man who has a hypnotic magical tattoo on his ass that makes any woman who sees it want to have sex with him. Titles that make you stare for a bit and then say “Oh, Japan. (sigh)”

Luckily, Soap Girl Moko is far more of a normal, typical sex comedy. For those unaware, a ‘soap girl’ is a prostitute. Officially, the places where the girls work offer public baths to men who may want to relax after a long day. In reality, the girls offer varieties of sexual acts, though do also give baths, mostly as prostitution is technically illegal in Japan. There’s tons of Soapland places, though. Our heroine, Moko, starts the first volume as a neophyte soap girl, still learning on the job. We learn she started after rescuing a man from committing suicide (several times), and leading him to a Soapland, where his morale (among other things) is raised by the head girl there. Moko is inspired by this, and decides to become a soap girl so that she can help people.

No, really, she does. There is no question at all, throughout any of this series, that it is written solely for adult guys as a typical guy fantasy. This isn’t reality, nor do you want it to be. The girls are all varying degrees of nice, though most of them have more of a realistic bent than Moko, who’s your standard fluffhead with a heart of gold. The owner of the Soapland is your typical frustrated young manager who get aggravated by Moko’s clumsiness and slipups. Her regular clients we see more than once tend to all be nice guys. It is, for a manga that usually features an explicit sex scene every 3-4 pages, very clean. But you have to wrap your head around the basic plot of the manga, which is that sex can help solve most of life’s problems.

There’s a tiny bit of character development as the series goes on. Moko starts off as a complete ditz, and towards the start of the series I actually Tweeted “Worst. Hooker. Ever.” She’s clumsy, she’s awkward, she accidentally bites her clients right where you never want to be bitten… it’s sad. Luckily the author knows that this sort of characterization would not be feasible for a long running series, and has Moko learn from experience fairly quickly. Her girl next door looks and sweet personality make her one of the place’s more popular girls (in fact, there’s a story discussing how her rocket in popularity is completely exhausting her), along with her seemingly genuine desire to get to know most of her clients. She also really comes to like sex, which lends itself very well to using her body to help her clients, her neighbors, her friends, guys who accidentally hit her with her car…

The plots for these sound like they were taken from “Bob’s Big Book of 70s Porn”, they’re so cliched. There’s guys dealing with impotence, cheating guys who Moko reunites with their estranged spouse, bitter old vice-presidents who quickly soften (well… really the opposite) after getting to know Moko, kids trying to lose their virginity who fake being 18 so they can get in, clients who get so enamored of the girl they like that they try to propose… you name it, it’s in here. That said, it’s rather refreshing what isn’t in here. Because the plot is about a certain whitewashed form of prostitution, all the sex here is completely consensual. Rape is mostly absent (one attempt leads to Moko successfully fighting the guy off), and the one bit of disturbing sadism (Moko’s overenthusiastic client gives her welts on her back from whipping her) has the other soap girls uniting to teach him a bit of his own medicine. No women here are meek little wallflowers – not even Moko.

I’ve been describing this as explicit, which it is – we see lots of sex, and Moko is nude a great deal of the time. That said, this still ran in a mainstream Japanese magazine from 1990-1994, so there is some self-censorship. There are no bodily fluids on display. Moko has visible nipples, but her nether regions are just suggested. The men’s privates are either whited out or shown in sillhouette – even the intersex women, who comes to Moko to help with her self-identity crisis. This, by the way, leads to Moko dressing up in a Western suit and hat with a little mustache, possibly the funniest panel in the entire book (and she still looks really sexy, too.) The art style of the characters themselves is very mid-late 80s, and seems influenced by both Hojo’s City Hunter and Takahashi’s Ranma. We see giant heads when characters are mad, for example, and sweatdrops are abundant.

The Western World is likely more familiar with this than they think. In 1994, after the manga was winding down, an anime was made of the series, also called Soap Girl Moko. This was then bought by Kitty Media in North America, who put it out on VHS (and later DVD) as My Fair Masseuse. It was a popular adult title for people who avoided adult titles, likely for the same reasons I liked this manga – it was refreshing to see a hentai anime that didn’t feature rape and showed sex actually being enjoyable to men and women. That said, don’t get this expecting anything other than what it is – sanitized porn for young college guys. It’s just well-told, fun sanitized porn for young college guys.

I said this was a license request, more due to habit when discussing a Japanese title not out in English than anything else. (It’s not even scanlated! Gasp!) But honestly, in this market? I can’t see this selling. As has been mentioned before, women buy while men download, and this is very much a title for men. It’s likely too explicit for the mainstream publishers, but at the same time it’s not hardcore enough for Icarus, I suspect. So if you’re interested, you might want to track down the original Japanese. Enterbrain bought the rights to the series about 2 years ago, and re-released it in 4 ‘bunkoban’ volumes of about 325 pages each, which sell for about 830 yen. Do it for Moko, won’t you?

Manga the week of 12/22

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‘Tis Christmas! And what better way to celebrate than with some worthy Signature manga from Viz! Not to mention a few treats from other publishers.

Dark Horse has the 7th volume of the Evangelion spinoff Shinji Ikari Raising Project. Unlike a lot of other Dark Horse titles, this one has been coming out fairly consistently, so I suspect sales are quite good. The fact that they’re picking up several other Evangelion spinoffs also lends credence to that theory.

Tokyopop has a 6th volume of the hardcover, 2-in-1 omnibus edition of Fruits Basket. There’s no added content here, but those who want a larger and more durable Furuba might check out out. This has the original Vol. 11 & 12.

Vertical has the final volume of Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo, which wraps up its Japan-meets-America cultural satire with gusto. It’s also has more cute cats, with the fourth Chi’s Sweet Home.

And Viz has a veritable Christmas Stocking worth of cool titles. Vol. 2 of Gente, by Natsume Ono, featuring more far-too-perfect-for-their-own-good Italian gentlemen. Vol. 4 of Children of the Sea, which will likely once again have absolutely incredible art and force my brain into tying itself in knots. Vol. 5 of Ooku, which possibly may finish its flashback? Pretty please? A new House of Five Leaves, with its wussy yet awesome samurai. For the slacker in your life, there’s I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow Vol. 2, which I’m sure will have its hero making many resolutions about his life and not quite following through. And there’s a new 20th Century Boys, which finally gets to the halfway mark with this volume.

What interests you?

GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class Volume 3

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By Satoko Kiyuduki. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Carat. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I can’t imagine how fierce the competition must be at Houbunsha to find the next new 4-koma hit… given that most 4-koma have to all obey certain rules, at least the ones I’ve seen. “This group of girls are music students!” “This group of girls are teachers!” “This group of girls are sparkly vampires!” All of which are different, but share a similar mindspace: are they teenage girls? Are they cute? Are they funny? If so, they can be Ninja Pirate Zombie Robots for all we care.

The girls we see in GA happen to be art students at a school devoted to the Arts in general. They’re in the Art section, which is division A (B being music, though sadly it does not contain the girls from K-On!). They are a band of five; our naive and clumsy yet sweet heroine; the ‘big sister’ tsukkomi girl; the hot-head who speaks and acts without thinking; the eccentric weirdo; and the emotionless deadpan genius. This being Manga Time Kirara rather than Asuka, together they do *not* fight crime. Instead, they go about the daily life of art school, learning about layout, lettering, textiles, illustrations for advertisements and the like, and so forth. There’s far more color pages in here than in most manga; of necessity, as so much of the talk relies on the colors we can see.

There’s a lot of fun humor here, which is what you want in a title like this. Nothing laugh out loud hilarious, but several moments that make you smile. I liked the spontaneous organization of a haunted house in the class, and found it refreshing that it didn’t stem out of a culture festival like all other manga. It’s also good to see the topic of art is a constant focus; there is the occasional mundane chatter about favorite types of cake, or girls being sick, but mostly it’s about their art, and the jokes come out of that, be it trying to please an unpleasable teacher with fashion designs, or visiting a museum to try to ‘get’ modern art. Even the non-art strips are a bit different than most high school 4-komas; the girls are learning etiquette by getting tea ceremony training (our heroine is the best at it, but also the most clumsy.)

I also appreciated the fact that we see other students being just as strange as our heroes. Frequently in series with eccentric girls at school as the leads, we find the other students around them being depressingly normal and boring, sometimes staring in disbelief at the antics of the wacky group. Here in GA, the 1st years may be our focus, but frequent attention is paid to the third year girls, who have a different group dynamic but can be just as bizarre; in fact, the president of the Fine Arts Club, Awara, may be crazier even than the crazy girls in first year! (I loved when Noda, the flakey one in first-year, is walking around with a bunch of boxes on her head with faces drawn on them. As she staggers blindly through the halls, everyone thinks she’s Awara.)

There is not particularly any character development here – the most we get is in the final chapter, when Kisaragi (our sweet heroine) goes to see Professor (the stoic one) to drop off a sketchbook, and Professor reveals she’s already engaged to be married to a guy she’s never met… and that she’s feeling very ambivalent about the whole thing. Not only does the old Japanese tradition of arranged marriage feel out of place in a series about goofy art students (and deliberately so), but Professor is the one girl who’s always calm and emotionless amongst the chaos. Seeing her depressed is very odd (Professor even notes that it’s not like her), and I wonder if the arranged marriage plot will go anywhere in future installments.

We have now ‘caught up’ with Japan in this series, as Volume 4 is not out there yet. The series is still running in its magazine, but as with most 4-koma series, it takes a while for new volumes, as the chapters aren’t as long as your average manga series. Still I’ll wait for the next one, as it’s fun spending time with these weird yet fun-loving art students.