This is my entry for the March session of Manga Movable Feast, an experiment where manga bloggers from around the web write about a single title. This month’s title is Kaoru Mori’s Emma, and the host is Matt Blind of Rocket Bomber. A full list of articles and reviews by those participating in this month’s MMF can be found here.
Emma is a Japanese comic about a maid.
Aside: I don’t really get the maid fad that was popular in Japan a few years back (and maybe still is?). When I was there, I never went into a maid café, and will not go to one if/when I ever return. I mean, if I went into a place for a cup of coffee and a bunch of girls in lace and frills I had never met before bowed at me and said “Welcome home, master,” I would probably back out slowly, then turn around and sprint the other direction with a cartoonish cloud of dust swirling behind me. And have you heard of some of the things the “maids” at these places do? They “cool” your drink by blowing on it, or give you hand massages. Assuming I somehow managed to stay in one of these establishments long enough to be served, I’d be like, “Why are you getting your spittle and germs in my coffee? What the hell are you doing to my hand?”
Of course, that’s all a rather romanticized interpretation of who a maid really is. Emma is rather romanticized as well, but seeing as it’s a romance story, I guess we can accept that a bit. And it at least tries for accuracy; it takes place in turn-of-the-century London (er, turn of the previous century, not the current one), when ostentatious display of domestic servitude was in fashion.
Emma, not to be confused with the Jane Austen novel of the same name, has had all ten of its volumes released domestically by CMX. (The books have a very nice non-glossy paperback cover with an interesting texture as you hold it in your hand - just don’t spill anything on it.) As I wasn’t really up to buying ten volumes of a series I wasn’t sure I was going to like, and wouldn’t have had time to sanely read all of them even if I had done so, I limited my purchase and reading to just the first two volumes.
So the titular Emma is a maid. She serves Keisuke, a lecherous 14-year-old aristocratic schoolboy who is always trying to peep on her when she’s changing out of her short frilly maid skirt; she inevitably catches him and sends him spinning into the heavens every single time with a stiff uppercut with her right hand while futilely attempting to cover her gargantuan breasts with her left. Wacky! Tacky! Sexy in a naked Barbie doll kind of way!
…Not. That’s kind of along the lines of what I would expect from a Japanese comic about a manga, and I bet it would sell real well and be made into a fifty-two-episde cartoon series and sell hundreds of thousands of naked Emma statuettes and set creator Kaoru Mori for life. But instead, Mori puts a lot of class into Emma’s world and characters, lucrative computer dating game profits be damned.
No, Emma is the personal maid of Kelly Stonwar, an elderly retired widow who plays something of a mother figure to the orphaned Emma after taking her in. Her maid frock is modest and simple, and she has yet to bare so much as an ankle - I’m at a loss as to why CMX slapped a “Teen Plus” rating on the back cover. And unlike Black Butler, the domestic servant in question is wholly human and spends her day cooking and cleaning rather than fighting bandits and solving mysteries.
Emma’s love interest in this romance is William, a former student of Kelly’s who meets Emma during a visit. William belongs to a family of merchants making their way in the world. Emma and William immediately take a liking to each other, and through a series of other meetings, chance and otherwise, they fall in something resembling love. However, William’s father - and much of the rest of society - disapproves of his son’s relationship with a lowly servant, and is instead trying to hook him up with Eleanor, the dolled-up daughter of another wealthy family who looks to be about ten years his junior. (Kelly, for her part, wants to see her two proteges get together.)
It’s all rather a classic story, but I’ve got to say that I have issues with how Mori tells it. She seems to not be following the old writers’ mantra of “show, don’t tell.” For one, I don’t see what these two people see in each other, and that’s a rather crucial aspect of understanding their romance, isn’t it? Is it just a physical attraction? I suppose Emma, with her round face, rounder glasses, and braided updo, has a bit of a librarian chic look to her. She apparently fetches - and rejects - the attention of many suitors, but when asked why she hasn’t rejected William, Kelly seems to be satisfied when Emma responds with something like “he doesn’t come off as strong.” And William for his part could probably have no trouble earning a trophy shinier than Emma, but does not and apparently never has. So they go for walks and on dates and such, and apparently have wildly fascinating conversations that deepen their attraction for each other which Mori doesn’t feel like sharing with us for some reason. Heck, it seems to me that Mori shows us more intimate conversation between William and Eleanor than William and Emma, even though we know William is just going through the motions to keep the peace with his dad.
Okay, maybe I just don’t get it. I’m a dude and therefore totally the wrong gender for this kind of story, after all. But in the end, I felt like I knew William and Emma cared for their each other merely because we had been told that William and Emma cared for each other instead of being shown how they fell in love, what they saw in each other, how they displayed affection. And the main conflict in the book - the entrenched differences in class between the two lovers - I also felt was being hammered into us instead of being displayed for us to witness for ourselves. Furthermore, I felt Emma herself as a character was a more interesting element of the comic than the romance between her and William. What does that mean when the story is supposed to be a romance? The whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.
So I’m afraid I’m going to stop with these two volumes. I know Emma has its fans, but I’m just not hooked.
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