Coffee Spoons

Yoshihara Yuki’s works differ from mainstream shoujo manga and bears its own distinctive style even within the josei genre due to the mangaka’s drunkenly blunt sense of humor and her clever manipulation of the gender dynamics between her female heroines and their love interests. Her protagonists are outspoken, aggressive, and unabashedly sexual in the pursuit of their romantic interests. They do not bother to put up a front of being docile or coy in their intentions. Their antics are hilarious. They steal their lover’s underwear, they talk dirty without being sexy about it, they are loud about wanting sex and can’t be bothered to beat around the bushes, they stalk their love interests and terrorize them with their monstrous libidos, and still they’re so much fun to read about that I can’t get through a chapter of any of her works without nearly bursting my gut from laughing so hard.

“Yoru no Bannin” does a wonderful job of showcasing Yoshihara’s style and philosophy in a bite-size one-shot that the reader can easily digest. Gotou Maya is an office worker who is struggling to keep up with her professional responsibilities, but often finds that due to her own lack of experience and incompetency she has to stay over time in order not to fall behind on her work. Staying late at the office in the evening, she encounters a security guard, whom she creatively names, “Mr. Guard”. He chastises her for being an inconvenience because his own job requires that he close down the company office and turn off all the lights but he cannot do so with her there. Their bantering usually leads to very comical scenes of him kicking her out of the office and her seething on the streets. Their bitter relationship changes when after an especially hard day at the office Gotou once again finds herself having to work over time. Only on this special evening, Mr. Guard shows up with a bento box that he had especially prepared for her. Giving her the excuse that he doesn’t like to see her getting skinnier because of the stress from work, he feeds her his homemade meal and she cries from the relief. With this gesture of kindness, they are finally able to open up to one another and Mr. Guard reveals that his dream is to become a househusband who stays at home and makes delicious food for his wife. Gotou is so surprised by his confession that she laughs and nervously tells him that there is no way she could ever find the means to provide for a househusband. However, by the end of the story after having gone through an ordeal in which she realizes her feelings for Mr. Guard, Gotou has matured and become admirably efficient at her work. She maintains a career as a salary-woman, allowing her to marry Mr. Guard and provide for him so that he can stay at home and live the kind of life that he had always dreamed of.

Although stories which utilizes the office setting are somewhat innovative in that they depict Japanese women in the workforce who are actually capable of providing for themselves, the way these stories unfold take this seemingly modern ideal in a completely different direction. The office setting is a cliche used to tell a narrative of love as a social device for attaining position and stability. The women find love at work, usually in the form of their boss, who happens to be a multimillionaire or is at least rich enough to provide for them for the rest of their days. The office cliche reaffirms current gender roles by having the women marry above their stations and often concludes with them leaving their workstation in order to live out their marital bliss as housewives, bringing them right back to the home. The take-home message of this cliche is that women do not actually want to work, or that if they mistakenly thought they did, they would be much happier off finding a suitable partner who can provide for them so that they can retreat back into their domestic sphere, where they are apparently better off. Therefore, the office is just another potential place to find love, rather than an actual place of contestation where women can redefine their gender identities.

“Yoru no Bannin” is a brilliant exception in its reversal of gender expectations and deviation from the cliche. Rather than being another escapist narrative in which young girls are culturally indoctrinated to be docile and complacent in their desires and ambitions, Gotou’s feelings for Mr. Guard helps her to persevere and defy her restrictive gender identity in order to take on the masculine role of the provider and fulfill her own dreams. In this story, love is depicted as an emotional goal that comes with heavy social and financial responsibilities, as opposed to being a naive, unconditional ideal. Gotou’s decision to pursue her love requires her to grow as a person and become stronger and more capable in not just her job, but also in her fortitude as a gendered being who is defying social conventions. With the help of Mr. Guard, she successfully adapts to her job, catches a pervert at work who plants cameras in the women’s locker room, and provides for her family by working hard and diligently. In this story, the woman is not a victim of her own circumstances. She defies her gender role by refusing to be neither a sexual object nor an asexual housewife. She has both financial and social agency within her domestic and professional sphere. In accepting her feelings, she is no longer scared of taking on the intimidating responsibilities that come with the pursuit of her love. Because love is not supposed to be an oppressive force that traps women in their domestic roles. Mr. Guard’s love for Gotou is her emotional support and the spring from which she draws her strength in order to break through social boundaries and pursue higher hopes than she could dream of by herself. Gotou’s trials and tribulations and ultimately her triumph over various forms of institutionalized adversities as depicted in the story are a message of encouragement to young girls to reevaluate their dreams and accept the hard work and social responsibilities that comes with the pursuit of them.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.