Maison Ikkoku, by Rumiko Takahashi
Volume 1:
I haven't had much experience with Rumiko Takahashi's work, which is weird now, looking back. I mean, Ranma 1/2 had a massive impact on my childhood, but that seems to have been a pretty common experience for 90s/2000s kids, and most of the actual self exploration was brought on by seeing the fan community for the show, rather than the show itself. Either way, I was reminded of Ranma recently, and, after going down a bit of a rabbit hole, decided that I should check out some of Takahashi's other work. So here I am, having picked up the first volume of Maison Ikkoku (the VIZ Signature one, collecting chapters 1-16). How is it?
Well in short, it's pretty dated, but overall quite nice! I think I let my memories of Ranma 1/2 affect my expectations going in, which seems to have worked in the comic's favor, as it let me be surprised by the amount of plot that happened in this debut. The first few chapters set up our main character, Yusaku Godai, a horny teenager just out of high school and struggling after failing his college entrance exams, and the love interest, Kyoko Otonashi, the new RA in his apartment building. Godai falls in love before he's even said a word to this new lady who is several years older than him, and I was prepared for about ten years worth of episodic, wacky hijinks that would put the two into strange and embarrassing situations, probably involving the other strange and off putting residents of the building, designed to keep one or another character's foot in their own mouth long enough to keep anyone from properly expressing their feelings. And there is plenty of that, but in this first book alone, we get:
- -Godai passing on his exams and getting into college on the second try
- -An exploration of Kyoko's character as a widow, still trying to get over the recent death of her husband
- -Godai actually confessing his feelings for Kyoto (while drunk, but she still gets the message)
- -Godai joining a club, and making friends with some of the women there without any kind of "oh, will he fall for this other girl instead oo drama" no, he just actually gets a social life, and:
- -Multiple characters actually accurately explaining what happened after comedic misunderstandings.
Like I said, there's still more than a fair share of contrived drama here, but there's also a lot of genuine character development and movement. It may not seem like much of a bar, especially given that the manga is touted as a character based story, and you can't really have characters without developing them, but it's still significant, especially given the all-powerful status quo present in Ranma 1/2.
That does, however, tie into one of the issues I had with the comic, in that while Godai gets a heaping helping of character development, Kyoko seems to mostly be empty, character-wise. We do get an exploration of her status as a widow, but that even further serves to define her in terms of her relationship with men, which can feel kinda icky in repeated doses. I'm aware that the manga started its run over forty years ago, and it's not really fair to apply things like the Bechdel test to older works, but I do still wish that Kyoko was more of her own person, instead of having her main traits be "manages the apartment" and "has feelings for Godai despite herself".
And this brings us to another one of my problem areas. The sexism in this comic is really rampant, and pretty aggressively in your face. Again, I know, manga written by a woman in 1980, alot of this wasn't explicitly meant to belittle or mock women, and believe me when I say I kept that in mind, but it still reached the point where it made me uncomfortable a few times while reading. It gets especially weird when Godai's lecherous tendencies border on sexual assault, and it's still played off as lighthearted and endearing. I have a hard time explaining it, but do you know how sometimes in a show, there'll be a misunderstanding that leads character a to think that character b has done something perverted, and then character b is upset when they find out what character a thought? Godai repeatedly just does the perverted things totally intentionally, and then gets offended when other people point it out. Like, there's a scene later in the book, at the beach, where Godai acts offended that Kyoko thought he was pinching her under the water, but everything we know about him as a character tells us that's absolutely something he would do, so it doesn't really land. He actually literally tried to kiss Kyoko while she was asleep as early as chapter two and then he has the absolute gall to play innocent. These are mostly isolated incidents, but they're common enough that they had to be noted while I was reading.
To bring it back around to a positive note, the art throughout this volume is absolutely amazing. This was only Takahashi's second long-form series, and you can clearly tell that she's still getting used to drawing these characters, but the emotions of every frame are captured really nicely. And I won't lie, I know very little about drawing techniques and all, so all I can say beyond the fact that the end product was nice is that there seemed to be a lot of watercolors used in these first few chapters? Or something else used to get a watercolor effect. I wasn't expecting it, but it was used really well in a lot of the character portraits.
And there are my thoughts on Maison Ikkoku's first volume! It really clearly has a few issues that make it kinda hard to read at times, but it's really surprisingly good in terms of actually moving the plot along, definitely enough to have me looking forward to reading the next volume, as I genuinely just wanna see what happens next at this point!