So, before we even talk about this manga let me give some content warnings. I don’t wanna just list off things though. Saying [CW: this, that, and more] feels too impersonal. At least by talking about it first people know what they’re getting into right? You can skip the next paragraph if you don’t care to be warned, I’m of this type.
Kami-sama Onegai includes a plethora of uncomfortable topics, most sexual in nature. Consent, age, family. If that’s something that you can’t stomach, you can stop here. That said, most are presented in a rather subdued way if I’m honest. It’s not framed as this psyche shattering thing. It speaks to a certain mindset, a mode of living, where things happen to you and glide by. Nothing quite lodging in your mind because you’re not entirely there, something like that. I think it’s effective for the tone it’s setting. Though some of the stories make good on these themes with more grounding and grace than others.
Anyways, Kami-sama Onegai is a collection of eleven short stories covering a variety of themes. They all have good in them but I’m gonna talk the most about Goodbye March, Apron and Sunglasses, and Time After Time. Apron and Sunglasses especially, for reasons that will become obvious. Also, I have no training in regards to writing. I have no idea if my writing is “good”, I just wanted to share my thoughts and share some manga that I love.
This full scan of the cover with the side folds included rules. I love the play between the two images. I love the colors.
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The first story, A Girl’s Dream, follows the tenuous relationship between Chiaki and Yashiro.
Chiaki is really cute. The story is also pretty upsetting in a very understated way. You get the sense she puts up with a lot of little things, not because she’s in any danger but because it’s easier for her. Which is familiar.
The atmosphere is thick. The ending is about what I expect though, like, it doesn’t hit me. Not that it has to, a story can exist for what happens in the middle, for a specific tone. I’m just curious how much of that impact is lost in the translation. I’m not good enough at reading the raws to decide that for myself.
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Story two, Friends, is a fun raunchy little romp.
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Story three, Please God, is one that connects to that first little warning I gave. Its ending is a sigh of relief, if not a rather stereotypical one for these kinds of stories. Takako Shimura covers a lot of similar subject matter with varying levels of grace. The key difference is that most of Shimura’s work downplays her leads discomfort with the situation, while also not giving its characters an easy out. This isn’t to say Please God’s more vocal discomfort makes it less honest. Most people just don’t get an easy out. I guess in that regard this story could be considered wish fulfillment. Maybe it’s just wish fulfillment for me.
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Story four, Shinjuku Deluxe, has probably my favorite page in this entire collection.
Like. It feels so uniquely modern. The Marge panel is just there. I can easily point and say it feels like a Cate Wurtz page, but that almost feels too easy. 1996. Some things change and some things stay the same, the dialogue, the flow of the panels and the non sequiturs. I guess this captures some of what I love about Kami-sama Onegai. It feels so fresh.
I’d claim it was ahead of its time but that would be naive, there’s swathes of underappreciated and insanely good works from women’s magazines around that time.
The dialogue too. So much is implied about its characters in so little text. The space between the words says so much about who they are to me. Obviously these literary styles existed before 1996, in the grand trajectory of the literary world that was pretty recent. But dialogue in comics tends to lag behind in this regard. I mean, it’s hard to be an artist and a writer. Most people can only manage the former, and if they can manage the latter, don’t then decide to learn to draw.
Also the marker work is so good.
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I have an intense soft spot for the fifth story, Goodbye March. It’s probably not better than the others by any objective measure, and I probably just identify with the main girl, but I dunno. It feels naturalistic. MINAMI Q-ta is a master of capturing the mannerisms of boys who are just… normal. Normal as in, they’re not sauve, nor insufferable. Just awkward, frustrating, and occasionally sweet and sincere, the way real boys tend to be. Even more so, I love how the girls in her stories tend to meet these boys where they’re at. Not reacting with exaggerated disgust, but not extending them undeserved affection. There’s no fantasy in either direction, the boys aren’t dreamy but neither are they monsters.
Which, honestly, is really hard to come by! I make a big stink about being kinda straight, despite definitely not being straight. Which is probably tacky and annoying, but I guess what I’m trying to express is that my sense of self is far more defined by my attraction to men than it is to women. And, in our current culture, I think it’s very popular to pair men off into either good or bad. Dreamy or monster, often interchangeably between the two. Things they do that are largely innocuous get latched onto and ridiculed, while genuinely abhorrent behavior gets passed by in the public eye. Finding stories that capture the middle ground between those two extremes is really hard!
And so, stories like this one cling close to my heart.
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The sixth story is Apron and Sunglasses. I love Apron and Sunglasses. And not just because it’s trans.
The ink wash and line work is seriously jaw dropping. Everything is roughly defined and yet feels so right to my eyes. Like, the hands and the room can be off and jagged but when I look at each page as a whole it just feels right.
The writing is also really, really good. It makes so much sense for this story to come on the tail of Goodbye March. Everything I said about the boy in that story holds true here. Having them next to each other gives additional context to each, since unlike Goodbye March, Apron and Sunglasses is about adults. I almost don’t wanna say more, because I don’t wanna ruin any surprises. Not that there’s any real “story” to spoil here. It’s just like, there’s a joy to turning a page and being caught off guard by the contents on the next. I think that can be spoiled to a degree. So if you want to go in blind and you’re still reading this blog-psuedo-review-post then stop and go read it.
I love how catty Mamoru is. I love how Yuka acts and talks. I said I was gonna talk a lot about this but I honestly don’t have much more to say in the end.
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The premise of the seventh story, Long Tall Sally, is… loaded. It’s one that crops up a decent amount in manga but feels (at least to me) completely detached from how these kinds of dynamics play out in the real world. This isn’t to say they shouldn’t be written about, it’s just hard to talk about and hard to engage with. Because, while the age gap is extreme and uncomfortable (which is the point), the way it’s framed and the dynamic of power in the story doesn’t really run parallel to how these things play out in the real world. Reading it through that lens yields a very different story than the story I feel the author is trying to communicate.
It feels loaded in a way that’s especially jarring on the backs of Goodbye March and Apron and Sunglasses, which feel uniquely counter to this one. Maybe that’s intentional, it’s probably not. With all that said though, I do kind of like how the ending plays out. Like, it’s the logical conclusion to a story you expect to have an ending as romanticized and exaggerated as what comes before it.
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The eighth story, Time After Time, is simple but really good. It’s another great example of dialogue saying a lot between each line, a skill I’m still struggling to learn myself.
I find myself running out of things to say about each successive story, because I’ve already said what I have to say in regards to a previous story. I think that’s the natural result of these stories being by the same author, with a similar tone, and with a similar emotional goal. I could tell you the dialogue is great but you already know that. I guess at this point, the excitement comes from the little details that stray from the stories before it. Which is cool in its own right.
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I don’t have much to say about the ninth story, Spirit, besides that I absolutely adore the ending. It’s a subtle gesture at the way feelings about gender get intertwined with traumatic experiences. When I say it like that, it all sounds very predictable and corny. Everyones prattling about both those subjects ad-infinium on twitter anyways.
Some could probably see it as downplaying a horrible situation, but like. Situations take on meaning based on who they happen to and who they’re done by. And for the most part, the weight and gravity of the situation is decided by the person it happened to, as much as other people tend to want to make judgements for them. It feels real to me, is what I’m trying to say. And that’s all that matters.
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The tenth story, Hot for You, is one that also makes a lot of sense coming on the back of the ninth. Honestly, transmasculine idealization and tendencies crop up a ton in women's magazine writing, doubly so when theres tenuous and dubious lesbian tones involved. It’s nothing explicit, but it’s also to be expected. That cross sex themes would inform some understanding of gay shit when we love in a society that runs counter to it.
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The eleventh story is the last in this trilogy of cross sex fantasizing, albiet in a much more… risque context. Refer back to the beginning of this post. Rather than talking about this story in particular though, I’d rather just talk about the collection as a whole. Which is exactly what I’ll do.
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An issue with short stories is that you don’t always get to know the characters long enough for the impact to be what it could have been otherwise. A beauty of short stories is that because you only get a glimpse, the imagination is allowed to fill in the before and the after. And the magic of a collection of short stories is that the imagination takes what it already imagined in the gaps, and creates new meaning between each story within the collection.
It creates a continuity that doesn’t follow any chronology, location, or sense. A continuity that exists just for you. One that’s different for everyone. At least that’s how I feel about it.
Kami-sama Onegai paints an idea, a mode of living. An emotion (or lack thereof) that lingers in the back of the mind. All the stories feel connected to me, like together they inform something bigger even if I can’t put my finger on it. They are made infinitely better by their proximity to each other. I think most of my favorite short collections accomplish this through their own whims and whimsy. Happy-Go-Lucky Days, Melancholia, Sex Fantasy, and so on.
And because this meaning is created for the reader by the reader, it doesn’t necessarily require deliberation on the author’s part. Obviously in Kami-sama Onegai the placing of each story seems rather deliberate, the boy stories come next to each other, the gender stories (give or take) come next to each other. Stories are themed together. But there’s still countless incredibly good collections that have an author’s comment at the end that says some version of “I needed more pages so I just recycled this old story” or “I wasn’t sure what to put here so I just threw this in”. Neither statements reduce the legitimacy of the connection between the stories, it’s just interesting how much interpretive power the reader has when dealing with a work of this kind.
Which is all to say, if this seems like your thing, give it a try?