Sweat and Honey
Posted: March 17, 2008 Filed under: Sweat and Honey 11 Comments »I’m sad that Passion Fruit passed under my radar. I remember really liking the idea, and I figured we’d get a few interesting volumes, but I passed on the first two and was bummed when the line wasn’t continued. I was surprised when a few people were making reference to another one of Okazaki’s works in English when I was reading reviews of Suppli, and I thought I’d pick it up since it seemed to be well thought of.
“Sweat and Honey” is a collection of very short stories… they’re sort of advertised as josei, but most of the girls are still in high school, so I’d be willing to bet they ran in a shoujo magazine. The first story was probably my favorite, and was the most josei-feeling of the bunch. It was called “After Sex, a Boy’s Sweat Smells Like Honey,” and was about an older woman in a sexual relationship that began to question her boyfriend, and all men in general, after her quiet cousin who had suddenly begun living with her starts revealing basic “truths” about men. It was very short, but it was easy to see the main character’s feelings shift towards other things as her cousin kept sharing her thoughts. I liked that it very effectively accomplished what it set out to do in only a few pages. Well, maybe it only felt like a few pages, but it was very short.
The second story was cute and a little nonsensical. A woman who walks her dog runs across a girl who seems to be the personification of grass/flowers/dandelion, and she keeps the girl company and begins to realize that a lot of her regular human interactions seemed very hollow. I liked the contrast between the extremely bouncy grass girl and the somewhat bitter way other characters were shown dealing with the main character.
The longest story, broken down into three segments, was actually the one I liked the least. I couldn’t really pinpoint exactly what was going on between the three characters until the end, when everything finally clicked into place. It was some sort of love triangle between two female friends and one girl’s brother, and I couldn’t tell if the sister wanted a relationship with her brother and was spiting him for ignoring her by getting involved with her friend… I think that was the gist of it, and the theme was that it seems to rain in a world only ruled by girls (or the manipulative sexual relationship the girls were sharing), but in the end it seemed like the girls decided that they were suited for each other anyway. But I don’t know. Like I said, it wasn’t very clear, but I still kind of liked the story. Whatever was going on, it was very pretty.
I definitely really liked this volume and thought Okazaki was quite good at telling stories in a limited number of pages. Perhaps this will help inform Suppli and help me enjoy it more thoroughly now that I’m a little more familiar with her storytelling technique.
[...] reviews Duetto, and Eva reads The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair. Connie reveals her opinions of Sweat and Honey, vol. 18 of Eyeshield 21, vol. 33 of Dragon Ball, and vol. 3 of Tarot Cafe at Slightly Biased Manga. [...]
It seems like the Passion Fruit manga were all serialized in Shodensha’s FEEL Comics, which is the same place Happy Mania and Paradise Kiss ran, both of which are josei.
Hmm… yeah, I can see these fitting in next to Happy Mania, though Happy Mania is definitely more raunchy and over-the-top. I always sort of automatically reject josei as a genre when high school girls appear. I also tend to disbelieve something is actually shoujo when the characters are adults, like in “Love Song.” I know it all depends on where the series originally appeared, though.
Paradise Kiss definitely ran in Zipper though, the fashion magazine the characters talk about.
First of all, I actually don’t know that much about josei. I’ve decided to learn more, which is why I was looking at this review in the first place. However, it seems based on what little I know that there are two kinds of josei mangaka 1) those who started with josei (or some other type of manga aimed at adults) 2) those who were consistently popular shojo mangaka for 10-20 years. I cannot think of a single shojo mangaka who stayed popular for 15+ years and did not find herself making josei. Actually I can – Suzue Miuchi. And Saki Hiwatari. Maybe Hakusensha’s mangaka have a different path.
With the josei made by the first type of mangaka, it’s easy to point to it and call it josei. However, the josei mangaka who graduated from shojo have strong shojo roots, so their works blurs the line between shojo and josei. From what I’ve read, the Japanese themselves can’t always make the distinction.
Oh, I think there are a lot of shoujo mangaka that stick with shoujo even with long careers. Just glancing over at the shelf here, I see Kaori Yuki, Yun Koga, You Higuri, Setona Mizushiro, Yoshiki Nakamura, and Miwa Ueda, all artists that have been around for 15 or more years and mostly stick to shoujo or BL. Setona Mizushiro isn’t really… “popular” like the other three are (she also does run BL work occasionally in josei anthologies, but I tend to categorize BL separately for whatever reason), Koga does sometimes cross genres to shounen, and Miwa Ueda was most successful with Peach Girl in the late 90s-early 00s, but the others all had early success and remain relatively popular to this day as shoujo artists.
The publishers for those women range from Hakusensha, Kodansha, Akita Shoten, Biblios, Shogakukan, and Shinshokan. I know that most artists are locked in by one publisher (Mizushiro’s situation is an odd one since she seems to draw for Shogakukan as well as the smaller Akita Shoten and Biblios, it’s unusual Shogakukan wouldn’t have control of her work). In a lot of cases, they may also be contractually obligated to draw the same type of series for as long as they work for the company, which may explain why so many artists stick to exactly the same magazines series after series until they quit. I think it’s only the most popular artists that are able to work themselves free, like Ai Yazawa, Maya Shinjo, or Reiko Shimizu.
I don’t actually know that much about josei either, but it is interesting to trace the roots, as you say. Josei is a younger genre than shoujo, so I think they just built the genre on the backs of the already mature work that was coming out in the late 70s and early 80s. There’s lots of great josei series, but I think there’s not as much character to the art and storytelling as shoujo… or perhaps a better way of putting it is that all the great josei stories just read like shoujo that is more well-written. Of course, I’m not sure that there’s anything wrong with that.
I recently found out that Moyoko Anno (who probably has something that qualifies for every genre, but I always think of her as josei since I read Happy Mania first) was influenced by and worked as an assistant for an artist named Kyoko Okazaki, who was very influential in shoujo and josei throughout the 80s and 90s. She was in turn allegedly influenced story-wise by Yumiko Oshima, one of the Year 24 group members.
Well, I checked, and it seems the only “josei” magazine Hakusensha publishes is Melody, which seems to run a mix of “josei” and “shojo” stories, so the lines must be blurry indeed. That would also explain why a lot of Hakusensha artists don’t break into josei, because if their style isn’t deemed appropriate for that one magazine, they stay in shojo.
On the other hand, Shogakukan has a handful of josei ‘zines, and that’s the publisher where I see the strongest pattern of popular shojo mangaka going into josei – Moto Hagio, Akimi Yoshida, Taeko Watanabe, Yumi Tamura, Chie Shinohara, even Yuu Watase (part of Genbu Kaiden was published as josei). I suspect the logic behind this is that, as the fanbases become older, they’ll want to continue to read their favorite mangaka, but not mixed with stuff for younger girls.
However, there are a lot of stories which one person will label “shojo” and another “josei”, and for all of the major awards shojo and josei are lumped together.
Yeah, actually, I was just looking through the Shogakukan website tonight, actually. In particular, they have an anthology called Flowers which seems to be categorized as josei and feature all or mostly shoujo artists. They have a section on the Flowers magazine website which lists artists profiles. The list is… impressive, but it seems to encompass the biggest shoujo all-stars that Shogakukan has to offer. Chiho Saito, Akimi Yoshida, Yuu Watase, Setona Mizushiro, Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Yumi Tamura, and a handful of others. I kind of want to see Flowers now (at the very least, I would be treated to 7SEEDS and the rather lovely-looking Chiho Saito series that seems to be running there at the moment). You’re probably right about the trends, I’m sure that both the readers and the artists probably matured enough over time to make something like the Flowers nostalgia-zine possible.
That’s interesting about Hakusensha. Actually, for as strong as their shoujo line is, it’s strange that they don’t really seem to deal in a lot of genres outside the bizarre seinen mix offered in Young Animal. I can’t find a lot of information on the josei they publish, and it seems like… they may not actually be currently running a shounen magazine? Strange. Also, I would be terrified of picking up a magazine called “Silky.”
It’s too bad that Viz’s old Flower Comics line didn’t last long. Even today I don’t think America has a market for it yet. Anything which would fit there is being cannibalized by Shojo Beat on the girly side, and Viz Signature on the mature side.
Hakusensha, Shogakukan, and Shueisha are cut from the same cloth. In fact, according to the Wikipedia, they are all run by the same family. So maybe Hakusensha doesn’t want to waste resources competing with its siblings’ extremely successful shonen brands.
It’s true there’s still not really a market for it, but I keep hoping the time will be coming soon. I hope that the increasing popularity of manga in America will get a larger female teen reader base and more females that will stick around after they get older and start looking for the more mature stories. More and more gets published every year, which is a good sign, and hopefully the niche will be big enough soon that a publisher can step in to fill the gap, or Viz can perhaps set aside a dedicated line. I can’t complain too much about what we’re getting now, aside from the fact that I prefer the older titles and I could always read more.
I just found that out the other day about Hakusensha, Shogakukan, and Shueisha, actually. I looked into it when I thought it was odd that the three major publishers all owned parts of Viz, but it made more sense when I realized the companies were related. More sense for Viz, but less sense from a business standpoint, unless it’s a von Holtzbrinck-type situation on a massive scale. It seemed to me almost like Penguin, Random House, and Simon and Schuster all being owned by the same group. You are probably right about the reason Hakusensha doesn’t publish shounen, it didn’t connect that there wouldn’t be any reason for them to compete with Shueisha.
I don’t know the specifics, but it might be very good from a business standpoint. Perhaps by being three companies they operate more efficiently with less overhead that if they were united. Also, a little internal competition might inspire them to be a little more innovative than they would be otherwise. Yet they can still reap the benefits of working together – such as in owning Viz. Only a few years ago, one of America’s media giants (Viacom) split into new Viacom and the CBS Coporation because being such a media giant was ruining their efficiency.
And I think Hakusensha could only hope to create an effective shonen magazine if they had access to a great shonen editor. I wish we knew more about manga editors, because they are so influential. In science fiction, the editors are just as famous as the writers. I went “WHAT” when I first found out years ago that Del Rey is publishing manga. Del Rey is one of those famous sci-fi editors. It’s still weird for me to see anything other than sci-fi/fantasy published under her name.
I’ve often wondered about the editing process, and just how much bearing it has on stories, or what a story looks like before and after passing through an editor. I can only imagine that most editors working in mainstream manga must be fantastic as well as tolerant people since most of the artists seem to apologize for being constantly late. I like reading those stories you find occasionally in the back of manga about how an editor steered the artist clear of what sounds like some potentially awful ideas, but I also wonder about the opposite influence, something nobody would ever write about out of courtesy, when a decent story may have to be cannibalized in order to fit into what a particular audience expects. But I suppose that’s often not so much the editor’s fault.
Having just read A Drifting Life, I also enjoyed a look at the process before editors existed. It did make me wonder if work really was just accepted as-is by the publishers without comment other than “do this type of story next time,” and I was still really impressed that artists were chosen for anthologies and magazines into the early 60s based on their previous work and were allowed to submit whatever they wanted. The lawlessness of it all.
Actually, I think the only decent look at the manga editing process I’ve ever seen is in Flower of Life 4, which is still only a snippet that deals with a very specific situation.
I was pretty shocked when Del Rey decided to get into manga too, but I was unaware of the fact that the imprint was the work of Judy-Lynne del Rey until just now. It’s still one of the strongest brands I can think of for science fiction, stronger than even Tor, Ace, or Daw, so it was kind of strange when I found out that manga was coming out under the same imprint.