Tramps Like Us 14

A lot of the final volume was dedicated to chapters wrapping up the stories of the side characters.  Yuri got the best one by far, with not only a little flash forward, but also a really nice look at her personality and friendship with Sumire over the years.  Yuri was a great character, and it was nice to see her given so much attention.

I don’t like to spoil things too much, but I’m going to go ahead and give my final thoughts on the series, which is going to spoil it for most people.  So here, here’s my spoiler marking.

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As I mentioned last time, I hated that Hasumi assaulted that girl as a reaction to the breakup with Sumire.  It was so unlike him, and just uncalled for in general.  His chapter here is nice though, and is composed of flashbacks of happy memories he has of Sumire and him “getting over” things.  Things work out between him and his pet, though it just didn’t seem like they had the same type of relationship as Momo and Sumire, so it didn’t work out that well for me.  I liked Hasumi because he was a genuinely nice guy who loved Sumire and had his feelings hurt by her… and it’s best just to leave him that way than give him a happy ending.  That’s just who he is.

I was disappointed the sex scene was skipped.  Not so much because I wanted to see it, but because I would have loved to see Sumire reacting to Momo’s kisses et al in the before parts.

The family meetings were a little underwhelming, but I liked that Sumire’s grandfather totally rejected Momo outright and there was that whole big scene with Sumire’s family.  That the grandfather relented so easily in the end was a little disappointing, but he was still a pretty cool guy.

I kind of disliked Sumire’s pregnancy.  It was happy and all that, and a nice way to end the series, but… Sumire doesn’t strike me as the type that an accidental pregnancy would happen to.  I understand that sometimes it happens to anyone, but it was timed way too conveniently for me to believe.

I hated Rumi right up to the bitter end, but I did like her final chapter.  To show her in such an unhappy position and unable to communicate what she wants was interesting as well as totally expected from someone who basically wound up in a foreign country not speaking very much of the language because they followed someone else out there.

HOLY CRAP.  It took me some puzzling the first time I read through Yuri’s chapter to figure out that there was a flash-forward involved with Yuri’s kids.  Reading through it a second time, I realized that Yuri’s daughter’s friend is actually Sumire and Momo’s kid.  That’s cool and… well, understated.

I don’t understand.  There’s a joke at the end made by a Japanese editor about how the face of Yuri’s husband is never shown.  She says she respects Rumiko Takahashi-sensei.  I’ve read Ranma 1/2 all the way through, and I’ve read enough of Urusei Yatsura and the shorter stories to know there’s no faceless characters there, and I’m pretty sure there’s none in Inu-Yasha either.  What is that in reference to?  Maybe Maison Ikkoku?

It mentioned the series won a Kodansha manga award in 2003, which prompted me to look up a list of the Kodansha award winners.  It shared the prize with Honey and Clover that year, which is pretty cool considering I like both series pretty well.  Also, 1993 was a good year, since Parasyte, Sailor Moon, and 3×3 Eyes all won the awards that year.

In short, this series is FANTASTIC.  Even after all these years, it’s still the best josei series I’ve ever read.  The characters are all extremely well-developed and come across as real people, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and all strengths and weaknesses for each character, major and minor, get equal story time.  The chapters each have a theme and are basically one-shot stories that advance the plot in most cases, a technique I’ve not quite seen anywhere else, or used extremely poorly elsewhere.  It had me close to tears at several parts, both happy and sad, and it was just… everything I look for in a series.  I love it dearly and it gets the highest marks from me.  I would say it compares favorably to Honey and Clover and Nana, and may only fall short because those two are more ostentatious and use humor a bit more than Tramps Like Us.  It is certainly their equal as far as relationships between characters go.