Baby & Me 4

Marimo Ragawa – Viz – 2007 – 18 volumes

I know that a lot of people are into slice-of-life series, but I think a lot of people pass this one over.  You shouldn’t, especially if you also enjoy shoujo manga, and I promise the premise isn’t as silly as it sounds.

I’m so happy I was able to discover this series.  It’s not something I would normally pick up (the character designs on the babies put me off, and the premise of a fifth grader looking after his baby brother also isn’t to my liking), but the stories are told exactly how I like it, and it’s hard to resist the old-school charm of the art.

There’s no ongoing plot, every chapter is just a peek into the lives of Takuya and Minoru.  Sometimes together, sometimes with just one or the other.  The stories are extremely detailed and realistic, and contain nothing that would make you doubt the fact that Minoru and Takuya exist somewhere.  Chapters like Takuya going out on a date with his friend and his crush as the third support wheel, Minoru having a dream inhabited by fantasy versions of people he knows, outings to summer festivals, helping Minoru get over his fears of a scary story he heard in preschool… all of it is subject matter, and all of it is surprisingly interesting and can make you tear up a little at the drop of a hat with its sincerity.  Minoru and Takuya’s mother is dead, but that card is played surprisingly rarely in this volume, and the stories are still a little melancholy in spots.

Sometimes the parts with Minoru don’t ring true (were he and his 4-year-old friends really afraid of a psycho killer while running through the summer fair?), but I can’t get over how realistic Takuya’s fifth grade life comes across.  One of the early stories here was my favorite, where Takuya has to help his friend Gon ask out a girl, then actually go on the date with the two of them since Gon is too scared.  Takuya doesn’t quite know what to make of Gon’s crush, and hasn’t really pondered what love is yet.  He still doesn’t really, and merely wonders when it will happen to him, making this chapter way better than it would be in any other shoujo manga.

There are also stories with a lot going on.  A story about the summer festival can cover many different topics, like older siblings picking on younger, revolts in the younger set, money problems, problems with respect and favoritism, and also seeing how older siblings can also spoil their younger ones.  There’s a somewhat disturbing chapter where the two brothers befriend an old man that morphs from something of a comedy about the boys not wanting to talk to a stranger to a very disturbing story about abusing the elderly and a man contracting Alzheimer’s.

This has a little bit of everything good about shoujo manga in it.  While things like Gentlemen’s Alliance Cross can still act as the perfect examples and the textbook, it’s series like this that nail down all the good things you can do when you tell a story to young women and really show you the best parts of the genre.  It’s wonderful stuff, and I wish there was more like it.