Your & My Secret 5
Posted: August 21, 2010 Filed under: Your and My Secret 4 Comments »Ai Morinaga – Tokyopop – 2009 – 7+ volumes
Have I mentioned how much I like Ai Morinaga? It really does border on the obscene, especially since the two longest series I’ve read by her (Your & My Secret and My Heavenly Hockey Club) tend to get stuck in plot ruts, favoring jokes over development.
I say this every time, but the jokes are funny. I wouldn’t come back every time if they weren’t, and I love the fact they tend to build on each other and somehow get funnier. The doujinshi circle we saw drawing books about Akira/Momoi and Senbongi a while back return, in the form of Akira’s lovelorn sister finding one in her brother’s room and becoming obsessed. This was in a side chapter about how she had a huge crush on Akira/Momoi since he’d gotten manly and turned into a huge jerk. There’s some abusive undertones to this, since she still blushes whenever he mistreats her, I thought that was a little disturbing. She obviously can’t act on it, and is a lot younger to boot, so it’s less disturbing than it sounds and easier to laugh about.
This was mostly a class trip volume. Morinaga seems to have a strange obsession with food, as Hockey Club is a series about characters that travel around for games and wind up eating local delicacies, and that’s more-or-less what happens here. Lots and lots of eating. There is some plot development, too, and this one isn’t as stagnant as Hockey Club. Momoi/Akira and Shiina are growing closer, and Momoi is struggling with her desire to have sex with Shiina versus what will happen when she gets her old body back and Akira doesn’t want to date her anymore. Similarly, Senbongi starts to get more serious about Akira/Momoi, who is finally growing more attracted to Senbongi himself despite the fact both of them know the secret.
Standard shoujo exposition, but again, the jokes prop it up nicely. Akira/Momoi struggles with his desire to go to the women’s hot spring, and is finally forced into it both as a kind of therapy for curing his sadness and because its expected of him. Hilarity ensues, which is better than I expected since I hate hot springs gags with a passion (Morinaga’s hideous depictions of the elderly might have something to do with this). Akira also finds himself more and more attracted to Shiina, but also struggles with jealousy, since Momoi/Akira is far kinder to Shiina than she ever was to Akira.
There’s even some greatness inside the front cover, which has an illustration of Senbongi and Grandpa embracing lovingly for no real reason.
I’m not really doing the humor justice, but it’s quite good. This is more-or-less what I’ve wanted from every gender swap story I’ve ever read, and Morinaga continues to deliver the greatness with every volume. The sixth just came out, and the seventh’s scheduled for later this year. It makes me very happy that this keeps showing up on Tokyopop’s schedule. Morinaga seems to take slightly longer than a year with every volume, so I hope both she and Tokyopop can see this through to the end, whenever that might be (the jokes could seriously go on forever).
I am sad to see that Del Rey hasn’t scheduled a new volume of My Heavenly Hockey Club in over a year, and with their recent cancellations (I got notices myself for Gakuen Prince and Pastel), that may mean the future is not good for that series. I’m sad that Morinaga is like a curse for US publishers, because I love her so very much. Maybe the real reason behind CMX’s downfall was that they were considering the license to Yamada Taro Monogatari.
It took me a minute to figure out you weren’t writing about the newest volume. But it was a good reminder of some things I’d forgotten in the rather long time since this volume’s release (like the doujinshi circle). I think Your & My Secret has become my favourite of the three Morinaga series I’ve read, just because the story actually seems to be getting somewhere (however slowly). Reading v6 yesterday, I was bouncing from “Aww, how adorable” to “Ew, gross!” to laughing my head off every couple minutes. It was the best!
But I still miss Hockey Club too, even if the story was going nowhere. I’m really curious about her newest series, Kirara no Hoshi—the premise sounds like a million other typical series, but the cover illustration and the fact that it’s Ai Morinaga have me convinced it would be worthwhile.
I like your conspiracy theory. :) And that hot springs bit was just gross comedy gold. It was priceless.
Lys: I was looking at that too, after finishing this volume up. Kirara no Hoshi definitely sounds way more normal than her other series, but she tends to have a gift for taking the overused and making it special. I think when I first picked this series up, I was burned out on gender-swap series after a run of really terrible ones, but this takes the tired formula and does wonderful things with it.
I do kind of want someone to pick up Kirara no Hoshi and Yamada Taro Monogatari, but I kind of worry that the latter is a little too old.
themooninautumn: Morinaga really does have a gift for that sort of thing. It’s a little strange.