DONWGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE

 I devoted some attention in REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2  to differences in the ways sadism-scenarios are used respectively in accomodation narratives and confrontation narratives, noting how in the former the consequences were almost never as dire as in the latter, as per all the Poe and Sade examples referenced in the first part. And another way of approaching these distinctions is by incorporating a dichotomy I came across in some forgotten book on comedy: that of "downgrading" vs. "degrading." 

Usually, when we think of "sadism"-- particularly because of the stories written by the man for whom the syndrome was named-- we think of people trying to degrade others by nullifying their will, abusing their bodies, minds, or both together. This is also the motive of what I'd term "pure sadism," which is not connected to such gains as learning enemy information or the location of hidden treasure. This is usually, though not universally, characteristic of sadism-acts in "confrontation narratives."

But "accomodation narratives" are usually about "downgrading," not degrading. Downgrading does not destroy the will of the one subjected to it, but rather alters it, seeking to purge parts of the will that the character does not recognize as disadvantageous. In Part 2 my foremost example was that of Raku Ichijo in NISEKOI, who, if I correctly interpret his creator's wishes, needs a little pain and humiliation to get him out of his romantic comfort-zone.

That said, not all serials are structured like NISEKOI, with a beginning, middle, and end. The open-ended teleseries BEWITCHED begins as an accomodation narrative concerning the difficulties of a young married couple-- one an ordinary, somewhat priggish mortal, the other a witch with supernatural powers. The first three episodes of the show merely set up some basic tropes of the situation. But the fourth episode, reviewed here, established the most fundamental trope that dominated most of the episodes, which might be formulated: Uptight Husband Tries to Restrain Wife's Identity and Her Relatives Make Him Pay For It.

This segment of my review recapitulates the main action between the mortal husband Darrin Stevens and his wife's mother-in-law Endora, whom he encounters for the first time in this episode.

When Darrin and Endora meet that evening, it's mutual hate at first sight. Darrin wants no interactions with Samantha's weird family, and Endora threatens to turn Darrin into an artichoke. This is one of the very few Endora episodes wherein Endora does NOT wreak some magical alteration on her son-in-law's helpless mortal body, and it's probably the first in which Samantha asserts that she can't do anything to cancel the spells of another witch. To the extent that Endora represents Samantha's  own rebelliousness, one might regard this claim as Samantha's tacit consent to tolerate the comical acts of violence her mother perpetrates upon Darrin. Indeed, it occurred to me for the first time that every time Endora or any other witch changes the way Darrin looks or acts, Darrin gets some part of his own identity erased, even as he repeatedly insists that his wife must.

Endora is hardly the only witch-spawn who gives Darrin trouble over the eight seasons of the show. Yet she is the only character who's more than a "guest star," given that actress Agnes Moorehead shared principal co-billing with those playing Darrin and Samantha, even for episodes in which her character did not appear. The sadistic acts that Endora and her brood perpetrate upon the helpless Darrin are fundamentally harmless and frivolous, and they're usually directed at "downgrading" his assumptions of absolute authority. 

Yet in marked contrast to the example of Raku Ichijo, Darrin never learns from any of his victimizations. Occasionally he might show a moment of relative tolerance, but by the next episode he's back to shouting and demanding and thus inviting yet another humiliating spell. And to some extent Endora, to the extent she has any consistency, enjoys tormenting her son-in-law so much that she invents the most tenuous logic to give herself the excuse. I suspect that as the showrunners approached the eighth and last season, no one thought for a moment of wrapping up the series by forging some stable rapprochement between Darrin and Endora-- and indeed, the very last episode is just a remake of a Season Two tale, with Endora playing another prank on Darrin and his workaday world. The showrunners knew they were doing simple done-in-one stories that always went back to the original status quo. And it should be said that the status quo allows Darrin to look like a successful professional to the outside world, all his eccentricities swiftly forgotten. But the audience at least sees that he brings some of his humiliations upon himself, and that was apparently enough to grant the series long life. 

It's of course possible for "degrading sadism" to appear in comedies, usually directed at minor characters in whom the audience has no investment, like the suckup Brice in 1988's SCROOGED. And a fair number of "serious" adventure-stories concern men or women being martially trained, and often these include trainers who seem to be perpetrating sadistic acts on their students, though the rationale is usually "what doesn't kill them makes them stronger." Thus the Jackie Chan character in his breakout film DRUNKEN MASTER keeps dodging the painful rigors of training, but eventually buckles down and endures all the downgrading torments needed to improve his kung fu and to triumph over an enemy.

Still, "degrading" is more associated with the "serious" mythoi, and "downgrading" with the "ludicrous" ones.

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2

 All of the examples of prolongation and repetition discussed in Part 1 were dominated by a relatively serious tone, which meant that in every scenario the sadist and his victim were radically opposed into a "winner" and a "loser." But this pattern of oppugnancy breaks down somewhat in the more ludicrous mythoi, where "accomodation narratives" might in theory outnumber "confrontation narratives."

In this near-myth analysis, I took issue with Gershon Legman's claim that all teenage comedy comics were just filled to the brim with young women panting with desire to harm/humiliate fathers and boyfriends. But to test his theory fairly, I scanned all of the adventures of an Archie Comics teen-heroine, Ginger Snapp, lasting from the middle forties through the early fifties. I did find some examples of the heroine Ginger occasionally visiting quasi-sadistic humiliations on either her father or her boyfriend, but there weren't enough of them for GINGER to support Legman's faulty thesis. Thus the few stories that existed in this venue fit my category of "prolongation," because the sadism-scenarios are confined to particular issues and don't reinforce one another.

The one story I analyzed, "Nightmare," was interesting because the victim's humiliation stems largely from his reactions to the titular series-star, not from overt deeds by Ginger. The story's action proceeds from Ginger's old man Mister Snapp. She asks him for money for a baseball uniform, but he, playing the "heavy father," wants to make her prove her devotion to the sport. He embarrasses himself by trying to keep up with the young folk, and then his daughter, only indirectly the author of his torments, beans him with a baseball by accident. Snapp then experiences a dream in which his daughter goes out of her way to clobber him with a giant bat, and he goes through other prolonged sufferings until he wakes up. So in his mind at least, Snapp is the "loser" and Ginger "the winner," though the only way in which the real Ginger torments him is just by the fact of being younger and healthier than her dad. This would be "exothelic prolongation" in that the reader feels humorous antipathy for Snapp, given that he becomes victimized by his own illusions.

I've written much more frequently on this blog about other serials, particularly in Japanese manga, in which sadism-scenarios recur frequently, so that all of the relevant features-- LOVE HINA, MAYO CHIKI, URUSEI YATSURA, and NISEKOI-- partake of the pattern of repetition. Often the accomodation narrative is focused on a male who keeps offending the woman, or women, who attract him, and getting clobbered by them for his transgressions. 

I examined a few key texts of NISEKOI in TENDER LOVING SADISM PT 2.  In contrast to GINGER, there were a lot of sadism-scenarios in the ongoing series, but "The Promise" is of special interest because it established that Raku, the male lead of the series, wants to live a life free of violence, and nurtures a yen for a similarly mild-mannered young classmate, Kosaki. But the manga-god controlling Raku's fate wants him to reach an accomodation with the less predictable aspects of life (or so I believe). Thus his potential new love Chitoge comes into Raku's life like a March lion. Chitoge is always "the sadist" in that she wallops Raku for the least infraction, even if she regrets her temper later on. But unlike "serious victims," Raku benefits from this "endothelic repetition" torment because it makes him stronger and more resilient. Arguably, Chitoge's aggressiveness, and that of her servant Tsugumi, even spreads to two other women in Raku's "harem," Kosaki and Marika, who don't normally beat on him. In "Transformation," it's comically implied that all four of them get drunk and "have their way" with the helpless male, though conveniently Raku's memory edits out whatever happened. After all, there's just so much "accomodating" an ordinary guy can do in that kind of situation. (And to be sure, all four females are substantially seen as "good girls," so the reader doesn't really think they molested him in any significant manner, and is mostly amused by the possibility that they could have done so.)

TENDER LOVING SADISM PT. 2

 

 

 

                                    

The NAGATORO manga I examined in Part 1 is more nuanced in its depiction of psychology than your average goony manga-comedy. That said, an analogous series like Naoshi Komi’s NISEKOI engages with the subject of female-male sadism in ways that are both more complicated and more complex (which are not the same in this case). Three particular stories stand out as relevant to this topic.

 

The introductory tale, “The Promise,” establishes a sketchy background for male protagonist Raku Ichijo. Raku, who has just begun his first year of high school, lives on an estate with his father, the head of a Yakuza mob, and with several other male Yakuza who don’t seem to be family relations as such. I say “sketchy” because according to the English translation Komi makes no comment as to the disposition of Raku’s mother, who’s only revealed to be living in America late in the series. The translation says nothing about whether Raku’s parents are divorced or separated, though the former seems more likely since the two remain in separate worlds at the story’s conclusion. The mother’s absence becomes relevant in that Raku, who wants nothing to do with the violent activities of the Yakuza (comedic though they are in the narrative), has assumed a quasi-maternal role in the house. Since he doesn’t like fighting, Raku’s become an expert cook and serves his Yakuza brethren all of their meals. The gangsters insist that some day Raku will assume the “capo” status of his father. Raku repeatedly denies that he will do so, fretting, “How come I’m always surrounded by violence? I look forward to the day when I can leave it all behind and lead a peaceful, quiet life.”

 

Sensible as this desire may be, it would have made Raku a very dull subject for his creator. Thus he’s flung into a new conflict in high school, which ensures that “my life became an even worse never-ending struggle!” Late-arriving first-year transfer Chitoge Kirisaki bounds into Raku’s life when she vaults the wall around the high school and accidentally knees Raku in the face. The two teens repeatedly quarrel with one another, with Chitoge insulting Raku for being an unmanly whiner. His purported unmanliness becomes underscored by the fact that the model-gorgeous Chitoge is also a superb athlete who does not hesitate to knock Raku’s block off when he insults her. Then Raku learns that Chitoge, half-American and half-Japanese, is the daughter to the head of an American gangster organization that’s moved to Japan. To prevent Raku’s Yazuka and Chitoge’s gangster-group from fighting with one another, the respective heads of the two gangs convince their offspring to fake a love-connection. Further complicating Raku’s life is that he already pines after Kosaki, a fellow student he’s known for years, and though Kosaki feels the same way toward him, neither has been able to get up the nerve to confess their feelings. Ergo, more “never-ending struggle.”

 

Naturally there would be no story if Raku and Chitoge did not develop feelings for one another, despite her tendency to lose her temper with him. Yet though Raku never becomes physically tougher, he does often end up playing the typical male role of the rescuer, particularly since Chitoge loses her nerve when confined to any dark or confined place. More wacky complication ensue when more girls become drawn toward Raku—principally Chitoge’s bodyguard Seichiro and Raku’s “family-arranged fiancée” Marika.

 

The second story for consideration is “Transformation,” occurring at least one year later. By this time Chitoge has become consciously enthralled with Raku’s ordinary-guy charms but she hasn’t confessed her feelings. Raku feels some degree of attraction to all four members of his “harem,” but he steadfastly believes that Kosaki is the girl for him. On New Year’s Day Chitoge gets together their whole “gang”—Kosaki, Seichiro, Marika, Raku’s friend Shu and Kosaki’s friend Ruri—and they all barge into Raku’s house to celebrate the New Year. (Some Yakuza are around but they’re kept off to one side and don’t actively participate in the story.) All the girls get drunk on “whiskey bonbons,” and all except Ruri become erotically charged toward Raku. In fact, Chitoge threatens to beat him up if he doesn’t kiss her, and there’s an intentionally ambivalent scene in which the four girls gang up on him—though the reader doesn’t see what they do to him and Raku himself blocks out the memory of the incident. Since the reader has repeatedly been assured that the four teenagers are all “good girls” at base, it’s unlikely that anything more than an osculatory assault took place. But this speaks to the fact that the “rape of Raku” proves amusing, as it (almost) never would with a female protagonist, specifically because male rape by female is so improbable.

 

At the time of “Test,” it’s still only been “over a year” since the beginning of the false love. Chitoge considers confessing her infatuation to Raku, who remains clueless that their fake relationship has become real to the both of them. Though he’s spent much of that year being clobbered by the irritable Chitoge, he seems to have accepted this fate as the consequence of dating a “gorilla girl.” Here he voices a fairly rare complaint about his status as her punching bag:  “we've been through a lot.... like you hitting me… and hitting me… and hitting me.” This provokes Chitoge to claim that “it was your fault all of those times,” and Raku replies that, “I’m pretty much totally defenseless.” To be sure, the above translation deviates from the official one, but I choose to believe that the latter translation is closer to Komi's thought, since it's funny to see a boy talking about being defenseless before a girl’s anger. Further, as with the “sort-of rape” in "Transformation," it would not be amusing were the genders reversed. Raku almost, but never quite, sounds like a masochist, though it might not be unfair to state that he has some submissive characteristics. Oddly, though, Chitoge defers to him to function as the “leader” of the group, particularly during the events examined in the longarc I’ve entitled “Limit.” And Raku does end up (SPOILERS) becoming the new head of the Yakuza sect, which he somehow makes over into a law-abiding organization. One might say that his ability to accept the chaos of Chitoge in his life makes him better suited to deal with all other forms of cultural chaos.

In any case, though these three stories don’t plumb the full depths of Komi’s take on the male-female power dynamic, they are among the most crucial for seeing how Komi both deviates from and reinforces gender tropes-- 

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 4

 Prior to posting my second mythcomic review for the month of January 2021, I find that I need to add a new category to the ones set forth in the original STRUCTURAL LENGTH essay.

In that essay, the first four categories I mentioned were “the vignette,” “the short arc,” “the short story,” and “the long arc,” I further stated that the short arc could take the form of a subplot within a greater context, be it a novel or a continuing feature, though the short arc did not always take the subplot form. This quality of “relatedness” is the main thing that distinguishes the short arc from its relative-in-length, the short story. A short story by its nature suggests an item that can read apart from any greater context, as per Edgar Allan Poe’s encomium on the form. Though his three “Dupin” stories qualify as a series, a reader need not read them all to understand any single story. The short story takes a moderately different form in a more regularly published series, such as a Batman comic book. Any given Batman short story makes more sense if the reader does know something about the Batman mythology, about the ways in which he battles crime and the types of criminals he encounters. That said, before one reads a particular standalone story of Batman fighting the Penguin, one does not have to read any other particular Batman-Penguin story to understand what’s going on. However, not every medium handles the short story identically. It’s rare, though not impossible, that anyone ever issues a prose short story in installments, but the practice is fairly common in the comic book medium. A relevant example appears in the two-part QUESTION story “Saving Face.” As much as any prose short story, “Face” has a definite beginning, middle and end, though it’s extended over the course of two serial issues. I would say, however, that there’s a limit on how much an author can extend a short-story continuity within a comic book format before said continuity morphs into something else. I would tend to say that in comic books three issues would probably be the upper limit.

Now, a short arc has similar length-restrictions, but it parts company with the short story in being more intimately tied in to a greater continuity. A relevant example is the three-part TOMB OF DRACULA narrative I’ve entitled “Where Lurks the Chimera.” The plot also has a beginning, middle, and end, but the events of “Chimera” are not independent from other ongoing TOMB stories as the events of “Saving Face” are independent from other stories in the QUESTION series. The main plot of “Chimera” revolves around the vampire-lord’s search for a mystical relic, and it concludes with Dracula failing to obtain his goal. Yet the narrative also intertwines with other events from previous narratives, such as the Count’s ongoing conflict with another villain, Doctor Sun, and his ongoing romance with a young woman, Sheila Whittier, and the reader who has not read previous or subsequent Dracula-tales dealing with these characters has missed a lot of content.

Going by my original list, the “long arc” would be the next category, but I’ve come to think that a new category is necessary, to signify an arc that’s a little more involved in terms of both length and story-content. This I’ll term the “medial arc,” and as far as installment-fiction is concerned, I would say that it usually lasts from six to eight installments, while its narrative is much more strongly imbricated with the ongoing continuity. One example of the medial arc is the five-part arc “Motherland” from the series Y THE LAST MAN. Now, “Motherland” was published late in the history of the ongoing feature, and it happened to solve a lot of the mysteries the author propounded about why almost all the males on Earth perished. But it’s just as possible to see the same level of continuity-involvement in a medial arc published at the beginning of a series. “The Black Pearl” occurs near the outset of the INU-YASHA series and serves to establish one of the dominant plotlines of the narrative: the relationship between the heroic Inu-Yasha and his more ruthless brother Sesshomaru.

At present I would not seek to fix a length of chapters for a long arc. I mentioned in LENGTH PART 1 that long arcs were best known to audiences through the form of the television soap opera. Since the only soap opera I’ve seen in its entirety is the 1966 DARK SHADOWS, I would tend to regard each season of this program as comprising a long arc—which, in the case of Season One, came to 135 30-minute episodes. With such a quantity of episodes, there’s certainly no sense of a unifying beginning, middle, and end. Every time a given story-conflict is resolved, some other conflict emerges from the metaphorical wings to take its place, and the final episode of the season is usually just a stopping-point rather than an organic conclusion.

Long arcs in comic books are rarely that long. In practice, I would say that they rarely exceed twenty installments, allowing for variations in story-length, before the author shifts to another arc or short-story. The events of the plot are not as strongly focused as those of the shorter arcs, though there may be an overreaching purpose unifying all the events. In the NISEKOI long arc I’ve entitled “Limit,” all sixteen installments are principally concerned with the teenagers rescuing their classmate Marika from an arranged marriage. Given this expansive narrative, each of the principal characters is given some feat to perform that serves the aim of rescue, and, given that NISEKOI is a comedy, many of these feats draw upon running jokes in the overall series. For instance, one such joke involves the erratic cooking skills of Kosaki, whose meals are almost always vomitous in nature. During the rescue operation, the operation’s planner assigns Kosaki to cook for the guards attending the wedding, with the humorous result that any guard who ate the girl’s meal become sidelined by virtue of stomach pains.

I mentioned in the cited essay that some comic-book serials are unified enough that they could function as “episodic novels” in the vein of Melville’s MOBY DICK. I noted that some long serials, like Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA lacked a “structuring principle,” be it related to plot or to theme, and thus I did not regard these as episodic novels, only as assemblages of arcs and short stories. NISEKOI, however, qualifies as such an episodic novel, in that it combines several of these structural forms into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

MYTHCOMICS: [“LIMIT,’] (NISEKOI, 2015?)

 

The most symbolically ambitious long arc in NISEKOI (examined more fully here) consists of sixteen chapters, each of which sports a one-word title. Since the arc isn’t given any special designation, I’ll name the arc by the chapter-title that seems most to embody the narrative content. The chapter “Limit” is so called because one of the characters uses the term in that section, but the term recurs late in the story, and it’s possible to imagine that the arc is a melodramatic meditation on the nature of physical and mental limitations, on the necessity of both surrendering to and transcending them.

Most mythcomics within the romance-comedy genres center upon the male and female leads, who in NISEKOI are the high-schoolers Raku Ichijo and Chitoge Kirisaki. “Limit,” however, centers upon one of the characters of the serial’s subordinate ensemble, Marika Tachibana. I’ve mentioned in my overview of the series that the two leads and most of their support-cast knew one another as children, and that most of them forgot that acquaintance until meeting again in high school. Marika is one of the exceptions. She’s a sickly child, and Raku’s friendship to her in childhood causes her to dedicate her life to overcoming her weaknesses, in order to mold herself into the perfect woman for Raku once they’re in their adolescence. I also observed that Marika is somewhat similar to Chitoge in being given to extreme behavior, and that Marika’s father was a police chief, in marked contrast to the parents of Raku and Chitoge. Their families are both loosely associated with underworld activities, though not of an order that has any impact on the series’ comical aspects, so that no major “cops and robbers” conflict ever manifests. But in “Limit” readers also learn that Marika’s mother belongs to an aristocratic Japanese family, and that maternal influence proves far more pernicious than that of the lords of the gangsters.

Whereas the sham romance portrayed by Raku and Chitoge eventually blossoms into the real thing, Marika doesn’t get any such escape from the fate of being a Tachibana woman. In “Limit” artist Naoshi Komi provides a brief overview of this aristocratic family, one in which for centuries all of the women are born sickly and are largely confined to their own aristocratic world. Given the structure of Japanese society, Komi can’t very well claim that the Tachibanas are matrilineal, but he implies it, by stating that the sickly Tachibana women nevertheless control the family in all eras. Marika’s mother, Chika Tachibana, is said to value her daughter only as a means of continuing the aristocratic line, though she allows her daughter to attend regular high school and to attempt to win over her childhood love Raku. Failing that alliance, Marika is expected to return home and to marry a much older man in order to preserve the Tachibana bloodline, turning her back on the world of youth and becoming a virtual duplicate of her mother. Marika’s destiny is to take part in a real arranged marriage, while Raku and Chitoge are obliged only to play-act at a possible unison.

In earlier eras Japanese children were raised to consider such marriages inevitable. Raku’s generation is thoroughly modernized, so all of Marika’s schoolmates are aghast at her fate. These children of 21^st-century Japan are almost utterly out of contact with the traditions of old Japan. They know ninjas only from pop culture and are surprised when they learn that the Tachiabanas have their own private ninja guard. They go to Shinto shrines to have their fortunes told, but their real temples are game arcades and soba shops. Marika is the only one truly rooted in the traditions of Medieval Japan, and she wants no part of them. Unfortunately, she’s a secondary character in the story of Raku and Chitoge, and in romances like this one, the race does not go to the most desperate.

Still, friendship has its value too. Because of her ill-defined illness (loosely compared to anemia), Marika is abducted back to her mother’s domicile, where Chika calls the tune and even her husband gets consigned to the dungeon if he talks back. But Marika has a resourceful rich-girl friend, one Shinohara, and she alerts Marika’s high-school buddies as to Marika’s sad fate. Chitoge, the girl who most often quarreled with Marika, leads the intrepid high-schoolers on a quest to liberate the Tachibana heir. What results is sort of a cross between the climax of Mike Nichols’ THE GRADUATE—the visual quote of the church-scene is pretty unmistakable—and one of Japan’s “ninja war” spectacles. Yet though Marika needs help from her friends, there’s still a great deal of emphasis on the young woman’s determination to defy her fate. Even her alienated mother Chika comments enviously on how strong her daughter is, implying that she Chika would have liked to escape her aristocratic fate.

The relationship between the two women may be the most mythic portrait of a mother-daughter psychological conflict in the medium of comics. While Marika is oriented upon winning Raku’s love and advancing into adulthood, Chika looks as if she’s been frozen in time. When Raku meets the senior Tachibana, he mistakes her for a sister to Marika, and Marika herself claims that her mother is “a thousand years old.” Komi supplies no explanation for Chika’s appearance, any more than he does for a minor support-character who looks like a child but claims to be older than the adolescents. Japanese manga artists may have any number of reasons for depicting adults with childlike appearances, but in NISEKOI it seems to signal the aforementioned envy Chika feels for her daughter, allowing her to become frozen in time even as she’s frozen emotionally. When Raku tries to make Chika to have mercy upon Marika, the matriarch engages in sophisms about the relative nature of good and evil to defend the sacrifice “the One” for “the Many” of the lineage. And when Raku asks Chika to confess her love for her daughter, Chika just responds, “Don’t make me sick.”

Yet the big battle of high schoolers vs. ninjas does bear fruit. Marika escapes her wedding, but she can’t escape the limitations of her own body, and she admits to her savior Raku that she’ll have to return to the bosom of her family for medical treatment. Nevertheless, the sheer daring of the teenage assault causes Chika to relent and cancel the arranged marriage, allowing Marika to chart her own course. This course includes her realization that she has to give in to the inevitable romantic union of Raku and Chitoge, even while threatening to come after Raku again if he doesn’t do right by his true love. Marika even plays a major role in the series’ last arc, overcoming her own limits by making certain that Chitoge comes together with the man Marika wanted to marry.

There are many Japanese stories in which the main characters are obligated to surrender their personal desires to serve the greater good. But even amid all the slapstick and sentiment, “Limit” puts forth a valid argument for the contrary verdict, in which desire trumps duty and provides a new avenue for growth and transcendence.

NEAR-MYTHS: NISEKOI (2011-16)

 

There are various structural similarities between many of the iterations of the teen-humor comics-genre both in America and Japan. Obviously, whenever a series focused on high-school teens is meant to continue indefinitely, the teens will remain frozen in time, eternally youthful and without the possibility of matriculation or maturation. One may find intimations of adult life in various stories written both for ARCHIE and for URUSEI YATSURA, but the characters will never exist outside the high school microcosm. They will take infinite numbers of tests, play an infinite numbers of sports games, and ceaselessly play pranks on teachers and make romantic hookups, and nothing more. High school is almost a variation of the Greek realm of Hades, where those sentenced to abide therein must repeat the same actions ceaselessly.

However, Japanese publishers are far more renowned than their American counterparts for teen-humor serials which come to a definite end. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the high school microcosm will always be treated any more realistically. I’ve no direct experience of the “light novel” series REAL BOUT HIGH SCHOOL, but judging from the 1998-2001 manga adaptation, the titular school, where students fight one another in extravagant martial matches, has nearly nothing to do with the way a real high school functions. The school is simply there as an excuse to bring together an assortment of same-age teens for the purpose of romance and slapstick hijinks. A variation on the theme appears in Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA. Some of the characters still go to high school while others live as “ronins,” would-be collegians striving to ace their entrance exams. But school is just the place where the principals go to take their tests, and all the romance and slapstick ensues at the dormitory shared by the hero and his harem of nubile love-interests. Unlike REAL BOUT, LOVE HINA does conclude with all of the characters matriculating and advancing to the next phases of adult life.

NISEKOI, translated as “false love,” follows the overall arc of LOVE HINA in that high school has a definite end, the action of the series taking place over four years. Most of the escapades do take place at the school, where tests and teachers take a back seat to romance and slapstick, though several plot-threads also involve the home life of either the two main characters, Raku Ichijo and Chitoge Kirisaki, or of members of the subordinate ensemble. Indeed, though Raku and Chitoge first become aware of one another at school, their respective families force them into sustained propinquity. Raku is the offspring of a well-to-do Yakuza family, though the teen has no intention of becoming a gangster, while Chitoge is the scion of an American crime-combine, the Beehive, which comes to Japan to conduct business. In a reversal of the main plot of ROMEO AND JULIET, the two adolescents must pretend to date one another in order to soothe tensions between the rival gangs—sort of a high-schooler version of political marriages designed to create international alliances.

Author Naoshi Komi makes a handful of direct references to The Shakespeare Play That Launched Several Thousand High School Renditions. However, if Raku and Chitoge resemble any Bard-characters, they would be the incessantly quarreling Beatrice and Benedick of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Yet in NISEKOI "Benedick" is just an average guy with a streak of righteousness, while "Beatrice" is a short-tempered, half-Japanese half-American tsundere chick with the habit of punching out anyone who pisses her off. Raku takes the brunt of most of Chitoge’s temper tantrums, which sometimes makes the “false love” imposture hard to sell. However, after the first year Komi largely drops the plotline of the rival gangs, though Claude, one of Chitoge’s guardians, plays a significant role throughout the narrative. Far more important to the story is that five other young women also begin pursuing Raku with varying degrees of intensity, and one of them is Kosaki, a girl whom Raku has loved since middle school. Kosaki reciprocates Raku's feelings, but neither has been courageous enough to confess their feelings. Of course, none of these rivalries would really matter emotionally if Raku and Chitoge’s feelings for one another were entirely false.

The other seekers of Raku’s affections are intentionally more over-the-top, which in many respects makes them less credible in the competition. Tsugumi is Chitoge’s martially skilled bodyguard, who dresses as a boy but has tortured feelings for Raku and fears to upset her cherished mistress. Haru, sister to Kosaki, isn’t much of a rival either, since she knows of her sibling’s feeling for Raku and thus never confesses that she too finds Raku appealing. Yui, though no relation to Raku, spends a lot of time at Raku’s house when both are children, and though she desires him he can only think of Yui as a sister. The only girl who comes close to rivaling with Chitoge and Kosaki is Marika, the daughter of the local police chief (who’s well acquainted with the activities of both criminal gangs). Marika is as given to obstreperous behavior as Chitoge, but she can express her feelings for Raku openly, while Chitoge is far more ambivalent. These tangled relationships become even more involved when the characters learn that all seven of them crossed paths as small children, and that most of them forgot their shared past after being separated. Komi uses an artful Dickensiasn device to keep this subplot percolating, though the backstory never overpowers the primary consideration: that Raku, even if he likes having a harem on some level, can’t keep both Betty and Veronica.

Far more than eros, NISEKOI celebrates the bonds of friendship. Granted, it’s an idealized friendship, one so intense that even rivals like Chitoge and Marika will go to the wall for one another. There’s a mature tone to the adolescents’ discussions of love, even though there’s still plenty of Takashashi-style absurdity to keep things lively, ranging from guardians using ninja-style weapons to a super-chemical designed to force Raku into playing Prince Charming by kissing all of his would-be paramours in their sleep. In the final analysis, NISEKOI is strongest in terms of the dramatic potentiality, though one particular sequence deserves separate consideration as a mythcomic.