MYTHCOMICS: MONSTER MARRIAGE SHOP (2021-2023)

 I said at the end of HARUM SCARUM that I'd be analyzing a harem comedy that didn't conform to the predominant pattern of the subgenre. MONSTER MARRIAGE SHOP does include a male protagonist surrounded by comely females. many occupying the same domicile, but all the females are yokai, "monsters," after the fashion of the still-ongoing 2012 manga MONSTER MUSUME. Like the influential LOVE HINA, SHOP telegraphs the inevitability of a particular "till death do us part" joining of the male lead with one of the resident females, though SHOP concludes within a mere twenty episodes. I've read enough translated manga that I feel I have the sense of what it looks like when a given manga has been structured for a long run, only to be wrapped up arbitrarily when some editor/publisher cancels the feature. I can't prove SHOP was not subjected to some similar circumstances. But to me it seems that female mangaka Kaworu Watashiya arranged everything in SHOP to come to an ending that she executes to deliver her specific take on the harem comedy-- one in which the "harem" functions a lot like a feminine support group.

At roughly age 9 male lead Yuto Nikao loses his father (about whom the reader never learns anything). At the funeral, his mother Mrs. Nikao (no first name given) comments that at least she still has her only child Yuto to console her-- except that in the wings a half dozen guys are waiting to date a hot widow. Throughout Yuto's adolescence his mother seeks to find a new father for Yuto, but she has terrible judgment, resulting in a stream of users and losers. Freud theorized that every male child would be conflicted once he was old enough to perceive Mommy having relations with Daddy. But though Yuto never thinks he ought to be the man in his mother's life a la Norman Bates, hearing Mommy Nikao have sex with assorted men has a bad effect on his male ego. Freud assumed that the Oedipal male would resolve his mother-complex indirectly, by seeking a mate reminiscent of his mother. Adult Yuto's solution to his complex takes a new wrinkle: he becomes a "marriage advisor," whose mission in life is to do well what his mother did poorly, facilitating good marriages. However, he also declines to seek a mate for himself, deeming himself an incurable "mama's boy" devoted to niche pornography.              

Then one night Yuto gets off his bus in the wrong place, wanders into a forest, and meets his leading lady, werewolf-girl Ururu di Bianca. She guides him into her hidden "monster town," where every resident is a yokai of some sort. Yuto takes his discovery in stride, and perhaps because nothing but his job defines the young fellow, he starts giving the relatively civilized monsters matrimonial advice.

 This state of affairs irritates the love-god Cupid (apparently all sorts of myth-beings occupy Monster Town). Feeling like Yuto's infringing on his territory, Cupid shoots Ururu with a love-arrow. Ururu comes close to de-virginating Yuto, but she's interrupted by a bevy of monster-girls who want the human's marital counsels. Yuto shakes off his near-rape and decides to open a matchmaking service in Yokai-ville. He doesn't realize, despite many subsequent hints, that Ururu has fallen in love with him now, so she and other monster girls start aiding Yuto in his new business.

I won't spend much time on the ancillary monster-girls. Watashiya seems to be following the example of MONSTER MUSUME, but with an important difference. Though two or three of the other beast-babes-- a succubus, a vampire, etc.-- seem inclined to sex up the human, none are really "into" him as Ururu is. Most of the time, the monster girls just hang around the agency waiting to see what happens, alternating between bonding and sniping at each other-- hence, my "support group" characterization. Almost none of them or the short-term customers actually get married, because in Monster Town, Yuto has to overcome his "mama's boy" fixation, and that means that his deflection into work must be invalidated. Not too many of the individual monster-girl stories are symbolically complex, except as they bear on breaking down Yuto's defenses. 

Not until Episode 14 does Watashiya introduce a ticking clock: Yuto's situation loosely parallels that of folklore-hero Urashima Taro, who was (according to the author) unable to leave Fairyland until he had sex-- which is. of course, what Yuto's been avoiding in the real world, to maintain his connection to the mother he still loves. 

Meisa the Gorgon, the intellectual of the group, expands on Yuto's psychology with the concept of the "frog prince syndrome." Frog princes, rather than importuning princesses for kisses, are deeply conscious of being undesirable. Thus their poor self-image justifies pushing away anyone trying to get close.  

Harnis the Succubus comes up with her own theory of building up Yuto: enter his dreams and have dream-sex with him. However, the attempt triggers Yuto's defenses: even in his mind, Yuto thinks his mother is always watching. Yet at the same time, he resents his mother's control and transforms into a gorilla flinging poo at Mom.

Harnis, perceiving that Yuto has shifted his fixation to Ururu, convinces the dreamer to summon the wolf-girl. But here too the punishing mother intrudes, and Yuto conjures up a lupine dominatrix.       

However, Yuto's dream may have some effect in the human world, for no sooner has Yuto awakened and dressed than a giant version of Mommy Nikao intrudes on Monster Town and snatches up Yuto like he's Fay Wray. The monster-girls theorize that the giant is a psychic projection of the human Mrs. Nikao, and if so, this is the only time the character appears in the narrative's "real time." Both Yuto and Ururu try to reason with the giant, but when Mrs. Nikao tries to eliminate the competition, the monster-girls take her down, though Yuto shows his respect to the "mother" before she vanishes.

With the vanquishing of "Queen Kong," Yuto can at last express his feeling for Ururu-- and though she knows he may disappear, she can't stop herself from "wolfing out" and having sex with him-- though this time, he doesn't want abuse but trusts her not to harm him. Yuto does return to the human world, but with a twist: he, unlike Urashima Taro, returns to a time slightly before he departed. So now he has the chance to return to normal life, so will he do so?

Of course not: within one day he's back in the forest, looking for Monster Town. And though he finds his Fairyland, it's a reversal on the trope of the human who returns to a future-world that's forgotten him. This time. the denizens of Fairyland forget that their human visitor ever existed, even though Ururu (possibly) carries his seed. And this comprises Yuto's last hurdle: the guy who had no confidence in himself must tell all the monsters who've forgot him that he knows them all inside-out. And to judge from the last pages, Yuto succeeds in making his lupine lady love him again. The reader doesn't know how much time has passed: only that Camilla the Vampire and a wolf-boy are regarding a bridal picture of Yuto and Ururu, and speaking of Yuto in the past tense. It's a bittersweet touch to the overall happy ending, implying that a mortal can't endure in Yokai-ville as if he was one of them. But if Yuto pays a penalty for love, most readers would consider that a better fate than expiating his trauma in a devotion to the happiness of strangers.     

MYTHC0MICS: "CALL OF THE WILD" (CONAN THE KING #28, 1985)

 

I'm sure it's been at least twenty years since I read an issue of this Marvel magazine, which began in 1980 as KING CONAN and which lasted a healthy nine years, albeit under the altered title CONAN THE KING. It was a relatively high-ticket item, starting at $1.25 and ending at $1.50, and was the last Conan project from Roy Thomas before he left Marvel for DC. I imagine KING was launched for the usual economic reasons, but I'd like to think there was some thought of giving the barbarian a venue more expansive than the regular color comic.

There's a certain irony to Marvel devoting stories to the famed sword-slinger in his mature years, since Young Conan was always the most popular incarnation in prose and in comics. Robert E. Howard devoted one short story and one novel to Mature Conan, but clearly the WEIRD TALES readers liked the hero best when he was a young freebooter ranging from realm to realm. Nevertheless, KING presented Conan at an even later phase of life than Howard ever had. By the time of KING #28-- the last Conan tale for writer Alan Zelenetz-- the barbarian has sired a teenaged daughter and a somewhat younger son by his queen, Zenobia. The text of "Call of the Wild" implies that Conan is sixty years old, though artist Alan Silvestri draws both the barbarian and his red-haired guest-star as if they're merely in their forties.

Despite having ascended to the kingship of Aquilonia, Conan chafes at the confinements of civilized life. He dons a disguise and goes drinking at a lowly tavern. Monarch's business intrudes, so Conan orders everyone to clear the hall. One hooded figure seems minded to defy the King's order but then chooses to leave. 

Back at Conan's palace, his daughter Radegund anticipates her "confirmation" (whatever that means in Hyboria) but her father has conspicuously forgotten the Big Event. He's selfishly mourning the freedom of his younger years, and he departs the castle grounds for the forest. However, his cloaked "friend" from the tavern has apparently followed him-- a good trick, given that she couldn't have known when he'd leave and which way he'd go-- and reveals herself to the startled potentate.    

Unlike Conan, Mature Sonja has remained true to the wanderer's life, never marrying or settling down. She claims to have come to Aquilonia only to fulfill a commission, and to have run into Conan purely by accident-- though she could hardly be ignorant of the barbarian's royal attainments. It's worth remembering that in the first two-part tale of the Marvel Comics Sonja, she tricked Young Conan into doing heavy lifting for her. Mature Conan is delighted to see her and dearly wishes to talk over old times. She scorns his royal ascension, and her refusal to be Conan's nostalgia-buddy very nearly crushes him. But then Sonja switches gears and "allows" Conan to render her aid.

              

Zelenetz could have had Sonja lead Conan to any number of routine treasure-troves-- a lost tomb, a wizard's castle. Instead, Sonja's quest takes them to "a death barge-- sacred to the darkest gods of the nether realm." Aboard the ship, guarded by fanatics, lies the enshrined body of a necromancer, and Sonja's been hired to steal a gem from the dead wizard's eye. The two thieves have no real compunctions against robbing the dead, though in a symbolic sense the Death Barge might represent the world of Death itself, which will eventually consume all living warriors. In fact, Married, Not So Mature Conan can't quite resist getting grabby with Sonja's forty-something charms. Yet he doesn't resent getting her boot in his face, since his desire for the allure of pure adventure surpasses all else.

While Conan kills a bunch of guards (I'm sure they were all Bad People), Sonja steals the jewel-- but the dead wizard retaliates with a spell of deadly smoke. Conan hits on the idea of flooding the cabin, which interrupts the spell for some reason. Sonja keeps only her stolen eye-jewel while Conan randomly takes a "token" in the form of a necklace. Then they swim back to land, leaving the disposition of the Death Barge up to the reader's imagination.

Conan is all for deserting his throne and returning to his old wild ways, but Sonja tricks him one last time, albeit for his own good. Silvestri does a fine job showing Sonja's stoical acceptance that she's no longer a part of Conan's life, and off she rides, leaving him to his kingship-- and implicitly to his queen and children (though Sonja's only comment on the Cimmerian's marital life is a catty remark about Conan having a "harem.") Conan's poised to pursue her-- and maybe, his lost freedom-- when he hears temple bells and remembers that he's got a daughter waiting for him to perform his paternal duties.

     

But "all's well" for the King, whose dereliction of his responsibilities put into his hands just the right sort of booty to be a gift to the daughter he completely forgot. Zelenetz and Silvestri came up with a sort of "family melodrama" take on barbarian adventure, and my vague recollection of the whole series is that it often pursued storylines more in the vein of Hal Foster than of Robert E. Howard. To be sure, the KING series never lets an issue pass where Conan isn't mightily smiting enemies with his iron thews, so a lot of his complaints about civilized life ring false. Zelenetz's title is as ironic as his conclusion, for Conan's trajectory is less like that of Buck in London's CALL OF THE WILD-- the dog who embraces the wild life-- and more like that of White Fang, the star of London's other canine outing, the wolf-dog that finally gives up the wilderness in favor of domesticity. As a further irony, it's the she-devil with a sword-- the hero whose gender is best known for "nesting"-- who remains loyal to the allure of wanderlust.

MYTHCOMICS: "ENDS OF THE EARTH" (ALL-STAR BATMAN #6-9, 2017)

 The stories that endure? The "demons" that win? They're the ones that speak to who we want to be. Not the ones that scare us into being who we don't. They're true because we want them to be badly enough that we MAKE them true. -- Batman to Ra's Al Ghul, ENDS OF THE EARTH FINALE.  

A tagline on the back of the TPB reads, "This is not a Batman story. It's a villain story." It's a reprise of a line Ra's Al Ghul speaks to Batman, albeit in his Bruce Wayne guise, as part of a climactic dialogue between the two enemies. Yet it's not true, and I suspect writer Scott Snyder knew it wasn't true when he wrote the line. For roughly the last fifty years-- the period in which fans became the dominant writers of superhero comics-- an identity between the Dark Knight and his gallery of grotesques and arabesques has been irregularly suggested. The "old pros" of BATMAN's first thirty years probably would have found this imputation of identity too metaphysical, whether one was addressing the creator of Poison Ivy (Robert Kanigher), Mister Freeze (Dave Wood), or the Mad Hatter (Bill Finger). Denny O'Neil, one of the first of the fans to turn pro, possibly understood the identity-dynamic when he created Ra's. Yet Bill Finger seems to be the driving-force behind the dynamic-- Finger, who tapped the power of psychological obsession for heroes and villains to an extent not seen in earlier media like pulps and serials. I commented on this common element in my 2020 essay, THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD.

Plot-wise, ENDS OF THE EARTH is in many respects a standard Bat-villain team-up. Ra's is trying once again to wipe out much of the Earth's population. He suborns the talents of Mister Freeze and The Mad Hatter. Batman interferes, this time with some assistance from Poison Ivy. Snyder injects some elements that are probably original to his take on the Dark Knight-- an armored adult partner named Duke (whom I found tedious), and some new iteration of the Blackhawks. But Snyder surely knew he was selling his particular take on four of the celebrated rogues, by delving into their obsessions as the hero seeks to take them down.

Mister Freeze is one of Snyder's best conceits, with the writer framing Victor Fries' apocalyptic nihilism as springing from a childhood reading of Robert Frost's "fire and ice" poem-- and thus not purely a consequence of his quest to restore the health of his cryogenically preserved wife. In the service of Ra's Al Ghul, Freeze has perfected world-killing spores in his Arctic sanctum-- and even though Batman knows that a squadron of The New Blackhawks plans to firebomb the frigid fiend's laboratory, the Knight is compelled to get there first. Perhaps Batman feels he must be sure of ending the threat up close and personal. Perhaps he still pities the demented scientist, despite his murderous project. Or--

--Maybe Batman just wants to vanquish the cool, cruel villain with his nemesis, that of "heat." I frankly don't know what the propensity of real bats to generate high levels of body heat has to do with Batman using his own anti-virus to destroy Freeze's spores. But it does give the villain the chance to imagine his apocalyptic world of icy stillness ending in a cataclysm of fire.

The hero's triumph is mitigated in Part Two, in that some of the spores escape destruction, and so Batman must seek the help of another old foe. This time the Princess of Plants is off in some wasteland, conducting her biological experiments for the love of pure science. Knowing that Ivy's feeling for humanity is strained at best, Batman still seeks to prune knowledge from his enemy-- while additionally, for some vague reason, the Blackhawks menace Ivy as well. Ivy does help Batman after a fashion, though she makes him listen to a lecture about a supposed true ancestor to the legendary Tree of Life. If Freeze looked forward to a still, cold world of the future, Ivy is by comparison a being who seeks truth in the imponderable world of life's pre-human origins.

But Ivy's aid only slows the fatal influence of Freeze's spores. Batman uses his detective skills to track down a corporation that helped Freeze in some unspecified way and finds himself in the Carrol-esque domain of The Mad Hatter. Freeze and Ivy might not see themselves as aspects of Batman's own psyche, but the Hatter is an enthusiastic advocate of solipsism. But there's only one fantasy to which Bruce Wayne is beholden to, and that's "the window moment," the moment when he saw a bat come into his window and beheld the metaphor to which he dedicated his life.

And so, the Hatter, despite his love of fantasy, provides the real-world clue that leads Batman to confront Ra's Al Ghul in America's capital. The hero doesn't seem to make much of how he found several of the Blackhawk agents working with Hatter, and for all the reader knows, Batman learned nothing from them. He knows only that their confederates are holding Duke prisoner and planning to execute him at a particular time-- as if the threat of Ra's to exterminate half the world isn't sufficient to motivate the crusader. There's a confusing scene indicating that Batman gets Catwoman to masquerade as Batman to draw the villain's fire, and overall this segment doesn't show Ra's at his best. Still, the dialogue describing their conflicting visions-- one demon-haunted, the other haunted by a vision of perfectibility-- makes the more baffling details less worrisome.         

And so ends ENDS OF THE EARTH. Snyder packed in far too many extraneous details to make ENDS an outstanding Bat-story. (For instance, the last section reveals that the Blackhawks weren't working for Ra's after all-- so why were they working with Hatter?) But I can appreciate that Snyder and his five artist-collaborators went the extra mile to spin a new story of the hero and the villains who define him.    
        

MYTHCOMICS: "BREAK YOUR DESTINY" GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (2011?)

 

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

"...in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male."-- SHOOTING THE SHIRT, 2014. 

The title "Break Your Destiny" appears only on this splash page from the second part of the final SWEEPER story. Shiina's story, and those of other mangaka, were published in various magazines and in a 2013 collection, in order to generate revenue to be donated to the benefit of victims of a devastating 2011 Japanese earthquake. 

Any readers of the SWEEPER manga would have known that Tadao Yokoshima's "destiny" was to be the beloved butt-monkey of the phenomenal ghost sweeper Reiko Mikami, so author Takashi Shiina would have been having fun with that preconception by claiming that "this man's desire is going to change Japan's history." But the history of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship ensures that none of the Japanese history-books must be changed, and despite the title Yokoshima finds that his destiny is locked in, and by his own free choice.

One element in the story suggests that this is supposed to be set in the early days of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship: the fact that their colleague, the sweet-natured Okinu, is still a ghost. This state of affairs came to an end in the story-arc "Sleeping Beauty" (circa 1996), during which time Okinu was reincarnated in a mortal form. Okinu forgot her friends for a while, but when she remembered, she rejoined with "Mikami GS" for the remainder of the series in her purely mortal form. And yet, if this story were supposed to be taking place before "Beauty," that would create a continuity-problem, for reasons I'll explain shortly. Since Okinu's being a ghost is not important to the narrative, it's most likely that Shiina simply indulged in a little nostalgia with his friendly ghost-girl.  

  

The setup is only loosely established: Mikami has been hired to dispel a bunch of spirits from a deserted Japanese temple, and she demands that the holdouts inside the temple surrender to her authority, or she'll wipe them out. Okinu reminds Mikami that Yokoshima's being held hostage in the temple, and Mikami seems indifferent to her male assistant's fate, as long as she succeeds in her mission and gets paid. However, to herself Mikami muses, "I am really counting on your charm towards the supernatural, Yokoshima. It's one hell of a gamble whether she might fall for you or not." In other words, though Mikami unambiguously wants to earn her fee for ghost-sweeping, she's not just writing Yokoshima off, but is gambling that he will "charm" the head spirit somehow. (How Mikami knows it's a female spirit is left to the imagination.) But in the period prior to "Sleeping Beauty," Yokoshima-- never a Don Juan at the best of times-- had not demonstrated any special "charm towards the supernatural." It's only in the later adventures that Yokoshima attracts two or three "supernatural girls" into his orbit, and that's what Shiina's thinking of when he, speaking through Mikami, credits Yokoshima with "charm."

Yokoshima, however, was not apprised of Mikami's opinion of his charms, so he's in turmoil at having been deserted. However, the head spirit-- Seiryuto, an analogue to a character from another Shiina manga-- offers Yokoshima a deal. If Yokoshima supplies her with supernatural power, Seiryuto will whisk him back in time to an era where he can become the ruler of Japan and can have access to all the women in the world. Yokoshima agrees, and Seiryuto transforms her temple into a time-traveling spaceship. 

Mikami and Okinu witness the ship take off, and hear Yokoshima bid farewell to them, and to Mikami's "boobs, ass, and thighs." Though Mikami doesn't know what's going on, she demonstrates that she's not as willing to let her assistant disappear as she suggested earlier. She uses a wirepoon gun to fasten a line to the ship, so that it hauls Mikami and Okinu along in its wake. Thus the two intrepid heroines travel in time as well and end up receiving exposition from none other than the famed warlord Nobunaga Oda. This could be deemed a quasi-crossover in that Shiina's next manga after SWEEPER was a fictionalized series about Oda in his teenaged years.

One thing the girls learn from Oda is that they didn't end up in the same period as Yokoshima. He appeared in medieval Japan half a year ago and began using Seiryuto's advanced weaponry to conquer the local lords. From Mikami, Oda finds out how the greedy exorcist offended her assistant, and Oda has a suggestion on how to fix the situation so that Mikami and Okinu can take their buddy back to their time: Mikami must apologize to Yokoshima. The 16th-century warlord shows a remarkable knowledge of the 21st-century term "tsundere," advising the heroine that it's not good to "be too much tsun and no dere." Against her instincts, Mikami tries to practice apologizing, but Oda informs her that she looks like "a complete villain." Oda, knowing that her attitude will never compel Yokoshima to give in, formulates an alternative plan.

Sometime later, Oda's army marches on Yokoshima's lands. Yokoshima doesn't care about fighting Oda, for he's surrounded by the beautiful women of his court. But Seiryuto won't let him canoodle with the hotties, because Yokoshima can only endow her with his supernatural power as long as his lust is not satisfied. Presumably the alien yokai has been blocking Yokoshima for the past months for that very reason, since he's just as desperate for sex as he was working for Mikami. Yokoshima doesn't want to confront Mikami on the field of battle, but the court ladies affirm that they won't give him nookie if he has no temporal power. Boxed in by his Faustian bargain with the alien, Yokoshima dons his armor and joins his army in the field.

Oda's alternate plan was to still have Mikami apologize to Yokoshima, but with a mask over her face to conceal her insincerity. But headstrong Mikami pursues her own destiny, and dons the horrendous mask of an oni, which just stokes Yokoshima's fear of her. Despite her mixed signals, Mikami makes a sincere (for her) effort to apologize, but her need for absolute control causes her to deny her apology seconds after making it. Yokoshima is unable to follow Seiryuto's counsel and convert his fear into anger, but his fear of Mikami's vengeance drives him to attack her with his sword. She mostly blocks his blow, but he hits her mask and it splits. Seiryuto is then surprised at the disappearance of her power-source, for even though Mikami maintains through her words that she doesn't need her assistant in any way, her "crying eyes" belie her lying words. For some vague reason, Seiryuto's loss of power propels her and the three ghost-sweepers out of the medieval era.

And what is the reward for Yokoshima's virtue, his realization of how important Mikami is to him, and he to her? Why, his reward is vice-- the vice of Mikami's wrath. But going on all evidence, she's insincere again in saying that she's punishing him for having physically attacked her. Mikami resents that Yokoshima pushed her into losing her prized self-control, not to mention any anger she might feel at his willingness to leave her. Seiryuto builds on Oda's tsundere comment by claiming that Mikami is "99.9999 percent tsun"-- which is another way of saying that Mikami has no dere to spare. Okinu tries to see the sunny side of torture by saying, "Well, but at least their hearts are connected-- I think." 

And yet Mikami does speak a truth of sorts in her final adventure-- one that makes the most sense if she utters it after she and her butt-monkey have endured all the travails of the 1991-99 series. In some of those adventures, Mikami became hazily aware that she's conceived a liking for Yokoshima, but she would never verbally admit it in his presence. But this last time, when he protests that she ought to show him "some grade of affection" after he chose her over rulership of Japan, Control-Freak Mikami makes the admission, "This is how I show affection! Through my whip of love!" 

Such a confession is entirely in line with a female who became obsessed with control after she failed to hold the attention of the men in her youth with traditional female traits. The final words of Mikami explain why she didn't fire the horny teen who kept ogling and molesting her, and it certainly was not because Yokoshima worked cheap. It's because he's so besotted with her beauty that he'll endure any rigor, any torture, to be near her-- and his passion transforms her into the perfect domme for such an intrinsic sub. As with many similar figures from Japanese pop culture, her violence becomes a "symbolic displacement for the sex-act." But at least Takashi Shiina offered some "grade of affection" for his character Yokoshima in the story "Stranger Than Paradise," in which it's revealed that (maybe) Yokoshima and Mikami eventually tie the knot-- though even holy matrimony is not enough to resolve all the conflicts in this equally sacred "battle of the sexes."

                         

              

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN WHO CAN SUMMON A STORM" (GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, 1995)

 As I write this, I've not yet finished reading the entire GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga online, but paused at Volume 2 (1996), three years from the feature's conclusion. In MIKAMI MEDITATIONS I opined that mangaka Takashi Shiina intended to provide an epistemologically grounded psychology for his starring character Reiko Mikami, as to why she was both a peerless hero and a money-hungry businesswoman who exploited at least one employee. However, Shiina chose to dispense elements of that psychology in dribs and drabs. Shiina's biggest "drab" so far, 1995's "Storm," does not provide a total psychology for his heroine, but I'm seeing a strong pattern suggestive of Adler's compensation theory. So I'm writing this essay without reading all of the available volumes of SWEEPER, as something of a test of my method, before finishing the series and seeing what else the artist has in store.

"Storm" doesn't concern any sort of real tempest, and so far as I can tell, it's a metaphor for psychological upheaval. The story starts out largely with the status quo, although after roughly four years of acting the fool, Yokoshima has upgraded his skills, enough to function as an assistant ghost sweeper. But his ability to charm the skirt off Mikami remains non-existent.

Then Mikami learns that there's a competing GS outfit nearby, one subsidized by the Japanese government. She seeks them out, only to find that she knows the head of the agency-- and Yokoshima sees an unusual sight, that of Mikami acting "girly."

Saijou, head of the "Occult G-Men," lived with Mikami's family when she was just a child, because Saijou was training in GS skills with Mikami's mother. It's soon clear to Yokoshima that although Mikami calls Saijou "brother," her attitude toward him is hardly fraternal. Yokoshima immediately assumes that Saijou hopes to conquer Mikami's heart, especially since Saijou is taller, more handsome, and a stronger GS fighter than Yokoshima. However, it's soon disclosed that Saijou really doesn't see Mikami romantically, and his main purpose for seeking her out is to recruit her for his agency. And Mikami accepts, even though government pay is nothing like the money she makes as a private agent.

      

A flashback established that Saijou was the first crush of ten-year-old Mikami, and that she even confessed her feelings to him, though he didn't for an instant take her seriously. To be sure, Mikami only joins Saijou's agency on a probationary basis, and she expects Yokoshima and Okinu to keep running her private business, making big money for her. The young man, knowing Mikami better than Saijou does, enlists some of Mikami's colleagues to make the GS business more profitable than ever. However, when Mikami visits her agency, she's clearly depressed to see it functioning well without her.

Mikami overcompensates by trying to throw herself into her g-men work, but Saijou has seen the way she acts with Yokoshima. He gives Mikami a minor assignment to get her out of the way while Saijou has words with Yokoshima. The younger guy still believes that Saijou is a romantic rival despite the latter's denials, but Saijou still has only fraternal feelings for Mikami, and so he tests Yokoshima in battle. Yokoshima knows he's physically outclassed, so he not only flees battle, he humiliates Saijou with a variation on the old "order 100 pizzas for your enemy" trick.

   

However, Saijou accidentally pushes Mikami over the brink by giving her a mundane assignment--lecturing to schoolchildren-- that he'd easily perform with his altruistic mentality, but which is like poison to the high-spirited exorcist. Saijou, Yokoshima and Mikami's other friends find her in a hospital, not responding to anyone. She mechanically repeats the word "money," but doesn't respond when Okinu holds a pile of cash in front of her nose. She also doesn't respond when her first crush speaks to her. Then Yokoshima declares that her coma-like status means that he can take advantage of her, and Mikami immediately snaps back to normal and elbow-slams him. Saijou realizes that even though he only wanted to work with Mikami for non-romantic reasons, she's more suited to non-altruistic pursuits, so he fires her and returns her to Yokoshima. However, Saijou gets the last laugh by duplicating Yokoshima's "100 pizzas" trick, which has the added effect of putting the hapless schmuck back in the crosshairs of Mikami's wrath.

 So in "Storm," Shiina isn't quite ready to tell his readers exactly what makes Mikami coo-coo for currency. He does show that ten-year-old Mikami crushes so hard on "brother" Saijou that she acts just like a self-sacrificing female, willing to do anything to please her man. Yet when she tries to do it in her mature years, the effort almost destroys her, even though she can face down ghosts and demons without blinking. Further, whatever gave Mikami "gold fever" apparently happened between her pre-teen and teenaged years, going by the story I summarized in MIKAMI MEDITATIONS. "Storm" suggests to me that after ten-year-old Mikami was left behind by her crush when he sought altruistic pursuits, she overcompensated by pursuing a parallel course of heroic action, but only when she was well-paid. So she both followed Saijou's example and deviated from it.

And yet, if money was really all Mikami desired, she would have been pulled out of her coma by the presence of greenbacks. Instead, what awakens the sleeping beauty is not love's first kiss, but the (probably feigned) threat of rapine. Experienced readers are not likely to believe that Yokoshima would ever really rape a woman, in this story or in any other. He's a reader-proxy for very minor acts of molestation-- groping boobs, stealing kisses-- and in this story, he seems to realize, if only instinctually, that Mikami gets "fired up" when he molests her. In part, it stokes her ego to know that she can always kick his ass, while still feeding her sense of self-worth with his constant appreciation of her looks-- both pleasures she could never get from noble Saijou. Where Shiina will take his heroine from here, I don't yet know. But even if he goes in a different direction from "Storm," I expect I'll find his psychological twists just as engrossing. 

ADDENDUM: It belatedly struck me that although the title implies that the new character may be the "man" of the title, it seems to be Yokoshima who actually brings forth the full storm of Mikami's emotions, as opposed to causing her to repress them. That's assuming there's no special Japanese cultural meaning to the phrase, of course.