Sleep Is For the Weak

PG-13, maybe?, for romantic hijinks and such; uncreative informational website

My favorite anime and manga come from the 1990s. I know, it’s really unfair to group together a bazillion titles and categorize them under the single title “good” or “bad” or “at least this isn’t 1970s manga.” (I keed - I love Swan just like everybody else.) But when I think back on the epic titles of the 1990s - Basara, Kodocha, Kenshin, Fushigi Yuugi, Slayers, Esca, Eva (before it was beaten completely to death) - I realize that they have real staying power. To look specifically at shoujo from the 1990s, those titles had action and drama and spunk. The characters weren’t hyperstylized, the plots weren’t bits of shock value strung together with cliché, the boys weren’t complete cardboard and the girls weren’t complete dishrags. Those are all common problems I see with shoujo from the past ten years, and although 2000+ has given us fabulous titles like Skip Beat, High School Debut, and Love*Com, it’s also given us an uncomfortable number of titles with aloof, asshole underwear models incomprehensively turning pig-headed girls into puddles of mush.

But now we get the Itazura na Kiss anime, a lovely adaptation of the classic manga that ran from 1991 to 1999 until the young mangaka’s untimely death broke countless hearts and left the manga unfinished. Now we get slick animation quality, smoothed-out character designs, fabulous opening and ending themes, and all other manner of media qualities that time has generally made better - but we still get that great, solid, 1990s sentiment. Kotoko isn’t very smart, but she’s a good kid, and she has hopes and goals and dreams - including bagging the cold valedictorian of her school and living happily ever after. But he’s a jerk, and she keeps telling herself she should give up, but her constant attentions are making him more social and slightly more human, so she figures that maybe it’s not that ridiculous an idea to keep fighting for him, after all.

The premise is like 80% of other shoujo titles, but it’s a.) more archetypal (considering it first started running seventeen years ago) and b.) done the way it generally should be done. This isn’t abuser x dishrag ala Hot Gimmick - and the side characters aren’t zany and annoying ala S.A. We have a solid, likable, sympathetic girl and her punkass-but-good-hearted friends trying to teach their valedictorian that he needs to settle down, marry a nice girl, and stop being a dick. I know the idea that “a girl’s ultimate goal is to marry an admirable boy” is largely outdated, and that current feminist shoujo (like High School Debut) promote the much-better ideal of boys and girls reaching equal friendship status before romance, but at least Kotoko knows what she wants and is willing to work for it. The boy isn’t going to fall into her lap just because she’s incomprehensibly nice or pretty in the face of his insults. Nope! This is classic girl-fights-for-boy, with all the spitfire and heart that 90s shoujo was good for. As implied by the word “itazura” (mischief) in the title, this series has its fair share of meanness (blackmailing the object of her affection into tutoring her with childhood pictures) and selfishness (she ignores the male friend who’s in love with her even though she knows how much that hurts), but the qualities aren’t really glorified, and they’re sympathetic in the way believable flaws are forgivable at that age. There’s also the general attitude in Itazura na Kiss that she’s going to do her damnedest to get the boy, but if it doesn’t work out, she’s just going to get on with her life because there’s more to her life than him. If you know anything about later chapters in the series, though, there’s more to their relationship than that. (Yow!)

This is classic, awesome schoolgirl shoujo. It teaches you that love hurts, but you should give as good as you get, and the trials of it all will make us stronger. Also, the importance of a strong housing foundation if you live in an earthquake zone.

Initial impression: I love this and can’t wait for more. It’s not the most feminist piece in the world, but it still sidesteps a lot of sexism. Give it a try, especially if you weren’t a geek in the 1990s and don’t know what you were missing. (Lianne)

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