Sleep Is For the Weak

PG-16+ for general adult subject matter; official Viz manga website

How can a comic that does so many things right be this bad? Ristorante Paradiso works within its genre extremely well – if you like subtle character drama, the storytelling in this book is spot on. The art is great – a bit thinner-lined and more conventional than Natsume Ono’s other recent Western release not simple – and lovely to look at for anyone who enjoys manga with an indie vibe. There are some excellent character moments, the facial expressions are wonderful, and the subject matter of adults dealing with their problems maturely but getting hurt anyway has real appeal for old, crusty, cynical people like the reviewers on this site.

So I should like Ristorante Paradiso. But below the great execution, the basic premise and background of the work are so off that they ruin everything the mangaka does with them.

It really comes down to just one problem: the main character’s mother is a terrible person, and none of the other characters seem to notice or care.

*Plot summary with ending ahead. You’ve been warned.*

The comic starts with Nicoletta, a 21-year-old woman moving to Rome to confront her mother, Olga, who abandoned her 15 years earlier. Olga had fallen in love with a man who didn’t want children, so she dumped her 6-year-old daughter at her parents’ house, keeping the child’s existence a secret and only visiting a handful of times while Nicoletta grew up. Once Nicoletta shows up in present day, Olga bribes her with a free apartment and a job at the titular restaurant (where she meets the famous crew of fetishy bespectacled older gentlemen) if she agrees to keep the secret of her mother’s identity. Olga is flaky and dodgy with Nicoletta, though a few gestures are meant to prove that she does love her daughter. Eventually, Olga announces at a party in front of her husband that Nicoletta is actually her daughter. Her husband says he doesn’t care because he loves her, everybody reconciles, The End.

So we have child abandonment for entirely selfish reasons, lying about major parts of her life to the man she loves, ignoring major responsibilities for the sake of her love life, manipulating the people around her into giving her what she wants even if it’s unreasonable, and stupidly thinking that she can’t trust a man who’ll basically do anything for her to continue loving her if she’s a mother. This is the stuff fictional villains are made of. But Ristorante Paradiso doesn’t want to be a story with heroes and villians – it wants to be the kind of story where everyone’s sympathetic and flawed and human. And that’s fair enough, but in that kind of story characters’ actions still need to have consequences. You aren’t forgiven for “just being human” if you’ve done something really terrible and made almost no effort to atone.

That’s where this manga fails. By being way too kind to Olga, the story takes the teeth out of the manga’s main conflict and makes all the characters around her seem like unrealistic doormats. The major conflict in this book sputters and dies halfway through, leaving the story boring and unsatisfying. Since the other characters are unbelievably forgiving of someone most of them have every reason in the world to hate, it loses a lot of the realism that slice-of-life stories like this rely on.

Initial impression: All in all, this book was a major disappointment. (NotHayama)

Additional impression: This manga has a spin-off book coming up and an anime for it aired a number of months ago. I watched a few episodes of the show and had to stop for reasons very similar to what NotHayama lists here. Why does everyone in the story bend over backwards for such a terrible woman? The shows mentions that Olga has a strong work ethic or something, but she’s clearly very selfish, she’s a textbook terrible mother, and she finds nothing wrong with treating the men in her life like objects, slaves, or idiots for no clear reason. Nicoletta is justifiably angry, but instead of calling her mother on her crap she ends up projecting her problems onto the already-objectified fetishy men of the restaurant who CLEARLY are uncomfortable with her looking to them for parental guidance and/or sex. All in all, I found the women in this manga to be really unlikable, and the men to be stupid, simpering dishrags. The story was unrealistic and the character’s reactions to everything were even worse. This is a story for adults. PLEASE WRITE REAL ADULTS. The next josei I have to read that refuses to acknowledge that its readership isn’t stupid is getting set on fire. Oh, and keep the harem bullshit (not to be confused with real harem dynamics) out of things that are supposed to be insightful, okay? Natsume Ono’s other English release, not simple, is a very decent comic intended for adult men, and Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters, another recent josei release through Viz Signature, portrays flawed-but-realistic women brilliantly. Skip this book and read those instead. (Lianne)

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