What if? What if? — Tokyo Tarareba Girls Volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura

[spindizzy]

"I spent all my time wondering 'what if,' then one day I woke up and I was 33." She's not that bad-looking, but before she knew it, Rinko was thirty-something and single. She wants to be married by the time the Tokyo Olympics roll around in six years, but...that might be easier said than done! The new series by Akiko Higashimura erupts with sharp opinions on girls and tons of laughs!!

Tokyo Tarareba Girls is from the same creator as Princess Jellyfish, and follows Rinko, a 33 year old writer for web series, as she and her two best friends resolve to get married before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Not that they have partners in mind at all – they're just going find a husband somewhere. From there, it spins out to show all of the ways that these three women struggle with dating despite their otherwise successful lives, and show the way that as Rinko's personal and professional lives spin out of control, she clings even tighter to her goal of getting married.

I realised slightly too late what my mistake was with Tokyo Tarareba Girls: I am too ace and too suspicious of marriage as an institution to make a good audience for a story about desperately wanting to get married. Especially the sort of desperation that the three main characters show here – they want to be married, and don't much care about who they get married to, so I was periodically squinting at this book like "... I don't understand why you're not happy with your wonderful friends and the job that you're proud of." I assumed that it was different cultural pressures, and my confusion is just my repeatedly forgetting that specific context – look at all of the infrastructure the women find specifically for finding husbands – but sometimes it feels cruel in its treatment of the main characters.

The depiction of the what-ifs and maybes that plague the three of them is very solid, albeit usually and ridiculously represented by drink-induced hallucinations of food (no, I don't understand why, even though the notes explain the pun) and Rinko's arguments with herself about what she wants feels very familiar. The scene where she tells herself that if she'd wasted less time hanging out with her friends, she'd probably be married by now felt guility familiar; as someone whose anxiety has also pointed out that time spent hanging out with friends is NOT TIME SPENT PRODUCTIVELY IN THE FACE OF CAPITALISM (... so my concerns are SLIGHTLY different to Rinko's), I can relate. But her friendships are really good – she and her friends are believably different from each other, and their raucous plans with each other makes me happy! I'm just disappointed that the series seems focused on making their friendship and active lives seem like a bad thing? I would definitely recommend reading hippogriff13's assessment of it, especially because she points out that in the serialised run of Tokyo Tarareba Girls, the artist/magazine editors had the gleefully doomsaying bar snacks ragging on actual readers who wrote in for advice.

I think that the other part of my problem is that a lot of the humour is based on Rinko's embarrassment, or on people doing exaggeratedly absurd things (like proposing to someone that you met for MAYBE FIVE SECONDS) and that isn't funny to me. I have an embarrassment squick, and while there are ways to tell stories about stumbling back into the dating scene and disasters cascading, Tokyo Tarareba Girls doesn't manage it. Especially because the main male character... Ugggggggh. Every scene he's in, he undermines Rinko's job and social life, and it struck me as unnecessarily cruel. I could see why they clashed, but I just wasn't emotionally invested beyond "Can the two of you please just stop?" ... Also don't get me started on the ending of this volume, because I was NOT expecting that. Or I was, but not how it went down, not at the end of the first volume, and I was holding out hope that it wouldn't.

Basically, Tokyo Tarareba Girls is genuinely not for me. The art is good, as you might expect from the creator of Princess Jellyfish, but I won't be reading on.

[This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.]

Edited 02/05/19 to fix broken links and correct hippogriff13's pronouns.

Comments

[krait]

I read about three chapters of this, because they were included in the back of a volume of Princess Jellyfish, and had the same reaction.

I don't understand, enjoy, or approve of marriage as a goal in itself, I disagree strongly with the idea that one should get married within a certain time frame, and I couldn't empathise with Rinko's desperation because it didn't seem to have any valid emotional weight to it.

"Woke up today craving marriage" is not a very deep motivation in itself, and it didn't seem like the deeper elements of such a motivation (i.e. Japan's extremely traditional and conformist culture, internalised misogyny) were going to be explored or examined. Watching Rinko denigrate her own work and accomplishments in favour of a socially-imposed obligation she doesn't actually have an emotional investment in was painful and unpleasant.

[spindizzy]

This is it exactly! I was expecting the cultural pressure to be explored a lot more than they actually were – I know the manga's supposed to be comedic, but lampooning dominant cultural messages is an entire genre of comedy – so seeing that ignored for more jokes at the protagonists' expense was gross.

... Which is a long-winded way of saying that I agree with you entirely, and thank you for commenting!

[krait]

Yes! At a certain point (like, say, it being your protagonist's primary motive) not addressing cultural pressure and gender bias becomes refusing to address them.

Refusing to address the roots of an issue ends up pushing the blame for a societal problem onto the character personally, which is cringily unpleasant. Especially so for people - like most women - who have experienced that shift personally. (lots of people prefer to blame individual women for things that are the fault of sexism!) It's relatable in a highly DO NOT WANT kind of way.

[hippogriff13]

Something apparently went wrong with the link to my "Tokyo Tarareba Girls" comments included in this review. The remarks Susan is referring to are toward the end of the comments after her most recent mini-review roundup, at https://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/276327.html#comments . (Hopefully that came out clickable.)

Hippogriff13 (whose pronouns are she/her)

[spindizzy]

My eternal weakness: missing out a speech mark in username tags! I've updated both the link and your pronouns, thank you so much for catching this and letting me know!