After 14 I was starved for manga that comes in regular sized volumes and isn’t completely ludicrous, so I ended up reading the two currently released volumes of 煙と蜜 by 長蔵ヒロコ today as well.
I enjoyed them, but my mixed feelings do still persist.
On the unambiguously good side, I love how well the art conjures a very specific time and place:
大正五年 名古屋
I enjoy getting that flavor of a real place and time filtered through the fiction, and it’s nice to see and hear about real places like the 金鯱城, or to see 夏目漱石 namedropped for like the third time in a period piece I’ve read.
The uncomfortableness I mentioned in the last post about the premise is a tricky one though.
To be clear – it 100% is not a sexualized story about how great it is to have a child bride.
The most important bar is well cleared in that the story and all of the characters in it treat the girl, Himeko, 100% like the naive child that she is. But since she’s our main POV character, it can be hard to figure out how much the book itself agrees with her naivete, because her main reaction to the betrothal is that she’s psyched about it - “my 許嫁 is a cool adult man - 素敵！”
Like it’s a lot of this:
The book (and Harta’s copy about it, from what I remember) leans hard enough on “circumstances put these two engaged people in a mildly intimate situation and it’s embarrassing!” type situations, played for laughs and heart flutters, that I do worry that’s like, all it’s going to end up being - a romance from the perspective of the younger side of a worryingly vast age gap.
But if I had to guess, I think this will end up being a coming of age story, with the “romance” complicated significantly as the fiance, as-yet stone-faced and mysterious but seemingly kind, either reveals more of a sinister side, and/or like, dies in WWI. After all (not knowing really anything about Japanese involvement in that war), he’s a soldier and it’s 1916, so foreshadowing-wise, I feel like it would be a surprise if that’s NOT how the author gets out of the uncomfortable marriage scenes set for three years from now… As much or more than the “romance” angle, the mystery of who Bunji is and what he thinks of all this and what he’s going to do seem to me like the hook driving the plot as well.
But who knows! That’s a problem with serial storytelling - it’s hard to seed big tonal shifts ahead of time, I think, and on the face of it, there’s surprisingly few “yes, we know this situation is not great” winks to the camera in these early volumes, so the tenterhooks feeling of “depending on the choices the author makes, this could be quite good or really, really, really bad…” feeling persists, which is too bad.
I’m happy enough to keep reading it incidentally in magazine form (and will read the volume coming out in a week or two to catch up still), but I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable recommending it without a more definite sense of where it was going.
As for what I drew next… it’s らんま1/2! So this won’t be the last I hear of the word 許嫁 for a bit…
I was hoping to draw this because I actually really like the series, but haven’t ever gotten close to finishing it, and it’s been in limbo for a while after I read a few volumes when I was still reading slowly enough in Japanese to count by volume more than series… I’d like to read more of it before exploring Rumiko Takahashi’s other work.
I don’t know if I’ll just try to churn through the whole rest of it, or take breaks as it gets to be too much of… Ranma stuff or what, but I’ll at least try to make some progress for a while.