Series Focus: Yami no Matsuei

by Nora

It's been a long time since a new manga series caught my attention, and longer still since I felt like raving about it to anyone else. And in this case, the series in question captured my love a long time ago---about a year ago, to be exact, when I stayed up for Yaoicon's all-night video marathon. (It had been shown at Shoujocon for the previous two years, but I never had time to watch it, there.) They ran the animated version of this series at that time, and I managed to stay up to about 4 a.m. to watch the first few episodes. Afterward, I went back to my hotel room, logged on with my laptop, and immediately ordered the entire series in fansub from Soyokaze before collapsing into bed. The tapes, happily, were waiting for me when I got back from the con.

The series is "Yami no Matsuei," for those of you who've guessed (or had similar reactions). Not very exotic, I know; practically everybody in the fandom's heard of it. Not very hard to find, either; a friend picked up the entire series for me at one time, in BookOff. Not very hard to read, at all; the Japanese is pleasantly easy, except for occasional four-kanji-long constructions which usually turn out to be place names or bureucratic terms. (Occasionally they turn out to be important stuff, however---like the name of a powerful spirit-beast or an explanation for why that spirit-beast is currently screwing a dead guy, or something like that. But you can intuit that from the context.) And if you don't feel like slogging through the Japanese, there's even some translations available, at theria.net

So now you have no excuse not to find the manga and read it immediately. Which you should do. "Yami no Matsuei" is shoujo---published and run in Hana to Yume, written by Matsushita Yoko---so you can't expect a lot of solid yaoiesque entrees, but there's enough hinted-at stuff and sexual tension that it can serve as a nice appetizer or after-dinner dessert. Something light to cleanse the palate in between helpings of Rika the Breeder, maybe. (Although I should note that volume 4 contains a none-too-subtle riff on Rika, complete with sadistic boys screwing and killing each other. Fortunately it's lightened by the fact that the main characters keep complaining that they're in a *shoujo* manga, they shouldn't have to deal with "that sort of thing.") Start with the anime if that's easier for you; it's apparently been picked up for commercial release and can no longer be obtained from fansubbers, so you'll either have to wait for the release or borrow the fansubs from someone who got them early (not me; I've already promised to make two sets of copies for friends). But once you've whetted your whistle with the anime, finish up with the manga---trust me on this. The manga's better.

The early part of the story is pretty much the same, however, in both the manga and the OAVs. The story focuses on a young man named Tsuzuki, who's a god of death. Shinigami, to be precise, and on the scale of gods, they're pretty low-ranked in the heavenly hierarchy---on the level of peon salarymen, actually. So in an afterlife which (perhaps allegorically) resembles modern-day society in large degree, the management of the dead is handled in a very efficient and bureucratic fashion, through a government-like entity known as Juu Ou Chou (which resembles the Japanese Diet building, for obvious parody reasons). Here, Tsuzuki really is a salaryman, and he has all the usual problems of any Japanese government employee---he hasn't had a vacation in 70 years, he never gets a bonus, his lunch breaks are always too short, and his boss thinks he's an idiot. In between these ordinary trials, however, his job is anything but. Tsuzuki regularly goes down to the human world, investigates cases of weird deaths (or people who should have died), and resolves them---sometimes by killing people or solving a mystery, and sometimes by summoning one of his 12 Shikigami and getting magically medieval on whoever's gotten in his way. This is one of the great mysteries about Tsuzuki, you see---he's sweet, he's kind, he's a glutton, and he's incompetent when it comes to corporate climbing, but he also might be a super-powerful part-demon with amnesia who attracts powerful freaks like flypaper. Maybe. We're not sure on the amnesia thing.

But I'm getting sidetracked; that's just the main course. The side-dishes come in the form of Tsuzuki's relationships with various partners, enemies, fellow Shinigami, and even his own Shikigami (god/spirit entities that he can summon, which take the form of beasts in the human world). The main partner that he has in the series is a sullen little fellow whose character design just screams "uke," by the name of Hisoka. The main enemy that he has to deal with---at least for the first few tankoubon---is a handsome, charming, psychotic fellow by the name of Muraki who once raped and killed Hisoka, and who wants to do the same to Tsuzuki for reasons that become clear (sort of) in the story. His fellow Shinigami are one of the tastiest (and strangest) collections of biseinen outside of a CLAMP series. There's Tatsumi, the junior boss who alternately bullies and protects Tsuzuki (how's that for hurt-comfort?); Watari, the lovely blond mad scientist who's trying to create a sex-change potion for some reason; and Terazuma, who accidentally got himself bonded with a feline Shikigami and now has adorable cat-ears and stripes (or rather, they would be adorable if he didn't periodically transform into a gigantic raging black spirit-tiger and destroy everything in sight). Tsuzuki's Shikigami are even better, once we enter their world and see them in humanoid forms: Souryuu, a tall, long-haired biseinen who dresses and acts like a Chinese emperor (although occasionally he dresses down in a black trenchcoat and goth boots); Touda, the fire-demon who we get to see in an absolutely yummy and far too brief naked bondage scene in volume 10; Byakko, a sweet lazy cat-man; Rikugou, who's beautiful as long as he doesn't open all six of his eyes; and Kijin, Souryuu's gentle son who I'm just dying to slash with his dad.

If that's not enough for you, later on we get to meet Koutarou and Koujirou, a pair of crow Shikigami who are hideous normally, but very tasty in human form (they have wings! and natural eye-makeup!); Kurikara Ryuu-Ou, an "evil" Shikigami who's a little badass, but who really just needs a hug; and Hisoka's father, who gets possessed by a demon in one of the most explicit tentacle-yaoi scenes I've ever seen outside of doujinshi. And of course there's Tsuzuki himself, who's biseinen with lovely purple eyes, and who's pretty clearly reversible---he goes all vulnerable and innocent around characters like Muraki and Souryuu, but he's seme-ishly masterful with characters like Hisoka.

target="_blank">

And to really make things fun, the story very self-consciously dances along the thin line between "plain shoujo" and boys' love on a regular basis. On several occasions the male characters get into erotic situations with one another, and the only thing preventing out-and-out yaoi moments is a) the hilarious "let's play with another yaoi cliche!" mood of the story, and b) the author's side-note protests to her out-of-control characters that "this is a shoujo manga! There are probably elementary school girls looking at this! Quit it!" She lets things get pretty hot, though, before she reins the boys in.

In short, in addition to the humorous and interesting plot, the in-jokes about Japanese corporate/government society, and the morality plays on the nature of life and death, the series is a top-notch eye-candy festival that will very likely have you drooling buckets into your own lap while you read.

Check it out!