G-Senjo no Maria

Catholic girls' schools as portrayed in manga aren't generally known for being accurate. Japan is not a Catholic country; Catholicism is to them what Buddhism is to Americans who wear the Buddha on their t-shirts and get him tattooed onto their backs. That's where G-Senjo no Maria stands out. The author, Miwa Ueda, attended a Catholic women's college and based the titular G-Senjo on it. She doesn't seem much better informed about Catholicism than the typical mangaka, but what she doesn't do is exotify it. That makes Gloria School is more like an real Catholic school than any other I've seen in manga.



G-Senjo no Maria establishes its lack of sentimentalism about Catholicism right off the bat: it opens with the schoolgirl characters selling Bibles stolen from their school church on the street to pay for their friend's dating expenses. They get caught but get let off with only some added cleaning duty (okay, so that's not that realistic).



But G-Senjo no Maria is not about G-Senjo. It's a deeply character-based story about a girl coming to terms with her sister's death. It's about growing up and moving on, symbolized by the girls' crumbling pre-war dormitory finally being torn down. It's a beautiful, heartfelt, lingering story, vastly different from the typical Catholic schoolgirl manga and all the better for it.

Only the Silent Three Could Help Her

People sometimes give shoujo manga credit for being the first popular genre of comics for girls. But during the 50s ans 60s, when the prototypes of modern shoujo were just being developed, another kind of girls' comics were already thriving halfway around the world in the United Kingdom.

British girls' comics were circulated in periodicals such as Bunty, Judy, and Diana which bore quite a resemblance to shoujo's Margaret, Ciao, and Princess, with comics sharing pages with short stories, recipes, and beauty tips. The kinds of stories they covered reflected the kinds of stories that were popular in girls' novels of the day - so naturally many of them were girls' school stories.

Most of the school stories were thoroughly of the Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton type: hockey games, midnight feasts, pranks and scrapes. This one, though, which I read on the awesome comic blog Out of This World, has an interesting twist. It's about three girls who dress in hooded robes and black masks to become "The Silent Three", a secret society that works in secret to give their aid to those who ask for it.

This time, it's a school maid who asks for help. She's been sacked for breaking the headmistress's vase, but says that she didn't do it. It's up to the Silent Three to find up who framed her. It's all quite exciting, if implausible.



And it's got me well hooked on British girls' comics, too. I'll be on the lookout for more comic school stories.

Secret Places

It's World War II. The Allied and Axis forces are entangled in a bloody battle that spans the globe with no end in sight. And, somewhere in London, a German girl named Laura enrolls in an unremarkable girls' day school.

The wartime anti-German hatred is extended to her as a matter of course; she is called a hun and blamed when an English soldier is killed by a German. During that first week she is ostracized by all the girls - all except one, Patience.



Patience (played by the beautiful Tara MacGowran) is a thoughtful girl with enough insight to realize how unfair her classmates' treatment of Laura is. By not being cruel to her she ends up befriending her almost accidentally. Their friendship deepens as the months pass in their idyllic setting, seemingly so far from the war, until Patience's sentimental affection for Laura grows to such a level that she feels she must end it. Her decision has disastrous effects.



Secret Places is the kind of film that is more occupied with atmosphere than plot. There are plenty of lovely spans of the English summer countryside as nostalgic piano music plays. The whole film is imbued with so much nostalgia that it seems almost sepia-toned with it. There is drama, multiple storylines of it, but not a single loose end is ever really tied; whoever was missing is either still missing or dead, and Patience's attraction to Laura feels more forgotten about in the end than anything else.



Still it was a beautiful film that will linger in my memory for a long time. I've got to seek out the book it was based on.

A Fourth-Form Friendship

The school idol taking a sudden interest in the everygirl for no reason anyone can understand is a common tropism in Japanese girls' school fiction - so common, in fact, that I can't think of a single girls' school shoujo-ai that doesn't use it. Sachiko and Yumi, Miya-sama and Nanako, all those girls from Hana Monogatari... the list goes on. And now to it can be added Mabel and Aldred from A Fourth Form Friendship, definitely the nicest Angela Brazil novel I've read yet.



The spirited Angela Brazil heroine au jour is Aldred, a fifteen-year-old with "charming gypsy looks" who has never attended a school before. She's absolutely determined to be the best in everything when she gets there - grades, sports, even popularity. But a spontaneous art lesson reveals that Aldred is all too quick to take credit for other's work, and let's just say that if that trait were a gun, it would be Chekhov's.

When she gets to the Grange she's not a little disappointed to learn that the girls don't find her absolutely enthralling. In fact, she has a little trouble making friendships at first. Then Mabel enters the picutre.

Mabel is the kind of idealized character that might make even Sachiko jealous. She's gorgeous, with waist-length, wavy red hair, fair skin, and light blue eyes. She comes from noble blood. She's inimitably good. And - and this is significant - although everyone likes her and she's kind to everyone, she never seems to want to make close friendships.

So it's hardly surprising that the Grange goes into a frenzy when Mabel suddenly approaches Aldred, asks her if she had stayed at a Seaforth during the summer, and from that point on is utterly inseparable from her.

At first it seems as though Mabel could fit right in with the perfect and incomprehensible oneesama of shoujo-ai, but in fact she does have a reason for her attraction to Aldred that isn't "because she's cute" or something - she believes that Aldred saved a boy from a fire at Seaforth. It turns out that a girl with a similar last name had done that there a few weeks before Aldred arrived, and as the story came down the grapevine to Mabel it somehow ended up with Aldred as the protagonist. Now, Aldred doesn't learn this until she overhears it when Mabel tells it to some girls as Aldred's hiding in a closet (she just kind of felt like going in there). But by then she's so fond of Mabel that she can hardly just walk out, tell the truth, and perhaps end their friendship. Instead she vows to clear up the understanding when Mabel brings it up to her herself. And when that time comes - well, what would you do?



The rest of the novel features Aldred getting into scores of nasty scrapes and silly mischief, with Mabel defending her all the while. By now most of the girls of the school have heard of her reputation from saving people from fires, but she nearly starts more than one fire herself.



I won't tell you how it all works out, but I will say that it's very exciting and not too didactic and that it ends with a kiss - a kiss of "complete reconciliation and forgiveness" that commences a friendship "founded at last upon the rock of self-sacrifice and mutual endeavour". Now if that doesn't beat all the cutesy "hontoni daisuki" and luminescent blushing of shoujo-ai, I don't know what does.

Maria-sama ga Miteru (season 1)

With my preoccupation with girls' school stories and idyllicism and roses and whatnot, it might be surprising to know that I avoided watching Maria-sama ga Miteru for a long time. I don't know why exactly I avoided it so - something about the art style, the exotification of Catholocism, the odd fan base. I even watched a few minutes of the first episode and deemed it too uninteresting to bother slogging through. Eventually, though, for some reason I can't remember anymore, I returned to the spurned series. I'll always be grateful that I did.



Maria-sama ga Miteru (literally Mary is Watching) is set at Lillian Jogakuen, an all-girls K-12 school with rich tradition and even richer students. The school has a "soeur system" of pairing upperclassmen with underclassmen for guidance and companionship. The tie between soeurs is an ambiguous kind of love somewhere between filial, friendly, and romantic, chaste but passionate.

At the center of all this is the Yamayurikai (Mountain Lily Council), a kind of student council made up of only members of the very most upper-echelon of Lillian Jogakuen's students. The Yamayurikai is split up into three groups: Rosa Chinensis, Rosa Foetida, and Rosa Gigantea, each of which has three levels: Rosa, en bouton (in bud) and en bouton petite soeur. These girls are idolized by the rest of the students and it hardly needs mentioning that there isn't much the underclassmen wouldn't do to be chosen as a petite soeur by one of them. Enter Yumi Fukuzawa, this series' particular incarnation of your friendly everyday shy schoolgirl. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that, after various wacky hijinks, she gets chosen as the petite soeur of Sachiko Ogasawara, the most idolized of all the en boutons.



It's tempting to compare this series to the Oniisama e because of their similar plots, but the atmosphere of the two is so vastly different. While Oniisama e is the epitome of melodrama, Maria-sama ga miteru seems almost to be anti-melodrama - if there is ever a conflict, it only lasts for an episode and a half or so, after which the girls return to their state of almost aggressive calm. Everything is peaceful and gentle and absolutely mild.

A more apt comparison would be to the "Class S" genre of pre-war Japan: stories of romantic friendships between upperclassmen and underclassmen at all-girls schools. Japanese reviewers often describe Maria-sama ga miteru as a rebirth of the once-beloved genre, and its popularity launched a legion of knockoffs of various qualities (which will probably be reviewed in this blog sooner of later). Whether Yoshiya Nobuko would be proud is debatable, but for better or for worse Maria-sama ga miteru and its copycats have made the schoolgirl love she championed live on.

The Jolliest School of All

I admit I was a little disappointed with the first Angela Brazil novel I read and reviewed, The Luckiest Girl in the School, with its down-to-earth wartime didacticism and its day school for middle-class girls setting. When I think of Angela Brazil, I think of impossibly gorgeous boarding school settings and stories with no purpose other than wholesome escapist fantasy. That's The Jolliest School of All in a nutshell.



The setting of The Jolliest School of All is just about as escapist as it gets - a school for high-class English and American girls in beautiful southern Italy called The Villa Camellia. The school building is a rambling old mansion with an enormous lawn full of ancient frescoes and orange trees. When her father is transferred to Naples, main character Irene is enrolled in this Mediterranean garden of maidens and escapes to a paradise from dull, gray London, just like the intended readers of the story.

The following twenty chapters are pure, episodic fun, as usual. All the proper boarding school frolics take place - holding clandestine tea parties in the dorms, playing harmless pranks on the staff, sneaking out and managing to not be caught through some unlikely cleverness. The girls take trips to various tourist spots in the area, including a tour of Pompeii and a hike to the top of Vesuvius. A recurring conflict is the rivalry between two of the school's "secret sororities" (making me think of Oniisama e, of course) - The Camellia Buds and the Starry Circle. The girls take their sororities very seriously, with occult ceremonies, ciphers, and a "buddy system" which they leave up to "Kismet". It's all faintly ridiculous and absolutely delightful to read about.



In the final two or three chapters, things take a darker turn. The reason for the mopiness of Irene's mopey "buddy" Lorna is revealed - her father was injustly accused of cooking the books. That's why he hides in Naples and refuses to speak to any English people. I guess I shouldn't reveal the ending, but rest assured that it's thoroughly predictable and lots of fun!

Intruding on the fun every now and then is a little old-fashioned imperialist self-satisfaction and white supremacy. Did you catch that the school is exclusively for English and American girls? Well, actually, it's exclusively for Anglo-Saxon girls. The girls are discouraged to even associate with other "races", and Désirée Legrand, whose family hails from the French-influenced island of Jersey, is the butt of a lot of teasing.

And then we get this gem of a passage when someone gives an inspirational speech after an "Anglo-Saxon League" pageant in which the girls dressed up as all of England's imperialist properties:

"Girls," she began, "I asked you to come here because I want to have a talk with you about our school life. You'll all agree with me that we love the Villa Camellia. It's a unique school. I don't suppose there's another exactly like it in the whole world. Why it's so peculiar is that we're a set of Anglo-Saxon girls in the midst of a foreign-speaking country. We ourselves are collected from different continents—some are Americans, some English, some from Australia, or New Zealand, or South Africa—but we all talk the same Anglo-Saxon tongue, and we're bound together by the same race traditions. Large schools in England or America take a great pride in their foundation, and they play other schools at games and record their victories. We can't do that here, because there are no foreign teams worth challenging, so we've always had to be our own rivals and have form matches. In a way, it hasn't been altogether good for us. We've got into the bad habit of thinking of the school in sections, instead of as one united whole. I've even heard squabbles among you as to whether California or Cape Colony or New South Wales are the most go-ahead places to live in. Now, instead of scrapping, we ought to be glad to join hands. If you think of it, it's a tremendous advantage to grow up among Anglo-Saxon girls from other countries and hear their views about things. It ought to keep you from being narrow, at any rate. You get fresh ideas and rub your corners off. What I want you particularly to think about, is this: it's the duty of all English-speaking people to cling together. If they've ever had any differences it's time they forgot them. The world seems to be in the melting-pot at present, and there are many strange prophecies about the future. Black and yellow races are increasing and growing so rapidly that they may be ready to brim over their boundaries some day and swamp the white civilizations. Anglo-Saxons ought to be prepared, and to stand hand in hand to help one another. I've been reading some queer things lately. One is that a new continent is slowly rising out of the Pacific Ocean—Lemuria they call it—and some day, hundreds of years hence, there may be land there instead of water, and people living on it. They say too that the center of gravity of both the British Empire and the United States is moving towards the Pacific. Sydney may grow more important than London, and San Francisco than New York when the trade routes make them fresh pivots of energy. Another funny thing I read is that as the world is changing a new race seems to be emerging. Travelers say that the modern children in Australia don't look in the least like English children or French children, or any European nation—they are a fresh type. America has been populated by people from practically all the older countries, but I read that children who are being born there now differ in their head measurements from babies of the older races. Perhaps some of you may be interested in this and some of you may only be bored, but what I want to rub in is that if a new, and perhaps superior, race is evolving it's surely part of our work to help it on. Here we all are, girls from England, America, and the British Colonies, of the same race and speaking the same language. Let us make an Anglo-Saxon League, and pledge ourselves that wherever we go over the face of the world we will carry with us the best traditions. We're out for Peace, not War, and Peace comes through sympathy. The women of those great eastern nations, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Hindoos, who are only just awakening to a sense of freedom, will look to us Westerners for their example. Can't we hold out the hand of sisterhood to them, and teach them our highest ideals, so that in the centuries to come they may be our friends instead of our enemies? It's a case of 'Take up the White Man's burden.' We stand together, not as Scotch, or Canadians, or New Zealanders or Americans, but as good Anglo-Saxons, the apostles of peace, not 'frightfulness.'

That's right, girls; keep the race pure or witness the rise of an alien species of big-headed genius babies.

Oniisama e...

If there's one thing I really like in an all-girls school story, it's melodrama. Star-crossed lovers, tragic beauties, excruciating heartache. The more over-the-top the sadness, the better. And no manga has ever been more over-the-top melodramatic than Riyoko Ikeda's 1975 Oniisama e - or done it as well.



Oniisama e (To My Elder Brother) introduces us to Nanako, your typical ordinary-girl heroine - cheerful, preoccupied with fitting in, and very naive. She soon learns that the exclusive Seiran Girls' Academy is no place for naive girls. At its center is the Sorority, a group of untouchably beautiful, accomplished, high-class girls who rule the school in ways I don't really get. Naturally, every student would pretty literally kill to join the ranks of those girls.

I'm sure you can guess what follows.



Nanako is chosen as a sorority candidate for reasons that are fairly incomprehensible (even when we get the Monologue of Explanation later on). She's not particularly smart, or beautiful, or even wealthy. And that makes all the other unremarkable girls very jealous.



The three-volume series follows Nanako as she becomes a member of the Sorority. She learns the dark secrets behind the ladylike facades of the Sorority members and the people they associate with, especially Saint-Just, the truant student whose masculinity and melancholy fascinate Nanako, and some secrets within her own family.



This is a work by Riyoko Ikeda, the award-winning, beloved member of the Year 24 Group. She's most famous for the French Revolutionary epic Versailles no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), which also had melodrama through the roof and extremely manly long-haired females (I get the feeling she has some kind of preoccupation with them). Nothing that Ikeda does isn't amazing, but when it comes to artwork and sheer creativity in layouts, this is hands-down her best work. Borders, shmorders. The action in Oniisama e cascades down the page, with shoujo symbolism overload in every corner. I mean, look at this page:



And I pretty much chose that at random. Lots of manga artists, even the best ones, feel free to get lazy on a page or two, but not Ikeda. Every single page is beautifully-drawn and amazingly laid out and gorgeous.

I'd say it's one of the best contributions to the all-girls school genre of any medium.