Because She Was Small: Minami's Lover

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we’re talking about Shungiku Uchida’s comic series Minami’s Lover, which ran in the pages of Garo from 1986 to 1987. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• GKIDS announced the English voice cast for Hayao Miyazaki’s new film The Boy and the Heron, including Christian Bale (previously cast in Howl’s Moving Castle) and Florence Pugh. Lots of neat actors here, but I always wonder why professional voice actors aren’t offered these roles.
• The popular webtoon Let’s Play is being adapted into an anime by OLM. Yet in a fascinating turn of events, artist Leeanne M. Krecic jumped ship from Webtoon this year to draw The Dragon King Oath at Manta in 2024. Is the Let’s Play anime a chance for Webtoon to milk as much as it can from Krecic’s leftover intellectual property? We’ll just have to wait and see.
• New trailers were released for upcoming anime adaptation A Sign of Affection, as well as the original series Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. Definitely two series to keep a close eye on next year, especially the latter.
• Another Discotek Day, another set of wild anime licensing announcements. I wrote about them for Comics Beat.
• Cartoonist Dan Schkade, who drew my beloved Lavender Jack, was hired to do Flash Gordon. Neat!

Bookmarks

• For Full Frontal, Matteo Watzky interviewed animator Toshiyuki Inoue about his experience working on Miyazaki’s newest film, The Boy and the Heron. Lots of great information in here about how Miyzaki makes movies, and how his new film differs from his earlier work. Spoilers, though.
• Speaking of The Boy and the Heron, here’s another review, this time by Autumn Wright at Paste.
• Jocelyne Allen wrote about Umi ga Hashiru Endroll, an award-winning manga series about an older woman who goes to film school after her husband’s death.
• Frog-kun wrote about I’m In Love With The Villainess, a series that is “incredibly woke and incredibly big-brained.”
• For Anime Herald, Ethan Halker wrote about the 2008 cult film Speed Racer and how it adapts the 1967 classic Mach GoGoGo.
• Baxter wrote about architectural horror YouTube short Hen na Ie (Strange Home.)

AMV of the Week

Here’s “Running Up That Hill” by katranat.

This piece discusses the ending of Shungiku Uchida’s comic Minami’s Lover. Consider this your spoiler warning.

“What if your girlfriend was tiny?” is a small but surprisingly populated corner of the anime and manga world. Midori Days, for instance, is a romantic comedy about a teenage boy whose right hand is abruptly replaced one day with his secret admirer. Hand Maid May tells the story of a hapless young man and his tiny female robot companion. These are adolescent fantasies that ease relationship fears by making the “girlfriend” smaller and more approachable. They are also stories of cohabitation. The hero of Midori Days must adapt to his new talkative right hand. The protagonist of Hand Maid May must juggle the affections of at least four tiny girlfriends.

Minami’s Lover, a manga series by multi-talented artist Shungiku Uchida, is not so different on the surface. Its heroine Chiyomi becomes six inches tall for reasons that are never explained. She goes to live with her boyfriend Minami, who keeps her in a dollhouse in his room. Chiyomi eats tiny meals and learns how to take care of her small body. Minami learns all about Chiyomi’s physical and emotional needs. The stage is set for a heartwarming story of two young people falling in love. But that’s not quite what happens.

Minami’s Lover never lets the reader forget how difficult it is to be in Chiyomi’s position. She can’t eat, drink or wash herself without Minami’s help. Minami’s cat knocks her around with his paws. Minami himself at times nearly crushes Chiyomi by falling on her or dropping her on the ground. When Minami puts Chiyomi in a box so he can take her on a school field trip, Chiyomi is so overcome by the movement of the bus he rides that she almost chokes on her own vomit. Minami tries his best to understand Chiyomi’s needs. But it’s difficult enough for him to empathize with a teenage girl. Empathizing with a six-inch-tall teenage girl is something else entirely.

If Minami and Chiyomi were adults, this would be a horror story rather than a comedy. What’s scarier than being shrunk to the size of a ballpoint pen and then trapped inside your partner’s bedroom? A24 Pictures is writing the check as we speak. Shungiku Uchida, though, doesn’t let her characters off the hook so easily. It’s Chiyomi that insists on staying with Minami rather than the other way around. Chiyomi is nervous that her parents will send her to the hospital for experimentation. It’s tough to say that she’s wrong, especially considering the medical system’s past history of misogyny. Yet as the days go by and Chiyomi becomes a “missing person,” the reader is tormented by questions without easy answers. Should Chiyomi have gone home to begin with? Did Minami keep Chiyomi’s secret because he wanted her for himself, or because he didn’t want to hurt her, or because he’s a teenager who doesn’t know any better?

Shungiku Uchida also pointedly avoids the infantilization of “tiny girlfriend” stories. Chiyomi menstruates during her stay with Minami. She has to drink, eat, barf and pee. She also struggles with boredom, frustration and fear. Chiyomi has nothing to do all day but hide in Minami’s dollhouse; she has no clothes to wear but whatever Minami is able to sew for her; she worries each night that her six-inch-tall body is unloveable. Uchida draws Minami as a cute little fluffy-haired sprite that emotes like a cartoon character. In moments of despair, though, she folds over and sobs with the despair of a human adult.

Minami faces his own challenges in caring for Chiyomi. He can’t go on school trips because leaving her without food or water would be a death sentence. He struggles with the feeling that Chiyomi is a pet or a doll rather than a human being. In the final chapters of the series, Minami is so overcome by the stress of caring for Chiyomi that he becomes sick. It’s easy in moments like these to be frustrated by Minami. But then, he’s a teenager too. A child should never have been placed in this situation to begin with.

Chiyomi dies in the final chapter of Minami’s Lover. Not because of Minami, but because of a car accident neither can do anything about. In the process she completes her transformation in his mind from a person with wants and needs, to a small animal he had to bury. It’s a shocking ending that I can imagine frustrating readers at the time. But then, Minami’s Lover didn’t run in a magazine for young boys like Shonen Sunday, or even a magazine for young men like Big Comic Spirits. It was serialized in Garo, the most willfully contrarian comics magazine of its day. That Chiyomi dies at the end of Minami’s Lover may be, for better or worse, what makes it a Garo comic.

Minami’s Lover has been adapted to television three times. None of those series chose to preserve the original ending. In fact, the 2004 and 2015 TV dramas reframe the story as a romantic fantasy of Chiyomi’s rather than a dark fantasy of Minami’s. Minami is played by actors that are taller and more handsome than Minami himself ever looked in the comic. Chiyomi herself becomes a shojo romance heroine rather than the grounded young woman of Uchida’s source material.

There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. Minami’s Lover was serialized in 1986 at a very particular time in a very particular magazine. The audience reading at that time may have been very different from the audience watching one of the many television adaptations. Perhaps Uchida chose to show mercy to that TV audience, rather than subjecting them to the same beating that Garo readers were made to endure. Or perhaps the production staff made the call that keeping the original ending would incite a riot.  What else could they expect by ending their quirky romantic comedy with the death of a child?

Still, I can’t help but respect the original ending of Minami’s Lover, precisely because it’s so indigestible. It would be difficult enough for Chiyomi and Minami to navigate their situation as adults. As teenagers, it’s too much for either of them to manage on their own. Sooner or later Minami would make a mistake and Chiyomi would die. Yet the two of them are dealt such a harsh punishment, and so abruptly, that you have to ask: why?

At the very end of the story, Minami walks by a little girl burying an animal. “Mommy, why did Piko die?” she asks. “Because she was small,” her mother says. Chiyomi was hurt for such a pointless reason, and Minami will never understand.

Further Reading

I was turned onto Minami’s Lover by Tegan O’Neil’s excellent review at The Comics Journal. It’s worth a read! I also recommend checking out O'Neil's delightful podcast Udder Madness with Claire Napier.