Heterochromia

Yesterday right before my flight back home, I decided to write a blog post as soon as I come back, but I wasn’t sure what to write about. During the flight, I started reading Suppli and there I have my topic: I will be ranting about why Suppli reflects my current life nearly as well as Nana used to reflect it back then. (The only, but main difference is that Nana made me feel touched and cry all the time, while Suppli mainly makes me think and admire the aesthetical merits of the drawing style.)

Suppli by Mari Okazaki (published by Tokyopop in english, and under the title “Complément affectif” by Akata/Delcourt in french) is a real josei manga unlike Hataraki Man, which is published in Morning Magazine. Now that I have read Suppli, I actually realized how seinen Hataraki Man really is, at least the manga (while the anime clearly is aimed at a rather genderless audience). The 3-months-without-sex joke is actually taken rather light-heartedly in that series, and the main focus in the series is still Hiroko’s struggling through work problems, her work relationships with her co-workers as well as the nature of work itself. Well, basically it’s about work everywhere, and lack of sex/love life is just a side symptom. Suppli is different, it starts where Hataraki Man has ended and thus pushes the main character Fujii, whose character is pretty similar to Hiroko, into a spiral of love relationships (notice the use of plural *cough*). Even her friends among the co-workers are tightly related to her now rather complicated love life. And the neverending, at first glance ridiculous sounding question is:

Can work save women?

In the anime of Hataraki Man, “sometimes work is your salvation”. In Suppli, we clearly get the answer that for a woman, it cannot really be the case. The world cannot turn around without work, but work might solve all kinds of problems, but it always is an obstacle to love. At the beginning of Suppli, we get another question by Fujii’s boyfriend: “Work or me, what is more important to you?” It’s such a typical and clichéd question, but at the end of the day, I have the impression that despite the fact that the manga mainly focuses on relationships, in modern society, work always comes first, while an unhappy love life destroys you as well. Thus is the base for all relationship problems in Suppli and to me, it seems like it reflects a whole generation of young, well-educated japanese women.

The necessity of both

From some comments I have read on Riuva, it seems like the concept of this kind of workaholic behaviour is not very accepted (among otakus at least, it seems?) However, most people I know and especially every girl I know says that she would never forsake her career for a guy. Also, even though we all love to procrastinate, I have yet to meet somebody at university who does not take their future and classes seriously. (Okay, maybe it’s just that I don’t talk to them even though they exist.) Besides the constant fear of not getting a job, I’m sure that a big part of these people would simply be unhappy if they would not succeed at work or at university - it’s the case for me. Why is it like this? I don’t really want to talk about my college life and probably don’t know enough about the others, but in Suppli, we get a glimpse of how Fujii’s work in a company that produces commercials is like: Every of their projects cost a lot of money, involves lots of people and therefore Fujii has a pretty high degree of responsibility for the work she does. At the same time, she has to turn in projects with storyboards, designs and has to organize everything, so that a decent amoung of creativity and organization skills is needed as well. Finally, the end product is geared towards clients, then the general audience, and Fujii’s dream is to produce a commercial that touches people just like an outstanding commercial used to do with her. Even without this idealism, one can at least get a feeling of happiness by the thought that people would have enjoyed your production, just like I would feel happy if something I would have constructed would be useful. Now how can this kind of work not excite a hard-working person like her?

If you look at the manga, also notice how the women in Suppli are all tall, stylish and look very proud. (This is how I like them, by the way! I want the same clothing style now!) I believe that it’s an asian (and french *hrr*) tradition that good-looking women are very proud - even more when they are smart and successful, and that it’s a big topic to not “sell yourself for too low”.

At the same time, most people I know are from university and thus are rather flexible and free. It’s very easy to combine university duties and a significant other into your life, while it most probably is going to be more difficult as soon as our working life starts. This is the source of Suppli’s storyline.

What about love then? That a woman cannot live without love is a statement in the manga that isn’t even questioned. Traditionally, it’s indeed easier for a woman to get a boyfriend than the other way around, and indeed, even the “perfect woman” character in Suppli speaks about her need for a man (or rather: several men) to support her. In fact, since school/university/work has ever started to become important to me, I had at least one person to support me besides my parents. This is exactly the same for the characters in Suppli: Even though work might hinder their love life, it’s from their men that they get their strength. Even though it is not explicitly stated in the manga in which ways their relationship life has an impact on their work, my personal interpretatio would be that it is definitely a subtle element. This intertwining influence of work and love is the core of the problem indeed!

The modern working woman

So is it different for a man? The cliché says that a man cannot be without work but can be without a woman. At the same time, he would never be asked to quit work and follow a woman somewhere, but can ask the woman himself. Thus is the japanese clichéd world Suppli is in, but at the same time, with our generation of independent women, the conflict of a long-distance-relationship would ’simply’ result in separation (even though personally I find it outrageous to separate when both sides love each other, whatever). In that way, even though the term “woman” as well as “working as a woman” or “the way a woman works” appears in Suppli all the time, I believe that especially with Fujii’s separation from her boyfriend in which he stated that he would make her unhappy if he keeps her up from work, men and women have become the same and have to struggle through the same problems of “work-life-balance”. (God, I hate this expression, by the way. It sounds so yuppie-like.)

Differences between men and women definitely exist, and Suppli (much more than Hataraki Man) emphasizes on this, but I’m not inclined to see it like this. I’m not blind to the fact that most supervisors are men so that women have to compete against them; or that women can be very competitive against other women and have a different style of working, arguing and intrigue against people; or that women have to at least consider the possibility of forsaking work for a man, leading to the dreadful feeling of regret if one has let go a man because of work - even without ever having done this, the thought of it makes my chest tighten. But at the same time, we are moving slowly towards a society in which everybody works, in which everybody can have affairs, lead adultery relationships and be condemned (or not) for that and in which the main problem I have described applies to men in general. Or do men really not care about finding love? As a girl, I probably cannot believe that. Maybe this is the only weakness I would see in Suppli - it is clearly geared towards women with all that “how women work” and the “every woman wants to marry at the end of the day” talk, creating a gap between the genders that has to be torn down.
A second weakness would be the generalization of the behaviour and characters of men and women - but who am I to say that, I’m doing it in this ranting all the time.

In sum, the relationship matters in Suppli are all so practical and reasonable to the point that it does not surprise me anymore that I don’t feel really touched by it unless I see one of Mari Okazaki’s astounishing make-out or sex scenes. I should not think about it too much, after all, I will have at least 2 1/2 years until I start to work, if I’m lucky.