Takamichi’s separation causes her to really examine her feelings, but there might be bigger problems than love to worry about.
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Touya Tobina
Translation: Tetsuichiro Miyaka
Adaptation: Annette Roman
What They Say:
Takamichi’s Jiu Jiu Obedience Training Goals
1. Play nice with your new temporary masters. But retain your loyalty.
2. Resist plots to eliminate your services…permanently.
3. At night, the Sickle Weasels come.
Content: (please note that the content portion of reviews may contain spoilers)
After the events at the end of the last volume, the family heads begin to question the safety of allowing jiu jiu to bond so closely with hunters who may not always be around. To make sure that the jiu jiu can work with any hunter, a switch is proposed — for one month, Takamichi, Mika, and Seijuro will trade their jiu jiu. No one is happy about this, including Snow and Night. But with the groups mixed up, Snow, Night, Takamichi, and the others, begin to learn things about themselves, as well as understand some of the secrets of the others.
One thing that Takamichi starts working out is her feelings for Snow and Night. When Ripple, Seijuro’s crow jiu jiu, explains what love is — “an illness that completely fills your mind and body with thoughts of someone” — she begins to wonder if that’s what her feelings for the two wolves are. Things become a little awkward, as Takamichi is somehow entirely clueless on love, but on what actually defines a couple or even a date. Thenthe incest feel I was nervous about back in the beginning comes up, as another character tries to get Takamichi to clarify her feelings for Snow and Night by asking if she wants to “make love” with them. This causes her to have some sort of a panic attack, ranting that she can’t imagine having sex with Snow or Night; which kind of hilariously freaks everyone else out (“Could you please stop repeating that word inside a shojo manga?!”). Of course, nothing much seems to come of this, as she goes back to imagining taking them for walks and sleeping with them in their dog forms, but while I’m glad to leave that awkwardness alone, it feels a little like Tobina’s backtracking in order to avoid the sticky situation she herself created.
The jiu jiu return to their rightful masters a little over halfway through the volume, and that’s when Tobina starts to pack in some more plot. Characters begin to notice that there’s something strange about the deaths of two of the old family heads, Mika and Seijuro’s fathers, and that, though he was still only the heir at the time, that may have some connection with Takamchi’s brother Yuki’s death. It’s looking more and more like Seijuro’s older brother, the current head of his family, is the villain, with his dislike of jiu jiu, subtle manipulation of Seijuro, and his possible framing of the sickle-weasel, White, in attacking hunters, but Tobina’s storytelling leaves things foggy. There’s not even a hint of what his motivations might be, and so far it’s impossible to see what’s making the other characters so freaked out. Other seemingly important information is difficult to interpret as well, mostly thanks to Tobina’s still confusing panel layouts, which require a lot more studying than should be necessary to figure out what’s happening. A discovery during training lead Mika and Snow to realize that there’s something more to Snow and Night’s power than even Takamichi is aware of, but what that means, and if it’s an actual danger, isn’t made clear.
In Summary
That most of this book is taken up by Takamichi examining her feelings is a little annoying, as it makes the love story rather complicated (I think she’s basically got four guys that are probably in love with her?) but that it also seems to be something that Tobina tries to take immediately back, as she makes Takamichi too innocent and also too insistent on treating Snow and Night like pets. A lot of plot gets packed in later on, but it’s so condensed, and at times difficult to interpret, that it doesn’t create enough anxiety and interest on its own. There are some pretty funny moments in this volume, like when Ripple and White meet the vampire Meru for the first time, and some truly adorable end-of-chapter character moments when Tobina flashes back to the old family head meeting when Takamichi and the others were children. That’s where I wish the story would focus, and Seijuro and Mika seem complicated enough on their own to make this an engrossing shojo, but Tobina’s made things too complicated for that, so we’ll have to see how she manages to untie all of the knots.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: C+
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: A-
Age Rating: 13+
Released by: Viz Media
Release Date: April 2nd, 2013
MSRP: $9.99
