Manga/Dorama review: Mei-chan no Shitsuji (Mei's Butler) by Riko Miyagi
Girl's manga Mei-chan no Shitsuji/Mei's Butler knows no limits. According to Wikipedia, the manga sells in the millions, the 10-episode TV dorama grabbed between 12% and 17% of Japan each episode, and the DVD was the second-best DVD seller in June of 2009. Now it's being made into a play, which sold out the day tickets went on sale.
The basic concept: a young girl named Mei, thirteen in the manga and fifteen or sixteen in the TV show, is raised poor--but then finds she's actually the displaced heiress to a huge fortune! Not only is she suddenly rich, but she finds that a gorgeous guy named Rihito has been assigned to be her butler, and this twenty-one year old hunk lives to do anything she asks. LIVES for it. It's all he wants! He glories in picking up her socks!
Mei transfers to an elite private school where her sweet nature wins over the snobby rich girls (all of whom have hottie butlers). Mei is adamant about not being interested in her new school's luxuries; it's a third the size of Tokyo, comes complete with its own private helicopter, expensive furniture and fine dining. Of course, she has a male best friend who just happens to be Rihito's younger brother, who is madly in love with Mei and decides that it's HIS goal in life to learn to properly pick up her socks too.
In other words, it's every bad romance stereotype balled into a pink package with butlers, but any romance succeeds or fails on how its written.
So: is it any good?
The TV show and the manga are quite different in execution. I watched the TV show first, and rather liked Mei. She knows her family trade--udon making--well and thus can cook, waitress, and clean with ease and a smile. She's tough, refusing to give up in the face of stubborn classmates who consider her a mere commoner, and loyal to her family; she chooses to go to her new school because leaving will save her family trouble, for example.
Manga Mei is the whiniest, most useless, irritating heroine since Bella Swan. No, Bella is better because at least she can cook. Manga Mei does nothing. Nothing. She tries to cook and makes a mess, so Rihito has to clean up after her. She tries to clean and just can't do it, so Rihito has to press her shirts. And while Mei in the TV show has a crush on Rihito that develops with time, Mei in the manga has a mad OMG HE'S SO HOT-type obsession going on from their first meeting, and pretty much all her decisions are made based on whether or not they'll make Rihito happy.
Also, the TV show has a sense of humor the manga doesn't. The TV show seems to know it's a silly story based on a silly idea, and often pokes fun at itself; the result is, well, fun. The manga, despite cracking occasional jokes that never work, takes its love triangles and drama way too seriously, so all I could think about was what a stupid story I was reading.
And then there's the sex, left out of the TV show. In the manga, Mei's grandfather orders Rihito (twenty-one) to have sex with Mei (thirteen) to bind her to her new family. Gosh, old fat men ordering servants to have sex with their barely pubescent granddaughters--what about that doesn't scream "romance?" And it gets better: girls forcing their butlers to have sex with them (sometimes drugging them to get the job done) and one butler molesting a female student made for grotesque scenes that I think were supposed to be sexy and failed totally.
A final difference: the characters in the manga are more vile than their TV versions. Manga Rihito is described as loving to bully people as though that's cute--yuck! Another character murders an innocent man and smiles about it, a plot detail left out of the show. A third makes a speech in the TV show about how important her butler is to her; in the manga she treats him like crap, beating him often and throwing him out of her house when angry. Miyagi noted: "(My villian) is surprisingly popular, it amazed me. So after all, people like beautiful characters even if they're bad? Is that how it is? ...Me? Of course, I love him."
Yuck squared.
Basically, the TV show is great if you like over-the-top silly comedy, and the manga is a disaster any way you look at it. I'm a fan of a lot of the actresses in the new play, so I can only hope they go more for the TV show in their adaptation.
*
View the dorama here.
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