Araiso Private High School Students’ Council Executive Committee
Title (Japanese): Shiritsu Araiso Koutou Gakkou Seitokai Shikkoubu
Title (Chinese): Nan Nan Zui You Ji (Love Series)
Mangaka: Minekura Kazuya
No. of vols: 1-2
"School Regulation Article 5: About the Executive Committee of the Students' Council. Students who possess outstanding intellect, physical strength and a strong sense of justice are given the Executive Committee armband and are responsible for upholding order in the school. No one is allowed to interfere with their authority."
In Araiso HS, the Students' Council Executive Committee is nothing like those we have in our own schools. Consisting of a group of five students, the Araiso ExCo is an elite fighting team which maintains school order in their own unconventional (usually violent) way. At the core of the ExCo are two boys, Kubota Makoto and Tokitou Minoru. They are superb fighters and are well-known over the school for their boldness, strength and suspiciously homosexual relationship.
Although this manga sounds like an exercise in glorifying high-school yakuza behaviour, Araiso is instantly recognizable as a work of Minekura Kazuya. Like the protagonists in her famous other work Saiyuki, Kubota and Tokitou are rough, independent bad boys who possess good hearts beneath the tough exterior. They follow no one's rules but their own and are quick to mete out their brand of justice, whether they are wearing the official armband or not.
The characters Kubota and Tokitou are actually the protagonists of another of Minekura-sensei’s works, Wild Adapter. According to Minekura-sensei’s message at the beginning of the tankoubon, she had drawn Araiso just to introduce the two characters and create some publicity for Wild Adapter but somehow or other, Araiso gradually became serialized as a manga series in its own right! I have not read Wild Adapter yet, but it appears that it is a very dark, bloody and disturbing manga. And this little snippet of information makes Araiso all the more interesting to read.
For Araiso is a light-hearted, silly manga that pokes fun at its own silliness and at the shounen-ai/yaoi genre. It can't be cut down by critics for its general lack of realism and inanity because it recognizes this and even celebrates it. The series has no overall plot but is made of many short, stand-alone stories full of wacky situations and pointless fun.
However, there is one episode which stands out for its focus on contemporary Japan’s dysfunctional family institution. In that episode, Kubota berates two working parents who neglect their young daughter in their frenzied attempts to earn more money, ironically, for the child. The reader also gets a small glimpse into Kubota's private life as he hints that he may have suffered as a latch-key kid himself. It would be interesting for readers of Wild Adapter to see if this information fits in with the characterization of Kubota in the other work.
But apart from this episode, Araiso is by and large a manga that does not take itself seriously. Kubota and Tokitou are guilty of constantly creating situations ripe for fellow schoolmates (and yaoi fans) to misunderstand. A chapter even starts off with a rather explicit scene of the two boys making out in the ExCo room, only for the reader to turn the page and realize that the scene is part of a manga drawn by the yaoi fangirls of the school Manga Club. The manga-within-a-manga device and the ingenious ways in which Minekura-sensei arouses the reader's expectations with glaringly yaoi scenes and then undercuts them by revealing the mundane truth, all poke fun at Araiso's classification as a "shounen-ai" manga. And while Kubota and Tokitou repeatedly assure everyone that they are not gay, there are many other characters who are openly gay and provide plenty of laughs with their attempts to get the pretty boys they desire. To top off the humorous self-reflexivity, there is a transsexual teacher in charge of the medical room! As Kubota and Tokitou both admit, Araiso HS is a strange school where anything and everything goes.
I truly enjoyed reading Araiso and I was pretty disappointed to discover that there are only two volumes in the series. If you are looking for some easy reading and good laughs, especially if you are familiar with the shounen-ai/yaoi genre, I would highly recommend Araiso.
Picture of Kubota and Tokitou taken from http://bane-huntress.com/OffLicence. Go to her site for scanlations of the manga and lovely scans from the artbook Sugar Coat ^___^
kaoru said at 7:33 AM