OrpheusEurydice2.0102

OrpheusEurydice2.0102_Ikeda

Manga panel: Lovers embrace above a forest scene where a man and woman stand apart, surrounded by falling leaves

Serialized first in Margaret magazine 1975-1976, then in Monthly Seventeen from 1977 to 1981; eventually reissued in Shueisha. The move from Margaret (a younger audience) to Seventeen was stipulated by Ikeda herself and was designed, she says, to direct the plot toward a more mature shojo readership. Clearly there is similarity to Ikeda's Rose of Versailles (ベルサイユのばら) (1973-). Both feature a female protagonist who lives life as a man. Though Rose may be better known, some regard Window as a greater work, a more refined masterpiece. A fraction of the epic manga (about 15%) has been translated into English. Consequently, anglophone scholarship is limited. Indeed, the only such found, N.A. Theisen’s, engages in a clever theoretical analysis of an error — not Ikeda’s divergence from myth but an intermediary’s — and its mistaken interpretation should, therefore be corrected. This correction plays to the paper’s second goal, I.e. to demonstrate that Ikeda’s adaptation is not at all ham-handed, but, conversely, remarkably sophisticated as an adaptation of one of Western culture’s most pervasive myths. The manga’s latter third, which is not yet translated into English, deals with the Russian Revolution with truly remarkable attention to geographical verisimilitude. The third and final objective of the paper is to demonstrate how the Eurydice myth, specifically as adapted by Ikeda, plays with the trends of SHOJO (young, female adult narrative) manga per se. Ikeda’s sensitivity to the so-called “Love Trap” bears careful reading.

Bibliography

Theisen, N.A. 2011. “Declassicizing the Classical in Japanese Comics: Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo’s Song” in G. Kovacs and C.W. Marshall, Classics and Comics (OUP), 63.

Anan, Nobuko (2016). Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137372987.

Fujimoto, Yukari. 1998. Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aru no? Shojo manga ga utsusu kokoro no katachi (Where do I belong? The shape of the heart as reflected in girls’ comics.) Tokyo: Gakuyo

AIMS 2021 abstract: Tracking Orpheus through St Petersburg: Gender Bending and Geographical shojo.