Reading manga generally requires some form of suspension of disbelief, and the cleverly titled Manga Sutra Vol. 1 (Tokyopop) is no exception: Here you have to imagine that it’s possible for two 25-year-old virgins to meet, marry and make it to their wedding-night bed without ever so much as having made out before.
Our protagonists are Makoto and Yura Onada, and their complete lack of experience serves two purposes in creator Katsu Aki’s extraordinary book, which itself is a dual-purpose one. Their naiveté fuels the conflict and humor of the narrative, and it also serves as a jumping-off point for lessons on sex for the reader. Manga Sutra is two-thirds domestic sex comedy and one-third instruction manual.
It opens on their wedding night, with Makoto freaking out on the bed, while Yura is freaking out in the shower. (Neither knows the other is a virgin.) They had met through a professional matchmaker, which apparently still accounts for 10 percent of Japanese marriages (the book is peppered with similar statistics and facts in the margins).
There’s a great deal of nudity and sex, obviously, but it’s hardly pornographic. Were it rated like an American movie, it would be R ... well, maybe NC-17, given the MPAA’s squeamishness about sex vs. violence. At any rate, while Aki draws lots of sex-having, the genitals are always cleverly obscured through pixilation or well-placed dialogue and shadow effects, and there are no penetration shots—or, at least, when it comes time for one, the panels switch from stylized drawings to medical-looking diagrams.
Each chapter is more or less devoted to exploring a different subject—foreplay, making out, breasts, penises, Japanese love hotels, etc.—with unifying conflicts like Makoto’s inability to last longer than a minute or so and the pressure the young couple feels from their vastly more experienced siblings, who are quite eager to give advice.
The instructional aspects are wide and varied, from how to take off a bra to the different shapes and sizes of various parts from person to person, and how it all works.
But most importantly, they never overpower the story, which, at its heart, is a very engaging comedy about two earnest but clueless young people trying desperately to get to know one another and make each other happy.
There’s an unfortunate, perhaps unavoidable tension to the production of the book, which comes shrink-wrapped in a cardboard slipcover, with a parental-advisory warning and an “18+” age-rating. I suppose it’s understandable that the publisher would want to err on the side of not getting sued because someone’s kid gets their hands on a naughty comic book, but at the same time, an awful lot of 18-year-olds will know an awful lot of this stuff by the time they’re old enough to buy and read the book.
Of course, the thing about sex and sexual relationships is that everyone could always stand to learn more. As much as I wish I could have read this when I was a teenager, I still learned a lot from it.