Valentine's Day, Japanese Style, Part 4:

Watanuki's Gender-Bending Valentine's Dilemma

By Margaret O'Connell
March 9, 2009

As one might expect from a genre given to Cinderella stories and tales of the eventual triumph of apparently average girls, a number of manga heroines have such difficulty with the daunting task of making chocolates from scratch that they are lucky if the results are considered remotely edible by even the most dyed in the wool chocoholic.

However, incidents involving girls' ineptitude at cooking, whether real or fictional, Valentine's Day-related or otherwise, appear to be more often alluded to in passing in manga than dramatized at length. Based on the sorts of situations various mangaka appear to think rate a noticeable reaction from interested-bystander supporting characters, and on former Tartsville regular Rebecca McGregor's descriptions of attitudes toward cooking and gender in the rural Honshu town where she taught English for several years, this may be at least partly because it is still considered less startlingly out of the ordinary — and therefore less comical or dramatic — for teenage Japanese girls to be bad at cooking and cooking-related tasks than it is for Japanese boys to be able to cook at all.

This may explain the emphasis in the supernatural-themed CLAMP manga Xxxholic (Del Rey Manga) on psychically-gifted teenage-boy protagonist Kimihiro Watanuki's cooking abilities. In some chapters there seems to be less attention lavished on Watanuki's preternatural misadventures than there is on comedic scenes of his grumblingly preparing food for his part-time employer, the magically powerful but domestically indolent time-space witch Yuko, and her cronies — and, more willingly, for the two classmates he is closest to. These are Himawari-chan, the girl he has a crush on, and Watanuki's ever-present rival/frenemy Domeki, a taciturn jock with spiritual talents of his own.

In the Xxxholic Valentine's Day story in volume four, Yuko coerces Watanuki into preparing the chocolate mousse cake-like dessert fondant au chocolat for her and her impish hangers-on, meeting his complaints that "Normally it's the girl who cooks the handmade chocolate" with "Normal? What's normal? To only do what the masses do? ... Where is the problem in adopting a custom that is 'abnormal' if it has no negative effect on the world at large?" Watanuki irately points out that Yuko's last-minute demand for Valentine's fondant au chocolat had a negative effect on him, since he had to rush out to the store after dark to pick up the ingredients she had neglected to buy, then stay up late following a complicated recipe he'd never tried before.

Even after Yuko, her not-quite-human kid sidekicks Maru and Moro, and the chatty rabbitlike supernatural being Mokona have chowed down on the products of Watanuki's labor — accompanied by their usual multiple glasses of liquor, in this case Calvados — there are still several servings of fondant au chocolat left over. In what initially appears to be a rare unalloyedly generous impulse, Yuko has Mokona teleport most of this to Syaoron and the other interdimensional travellers in Xxxholic's sister series Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE — with the specific intention of obliging them to reciprocate by sending her an impressive gift on White Day one month later.

Watanuki's outrage over this calculating scheme is soon forgotten when Yuko informs him that he can have the single remaining fondant au chocolat "to give to the person you would most like to see eat it." In a reversal of the standard girl-on-boy Japanese Valentine's chocolate-giving protocol, Watanuki excitedly plans to give the deluxe chocolate dessert to his crush Himawari-chan, even arranging to re-heat it to the perfect temperature in the home ec lab before presenting it to her.

Unfortunately, Himawari-chan is absent from school on February 14. While Watanuki is bewailing his cruel fate after belatedly discovering this, Domeki hops in the home ec lab window to see what all the fuss is about and winds up sampling both the fondant au chocolat and the hot chocolate Watanuki had prepared to go with it, much to the latter's indignation. The excitable boy chef is still fuming over Domeki's usurpation of the chocolate intended for Himawari-chan as the two of them walk home together. Domeki's shopping bag full of chocolates received from female classmates merely rubs salt in the wound of Watanuki's other Valentine's grievance — "It seems I'm not good enough to get chocolate" from girls.

Well, not regular human girls, anyway. The two homeward-bound boys encounter what appears to be a cute junior high school girl who becomes extremely flustered at running into them, exclaiming, "I'm looking for something. For Valentine's chocolate ... to give to someone wonderful!" "Another Domeki fan," Watanuki groans inwardly. Then the girl suddenly announces, "And now I've found it!," passes her hand through Domeki's midsection, and pulls out the very fondant au chocolat that he had infuriated Watanuki by eating a short while earlier.

The reconstituted dessert looks as delicious as ever, but Domeki collapses to the ground in a coma, apparently to his magical assailant's surprise. Distraught over the unexpected consequences of her chocolate retrieval and Watanuki's distressed reaction to it, the girl flees into the sky. In case her flying away wasn't enough of a clue, Yuko suddenly pops up and informs her freaked-out employee that the cute girl is a zashiki-warashi, or guardian spirit, who has inadvertantly stolen Domeki's soul along with the fondant au chocolat she magically extracted from his stomach. "If you do not return the thing that was taken from Domeki before the day is over ... he will be fated to sleep forever," the time-space witch warns. "The last thing in the world I want to do is to help him!" Watanuki snaps. "But I'll never sleep if his condition is my fault."

Resigning himself to working even more hours at Yuko's shop in order to repay her for her assistance, her reluctant employee boards the giant bird the time-space witch whistles up and chases after the fleeing zashiki-warashi. After some difficulties with the girl spirit's overprotective crow-goblin flying bodyguards, Watanuki manages to catch up with her, only to discover that he had misunderstood her original intentions: "The person I wanted to give chocolate to ... is you!"

Back at the site of Domeki's collapse, where Yuko has passed the time by covering the comatose boy with newspapers and sitting on top of him eating roasted sweet potatoes, the time-space witch teases her confused part-time assistant, "You playboy! You received chocolate from a very cute zashiki-warashi!" "Heh heh heh," Watanuki laughs sheepishly — then abruptly reverts to indignation upon realizing, "But this chocolate was made by me!!"

"Yes," Yuko responds. "It was chocolate made by you, Watanuki, with the 'power' that allows you to see spirits. And it was eaten by Domeki, who has the power to repel spirits. A 'special chocolate' that's quite appropriate to convey the true feelings of a zashiki-warashi."

"That doesn't make me happy!!" Watanuki stews. "I mean, I'm happy that some girl gave me chocolate, but ...." When the time-space witch merely tells him to hurry up and return the floating, glowing reconstituted fondant au chocolat to Domeki's stomach, the teenage spirit-magnet gripes, "And the chocolate I do get, I can't eat! Dammit!", then carefully lowers the sphere of light containing the "borrowed" chocolate toward his fallen frenemy.

Domeki promptly sits up, glancing around and asking, "What am I doing sleeping here?" Yuko hands him a roasted sweet potato and gleefully proceeds to tell him the whole story, while the agonized Watanuki clenches his fists in the background and howls, "It's just ... all so unfair!"

Back at school the next day, Watanuki is overjoyed to finally receive a box of chocolates that he himself had no hand in making from none other than Himawari-chan, who has now recovered from the cold and fever that had kept her at home on Valentine's Day. In transports of delight over being "the one receiving chocolate from Himawari-chan!", Watanuki returns to earth with a thud when his crush turns to the phlegmatic Domeki and hands him a box of chocolates, too.

"Dammit! Why does lowly Domeki rate chocolate from Himawari-chan?!" her adoring admirer fumes. "B-but I get the feeling that mine is a little larger ...." Himawari-chan obliviously bursts that bubble, too, informing Domeki, "I decided to give you both the same thing."

Watanuki tries desperately to retain his sense of the specialness of what he imagines to be "chocolate that Himawari-chan handmade and infused with love." But he is foiled yet again when he overhears his crush explain, "The store where I bought it always makes delicious chocolate! Those were the last two milk chocolates in the shop — they're so popular!"

Grumpily discussing the latest Valentine's developments with his whimsical employer later that afternoon, Watanuki is taken aback when Yuko claims that the Valentine's Day offering Himawari-chan gave him is "the third chocolate you received this year."

"Huh? How do you get three?" the baffled boy asks.

"The zashiki-warashi gave you one," the time-space witch enumerates. "Himawari-chan gave you one .... And the chocolate I gave you."

"You didn't give me one," Watanuki protests, flapping his hand in a vigorous gesture of denial. "Not you, Yuko-san."

"I had fondant au chocolat made, one of which you received, right?" Yuko points out, faux-seductively stroking him under the chin with one finger.

"What kind of 'giving' is that?!" the unwilling maker of the fondant au chocolat in question explodes. His annoyance is certainly understandable, especially if the time-space witch is actually counting the chocolate dessert that the zashiki-warashi extracted from Domeki to give Watanuki as also being from Yuko herself, since she is the one who originally commissioned it. This may well be the case, since I couldn't find any panels showing Watanuki tasting the chocolate he had just made himself at the "midnight chocolate party" where Yuko and her supernatural sidekicks enjoy fondant au chocolat and Calvados.

"It is one definite kind of 'giving,'" the imperturbable time-space witch replies serenely. "There are all sorts of ways to use words."

Aya Kanno's Otomen (Viz) is another, more overt, manga portrayal of a boy who, among other things, is unexpectedly good at "feminine" tasks such as food preparation. In volume one of the series, female lead Ryo Miyakozuka's ultra-macho widowed father takes it perfectly in stride that his daughter is such a klutz in the kitchen that her attempts at baking produce deformed lumps of dough resembling mutated monsters from old anime. But he is far less forgiving of her would-be boyfriend Asuka Masamune's allegedly gender-inappropriate willingness and ability to cook "even though you're a guy."

Arriving home unexpectedly early to find Asuka showing Ryo how to bake an artistically-frosted cake, which Mr. Miyakozuka denounces as "food for girls and little kids," the outraged father demands, "What's with this spineless guy?!" and orders Asuka out of his house. Mr. Miyakozuka persists in his peremptory dismissal of Asuka as unmanly and therefore unworthy to date his daughter until the resolute boy returns to win him over with a home-cooked meal so good that it inspires nostalgic memories of Miyakozuka's long-dead wife — then proves his strength and ability to protect Ryo by besting her father in an impromptu judo match.

Next week: Part Five!

Overview of Xxxholic volume four
Manga Monday: Otomen