One psychological aspect of the 2010 manga MAYO CHIKI led me to consider whether or not at least a portion of the finished story might qualify as a "mythcomic." However, MAYO CHIKI did not begin as a comic book, but as a series of light novels, which in turn were adapted to both manga and anime. Since from the first I've focused on mythcomics only if they were original to the comics-medium, MAYO CHIKI does not qualify. The novel series as a whole may comprise a literary myth, but the manga does not generate that myth, but only transmits the myth from the prose works, though some details may have changed in the translation.
There's no reason, though, that I can't treat the manga as a "near myth," with the stipulation that it's derived from a primary source.
In some ways, MAYO CHIKI is a typical enough Japanese teen comic. It begins with a male character who is, at least on the surface of things, "average," and then creates a situation in which he's pursued by a small harem of pretty girls.
However, in the case of MAYO's POV character, Jirou Sakimachi, he's got a biological peculiarity. He was raised by a mother who was a pro wrestler, and who, for no clear reason, constantly used Jirou as a "sandbag" (by which the translation means a "practice dummy.") In addition, his younger sister Kureha is also a wrestler, and has doled out the same punishing treatments to Jirou since she became old enough to wrestle. As a result of all this punishment, Jirou bleeds from the nose whenever he even comes into sustained contact with a female.
For some thirty years at least, it's been a well-traveled trope in Japanese culture to depict male sexual excitation in the form of nosebleeds. However, going by the dialogue in the second manga-opus, Jirou supposedly does so as an avoidance technique. "If you made bloodshed," another character suggests to Jirou, "they'd stop hitting you, isn't it like that?" This may not be the whole truth, but the authors clearly meant it to be part of Jirou's makeup. In addition, it provides the girls in his harem with an excuse to "cure" him of his reticence toward women, while they can feel confident that he's not likely to become an aggressor.
Further complicating the romantic drama is that the girl Jirou likes the most, Subaru Konoe, can't be seen publicly as a girl. For assorted reasons Subaru, in order to serve as butler to the heiress of a rich family, has to pretend to be male. For the bulk of the series, there are endless misunderstandings about the relationship between Jirou and Subaru, most of them revolving around the idea of "boys' love" (a particular fascination for high-school girls, it seems). In fact, Jirou's sister Kureha-- who lives with him, even though their mother is conveniently out-of-country for the whole story-- is one of the students who enthuses most about her brother being united with the supposedly male Subaru.
"The portion" I mentioned in paragraph two is the last few installments of MAYO CHIKI's conclusion. Jirou proposes to Subaru, but she has a widowed father, Nagare, who seems to hate Jirou on general principles. Nagare won't allow any marriage unless Jirou fights him, and he's a much better fighter than Jirou. The young man is forced to ask his sister Kureha to wrestle him again-- by this time, Jirou's mostly mastered his bleeding-problem-- and of course, Kureha clobbers him just as she did in the earlier practice sessions. However, though Jirou doesn't win the fight with Nagare, the younger man scores enough points that his future father-in-law has to concede him some respect, paving the way for a future wedding. To be sure, though, the authors manage to contrive a method by which Jirou doesn't entirely have to give up his "harem" in all respects.
In section 36, though, the authors choose to give Nagare a strange connection to Jirou that goes beyond the standard trope of the "heavy father." Jirou asks the older man why he hates him, and Nagare replies that Jirou reminds him of his younger self. Nagare then finds out Jirou's surname, which he's somehow avoiding learning in 36 volumes, and makes the odd revelation that he was a boyfriend to Jirou's wrestler-mother. This gives Nagare another reason to resent Jirou, because he's the child of the man who beat out Nagare for the favors of Jirou's mother. Yet it ends up meaning a little more than that.
While Nagare is in no way physically related to Jirou, the revelation that the former was at least a potential love-interest to Jirou's mother makes Nagare a "symbolic father." He thus takes the place of Jirou's deceased real father who is referenced even less than Jirou's mother. And if Nagare is Jirou's symbolic father, then Nagare's daughter is also Jirou's symbolic sister.
Though Japanese manga-works are awash with replete with numerous narratives of sibling-incest, it's not overtly suggested that Jirou has ever had a sexual response to the younger sister with whom he lives, or, for that matter, to his absent mother. He's also not an overt masochist, as he's never shown enjoying the violence Kureha wreaks upon him. But Subaru the symbolic sister may be seen as a displacement for Kureha the real sister, and possibly for the mother as well.
One cannot really interrogate the interior feelings of a fictional character, who has no depth. But one can inquire into the ways that the living authors encode certain patterns in the characters. One thing that *may* have been going on in the authors' skulls was that though they claimed that Jirou's nose-bleeding served as an avoidance-technique, they arranged things so it's not impossible to read it normatvely, as an indicator of sexual stimulation. That would mean that Jirou may have undergone some sexual stimulation through his contact with his family-members, and that this, and any masochistic stimulation, was so unwanted that it manifested in spontaneous nose-bleeds from any and all sustained contacts with females. The nose-bleeds don't stop until Jirou is united with a female whom he doesn't consider a familial transgression. And yet-- because she's a "symbolic sister"-- first seen trying to beat up Jirou when he accidentally sees her in her underwear-- one may argue that Jirou is still fulfilling the familiar pattern of sibling-incest, albeit only on a symbolic level.
In conclusion, MAYO CHIKI, even if it doesn't possess the full density of a mythcomic, seems far richer than anything one finds in the teen humor titles of America. Whether one considers that a boon or a deficit will depend on one's definition of "innocent entertainment."
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