The most symbolically ambitious long arc in NISEKOI (examined more fully here) consists of sixteen chapters, each of which sports a one-word title. Since the arc isn’t given any special designation, I’ll name the arc by the chapter-title that seems most to embody the narrative content. The chapter “Limit” is so called because one of the characters uses the term in that section, but the term recurs late in the story, and it’s possible to imagine that the arc is a melodramatic meditation on the nature of physical and mental limitations, on the necessity of both surrendering to and transcending them.
Most mythcomics within the romance-comedy genres center upon the male and female leads, who in NISEKOI are the high-schoolers Raku Ichijo and Chitoge Kirisaki. “Limit,” however, centers upon one of the characters of the serial’s subordinate ensemble, Marika Tachibana. I’ve mentioned in my overview of the series that the two leads and most of their support-cast knew one another as children, and that most of them forgot that acquaintance until meeting again in high school. Marika is one of the exceptions. She’s a sickly child, and Raku’s friendship to her in childhood causes her to dedicate her life to overcoming her weaknesses, in order to mold herself into the perfect woman for Raku once they’re in their adolescence. I also observed that Marika is somewhat similar to Chitoge in being given to extreme behavior, and that Marika’s father was a police chief, in marked contrast to the parents of Raku and Chitoge. Their families are both loosely associated with underworld activities, though not of an order that has any impact on the series’ comical aspects, so that no major “cops and robbers” conflict ever manifests. But in “Limit” readers also learn that Marika’s mother belongs to an aristocratic Japanese family, and that maternal influence proves far more pernicious than that of the lords of the gangsters.
Whereas the sham romance portrayed by Raku and Chitoge eventually blossoms into the real thing, Marika doesn’t get any such escape from the fate of being a Tachibana woman. In “Limit” artist Naoshi Komi provides a brief overview of this aristocratic family, one in which for centuries all of the women are born sickly and are largely confined to their own aristocratic world. Given the structure of Japanese society, Komi can’t very well claim that the Tachibanas are matrilineal, but he implies it, by stating that the sickly Tachibana women nevertheless control the family in all eras. Marika’s mother, Chika Tachibana, is said to value her daughter only as a means of continuing the aristocratic line, though she allows her daughter to attend regular high school and to attempt to win over her childhood love Raku. Failing that alliance, Marika is expected to return home and to marry a much older man in order to preserve the Tachibana bloodline, turning her back on the world of youth and becoming a virtual duplicate of her mother. Marika’s destiny is to take part in a real arranged marriage, while Raku and Chitoge are obliged only to play-act at a possible unison.
In earlier eras Japanese children were raised to consider such marriages inevitable. Raku’s generation is thoroughly modernized, so all of Marika’s schoolmates are aghast at her fate. These children of 21st-century Japan are almost utterly out of contact with the traditions of old Japan. They know ninjas only from pop culture and are surprised when they learn that the Tachiabanas have their own private ninja guard. They go to Shinto shrines to have their fortunes told, but their real temples are game arcades and soba shops. Marika is the only one truly rooted in the traditions of Medieval Japan, and she wants no part of them. Unfortunately, she’s a secondary character in the story of Raku and Chitoge, and in romances like this one, the race does not go to the most desperate.
Still, friendship has its value too. Because of her ill-defined illness (loosely compared to anemia), Marika is abducted back to her mother’s domicile, where Chika calls the tune and even her husband gets consigned to the dungeon if he talks back. But Marika has a resourceful rich-girl friend, one Shinohara, and she alerts Marika’s high-school buddies as to Marika’s sad fate. Chitoge, the girl who most often quarreled with Marika, leads the intrepid high-schoolers on a quest to liberate the Tachibana heir. What results is sort of a cross between the climax of Mike Nichols’ THE GRADUATE—the visual quote of the church-scene is pretty unmistakable—and one of Japan’s “ninja war” spectacles. Yet though Marika needs help from her friends, there’s still a great deal of emphasis on the young woman’s determination to defy her fate. Even her alienated mother Chika comments enviously on how strong her daughter is, implying that she Chika would have liked to escape her aristocratic fate.
The relationship between the two women may be the most mythic portrait of a mother-daughter psychological conflict in the medium of comics. While Marika is oriented upon winning Raku’s love and advancing into adulthood, Chika looks as if she’s been frozen in time. When Raku meets the senior Tachibana, he mistakes her for a sister to Marika, and Marika herself claims that her mother is “a thousand years old.” Komi supplies no explanation for Chika’s appearance, any more than he does for a minor support-character who looks like a child but claims to be older than the adolescents. Japanese manga artists may have any number of reasons for depicting adults with childlike appearances, but in NISEKOI it seems to signal the aforementioned envy Chika feels for her daughter, allowing her to become frozen in time even as she’s frozen emotionally. When Raku tries to make Chika to have mercy upon Marika, the matriarch engages in sophisms about the relative nature of good and evil to defend the sacrifice “the One” for “the Many” of the lineage. And when Raku asks Chika to confess her love for her daughter, Chika just responds, “Don’t make me sick.”
Yet the big battle of high schoolers vs. ninjas does bear fruit. Marika escapes her wedding, but she can’t escape the limitations of her own body, and she admits to her savior Raku that she’ll have to return to the bosom of her family for medical treatment. Nevertheless, the sheer daring of the teenage assault causes Chika to relent and cancel the arranged marriage, allowing Marika to chart her own course. This course includes her realization that she has to give in to the inevitable romantic union of Raku and Chitoge, even while threatening to come after Raku again if he doesn’t do right by his true love. Marika even plays a major role in the series’ last arc, overcoming her own limits by making certain that Chitoge comes together with the man Marika wanted to marry.
There are many Japanese stories in which the main characters are obligated to surrender their personal desires to serve the greater good. But even amid all the slapstick and sentiment, “Limit” puts forth a valid argument for the contrary verdict, in which desire trumps duty and provides a new avenue for growth and transcendence.
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