MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 4

 In this essay-series I've written a fair amount about Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami, but very little about her male co-star Tadao Yokoshima, who's integral to the series' concept. He unlike Mikami does not have a consistent "literary psychology," but is composed of a congeries of humor and heroism tropes, fluctuating between one set of tropes to another however it suits author Takashi Shiina.

    The first two-part adventure clearly establishes Yokoshima as the butt of most of the series' jokes. He's a horndog teenager who works as an assistant to the gorgeous ghost sweeper, risking his life for little remuneration, just because he lusts after Mikami. In the earliest adventure Mikami appears more flirtatious than in later episodes, seeming to offer Yokoshima the possibility for a future hookup, just to keep the teen working for chump change. 

Only one incident in the two-parter suggests that Yokoshima may be more than just a miserable lust-monkey. Both Mikami and Yokoshima are menaced by a deadly ghost, and Mikami is ready to go down fighting. Craven Yokoshima wants his last memory to be pleasurable, so he grabs Mikami's breasts. This action, for no explicit reason, allows the horny teen to release some magical/psychic power that amps up Mikami's abilities and exorcises the ghost. Despite the fact that Yokoshima's lustfulness saved their lives, Mikami beats the hell out of the teenager for taking liberties. To his credit, the threat of future beatings never permanently breaks Yokoshima's spirit. 

The matter of Yokoshima's lust-power finally becomes an ongoing story-element with the 20-part arc "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The dragon-goddess Shoryuki approaches the Mikami agency, fearing that a demonic power has compromised the testing-ground of the Ghost Sweeper Academy, and wanting Mikami to investigate. Shoryuki has already noticed that Yokoshima possesses an untapped spiritual power and suggests that it would be easy for the teenager to enter the Ghost Sweeper trials alongside other students. Though Mikami goes along with the plan, the lady exorcist has no faith in Yokoshima's potential and mocks him ruthlessly. However, when Shoryuki bestows a blessing on Yokoshima in the form of a kiss on the youth's forehead, Mikami is seen to be annoyed, even though she knows intellectually that the goddess isn't making any sort of romantic overture.

Yokoshima does pass his Ghost Sweeper tests, but there's little to indicate that he possesses the passion Mikami has for the profession. He oscillates between taking on heroic stature and devolving back into all-too-human cowardice, but I'd probably still deem him to belong to the persona-category of "hero," albeit of a very flawed nature. If anything, his "assistant ghost-sweeper" status binds him even more closely to Mikami's orbit, as she becomes "sensei" to his "student." And since he still screws up, this gives Mikami additional reasons to yell at him and beat him up. However, though Yokoshima does not intend to "stoop to conquer," the more Mikami works with the teen, the more she comes to want him around all the time, even though she consciously denies any such feelings.

Author Shiina also teased his readers with the possibility of a future Mikami-Yokoshima hookup in the time-travel arc "Stranger Than Paradise." Yokoshima meets a stranger who turns to be out the Yokoshima of ten years in the future, who reveals that by that time he and Mikami have become man and wife. More crucially, Future-Tadao has made the time-jaunt because in his time Future-Reiko is dying of an untended wound she took in the "present" era. Future-Tadao accompanies Yokoshima and the unwitting Mikami when they seek the demon who poisoned Future-Reiko. Future-Tadao hopes to use the monster's venom to concoct a counteragent to his wife's poison and take it back to his time to cure Future-Reiko.   

Naturally, this mission is successful as far as the reader knows, though Shiina throws in some plausible denials, having two characters state that Yokoshima and Mikami of this time may not be fully identical with their counterparts. When Mikami learns the nature of Future-Tadao, she uses magic so as to erase, from both Yokoshima's mind and her own, all knowledge of their rumored entanglement. 

Shiina never brings up the maybe-alternate future again. However, it's likely that many SWEEPER readers of the time shipped the two leads, and so the author gave them a "Tadreiko" to keep them happy. For good measure, Shiina does note that the two future-versions of the heroes remain on fractious terms, with Mikami dominating her husband while Yokoshima still hits on other women. In fact, in a scene paralleling a similar event in "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm," the ailing Future-Reiko experiences a surge of her will to live when she's told that her husband's been macking on the hospital nurses-- quite possibly because she anticipates punishing him again. 

Though Shiina devotes a couple of arcs to stories about Yokoshima's parents, neither of the teen's progenitors shape his personality the way Mikami is shaped by her parents-- which shaping I'll explore in another post. The dominant impression Shiina wants readers to reach is that Yokoshima remakes himself partly in response to Mikami's high expectations, and partly to his hormonal intensity. 

In two late stories, Shiina tells the story of the couple's first encounter. In the first, it's Mikami reflecting back on her low opinion of Yokoshima when they first met.

A later flashback, though, focuses more on the original concept. Even though Mikami gets irritated when Yokoshima molests her the moment he sees her, he's so eager to work with such a "gorgeous lady" that she realizes that she can save a lot of money on such an over-eager goof. 

Re: the comment about her finding Yokoshima "funny"-- Mikami never seems the least bit amused by either his blunders or his continued pursuit of her body. The most one can say is that there have been occasions where Mikami, like some femdom mistress (to which she's compared in one story), puts her subordinate through some grueling activity, which may or may not give her sadistic thrills. Yokoshima responds to all of these rigors by importuning Mikami to either give him sex or more money, and she, being both a virago and a capitalist, contrives to withhold both. Arguably Yokoshima's pertinacity does eventually wear Mikami down to the extent that she stops thinking of him purely as a tool-- though being placed in the position of a "sub" to her "domme" may not seem too much of an improvement to the beleagured youth.   

Yokoshima has a few arcs that test his devotion to his sensei/mistress, to be sure. But it's Mikami's personality that undergoes the most significant changes in the series as a whole, as I'll show in the next essay in this series.  
            

ADDENDUM: When I wrote about Mikami using magic to erase her knowledge, and that of Yokoshima, regarding their future marriage, I didn't make any comment as to her motive, but at the time I just thought she was doing so to (a) keep Yokoshima subservient, and (b) keep herself from conceiving any soft feelings toward her assistant. But TV Tropes had an interesting take: Mikami, by erasing her own memory, has put her control-freak self at a disadvantage, for in the absence of knowing the future she SAYS she finds disgusting, there's every possibility that her feelings for Yokoshima will morph over time and the future union will indeed transpire.