MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 6

 In the first MIKAMI MEDITATIONS, I hadn't read the full corpus of the 1991-99 GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga, so I followed the only available information source for a particular datum: the age of the female lead Reiko Mikami. Wiki claimed that Mikami was 31 years old, but I never saw anything in the original manga that even came close to confirming that inaccurate info. However, upon re-reading one of the later arcs, "Relentless War," Mikami's age is decisively stated-- at least. as decisively as anything else that appears in an amateur online translation, the only source for the SWEEPER stories in English.

So there's no question that Mikami is 20 years old, only three years older than her high-schooler colleague Tadao Yokoshima. His age of seventeen is frequently repeated, and maybe artist Takashi Shiina felt he had to keep reminding readers of Yokoshima's status, since he spends so little time in school. There's some degree of change in the characters' attitudes and circumstances during the span of the series, but SWEEPER is a static series timewise, so no one really ages. In an early story, Mikami tells Okinu that she considers herself a "mature woman" and her ardent suitor Yokoshima to be a "brat." Mikami also avers that the student needs another ten years to catch up with her, which might have impressed me as her admitting to considerably more years than twenty. And then there are a couple of late stories where Yokoshima insults Mikami by calling her an "old hag," which certainly sounds odd if only three years separate them. 

However, I am aware of one other manga, ZERO'S FAMILIAR, in which a teenager calls a woman of only twenty-three years an "old woman." So there's some probability that this was a familiar type of joke in Japanese culture, a slam meant to be aggravating but not technically accurate.

Had I thought about it, an early story, "Love Needs Its Time," shows that Shiina always had a loose sense that Mikami and Yokoshima aren't far apart in age. At the conclusion of "Time," Yokoshima flashes back in time to when he was a baby, and a very young Mikami, possibly just three years old, encounters him.

  Mikami's age puts an interesting spin on the first time Shiiina depicts Mikami and Yokoshima meeting as relatively mature entities, in a sequence from the arc "The Right Stuff."

              

The main point of the flashback is to regale readers with how the Mikami/Yokoshima relationship got set in stone from the start: the lust-monkey makes some foolish pass at his boss and she beats the hell out of him. However, the flashback is more important for offering a deeper motivation for Mikami to hire the high-schooler. As I've said before, if she was truly repulsed by Yokoshima's advances, Mikami would just fire him and look for another cheap employee to do her heavy lifting. 

The internal chronology of "The Right Stuff" also mentions that Mikami's mother Michie died (or rather, faked her death) five years previous to the "static time" of the ongoing series, which would make Mikami fifteen at the time. One presumes she finished both high school and her training as a ghost sweeper under her sensei, so she's about twenty when she opens her agency. Clearly she wants to be an independent businesswoman, and she appears to have no romance in her life. The only time Shiina showed her evincing any interest in romantic life was when Mikami was ten years old and crushed on the older Saijou. Yet he had only filial feelings for her, and thus one may assume that, for all intents and purposes, Mikami's turned her back on romance at this crucial time in her life. 

Mikami wants to carry on her mother's profession of ghost-sweeping, but for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, she also intends to make a lot of money from it. She's aware of her phenomenal looks but views them only as assets in attracting a customer base. She may not be totally immune to flattery, though, since after scorning Yokoshima's clumsy come-on, she responds to his verbal praise with the interesting sentence, "Since you're so honest, I'll forget about that [attempted assault] from before." In other words, before Yokoshima has said anything about being willing to work for cheap, Mikami unfreezes a bit at his compliments. She starts unburdening herself as to how she thought she'd hire a good-looking guy to help sell her image to customers, but she was afraid she'd have to pay a lot of money for such an assistant, which would cut into potential profits. Yokoshima knows he's not good-looking, but he's so besotted with Mikami that he offers to do her dirty jobs for a pittance. However, in practice, Yokoshima does gain some additional remuneration whenever he peeps on his boss in the shower, and she brings this up frequently-- though again, it doesn't bother her enough to make her sack him. But does she keep Yokoshima around purely because she saves money by employing such a doofus to do all her hard work? She almost certainly enjoys holding on to her money and may even get some sadistic satisfaction at beating him down when he propositions her, apparently wanting to keep her virginity as much as a big bank account.                 

Yet Shiina almost certainly knew the persuasive power of the "hot girl falls for humdrum-looking goof" trope, so as early as the Volume Four arc "Dad's Here," Okinu suspects that Mikami harbors tender feelings for Yokoshima despite his considerable demerits. Yet Shiina waits until the late arc "Right Stuff" to depict the original dynamic that prevailed when the sexy exorcist met her stooge-- and that flashback takes place during a real-time story in which Yokoshima has harnessed his psychic powers to a level that almost surpasses Mikami's abilities.

Yet Shiina was careful not to undermine the comical tension, so Yokoshima never transcends his "stooge-self" and Mikami always remains the harsh mistress. The capstone story to the entire series, "Break Your Destiny," shows Mikami as a true tsundere, unable to dispense love without putting her potential paramour through the wringer to make sure of his devotion. The two of them being closer in age, though, makes it seem as though their perverse relationship takes place in the period where more normative couples usually date and get married for the first time-- so that it seems a little more possible that this fractious couple will be able to do so as well.