I was hoping to find a shojo maid manga when I picked this one up. What I got was...certainly something else.
MAID SHOKUN, written by Nanki Satou with art by Akira Kiduki. First published in 2006 and first published in North America in 2011.
PLOT:
Chiyoko came to Tokyo from the countryside to study, but instead finds herself roped into helping out at the Akihabara maid cafe Mille Fille. It turns out that some of their new waitresses just quit, and Chiyoko turns out to be a natural at the maid role. Things get complicated when one of the girls has to deal with a stalker, two of the staff are outed as lesbians, Chiyoko finds herself starting to fall for a patron, and a sensationalist news story puts the cafe in peril.
STORY:
As noted, I picked up Maid Shokun hoping for a more shojo take on the whole maid cafe thing and I was kind of half-right. This is pretty far from shojo if you look at the magazine it ran in. I expected a cozy story of a country girl who finds friendship and a sense of belonging through an unconventional source. What I got was loads of drama, and not the fun melodramatic kind.
How much you take away from this manga will depend a lot on how you feel about maid cafes in general. This first volume spends a fair bit of time talking about maid cafes are this gentle respite from the everyday world and how it's the duty of all its employees to make their clientele feel good. It has no time to explore the questionable gender politics behind the whole maid fantasy. It also has no time to question if these girls are being exploited as workers, considering that their cafe barely breaks a profit and the girls are paid less than 1000 yen per hour. At most, it acknowledges how easy it is for a business like this to foster stalkers who can't distinguish a performance from reality and how hard it can be to stop such things.
In fairness, a lot of this pro-maid cafe talk is coming from senior waitress Arumi. She approaches her job with the zeal of a cult leader, to the point that she is constantly lecturing Chiyoko and the other girls about how they should do their jobs and the kind of performances they should and should not do. Keep in mind that she is not the manager and that the whole story kicks off because Arumi has driven away multiple employees with her maid martinet routine. She's kind of awful and frankly should be fired, but instead she's merely treated as quirky but dedicated (with a dash of tsundere when it comes to Chiyoko's overtures of friendship).
Arumi is off-putting, but things can (and do) get worse. As part of the fallout from the stalker subplot, Airi (the victim of said stalking) is outed as a lesbian who is in a relationship with a fellow waitress. Furthermore, we learn via flashback that the two of them met while working as sex workers and that the two started working at this cafe as a way to get out of that line of work. Do their coworkers react with understanding and sympathy, finding a constructive way for their coworkers to preserve their privacy and safety? No! Instead one girl immediately starts making homophobic jokes while fretting about their clientele finding out, Arumi insists that either one of them quit or both of them break up, and everyone except Chiyoko just goes along with the others. Worse still, the two nearly do break up because Airi's girlfriend wants to be a noble sacrifice so that Airi can live heterosexually ever after.
The sad part is that as nasty as this drama gets at points, it is the most compelling drama Maid Shokun has to offer. Taken on its own, it would be a solid yuri manga, even if the wrap-up is kind of anti-climatic. It's certainly more interesting than anything Chiyoko has to offer as a protagonist. She's your bog-standard ingenue, which means she mostly serves as the sentimental, naive foil to the drama going on around her. She only begins to take back the reins of the story towards the end of the volume, when she finds herself falling for a regular after an off-hours encounter with some pushy drunks. It's not enough to make her an interesting character, and even if this series hadn't been unceremoniously cancelled it wouldn't have been enough to compel me to come back to this series.
ART:
I can see now why I initially thought Maid Shokun was a shojo, as the characters' wide eyes, gangly bodies, and cute looks (complemented with suitably cute, frilly maid uniforms) certainly wouldn't look out of place within that framework (if a bit more down-to-earth than usual). It certainly doesn't have any of the fanservice you would expect from a seinen series. That being said, that gangliness becomes an issue anytime Kiduki is called upon to draw action or deal with any sort of foreshortening. When that happens, the characters start to get awkward and noodle-like. You can even see this happening on the front cover. This is apparently one of Kiduki's first forays out of ero-manga and has made a lot of manga since then (this isn't even their last collaboration with Nanki Satou), so maybe it's just the artistic equivalent of growing pains.
PRESENTATION:
This was one of the last books released by Tokyopop in 2011, coming just two weeks after they announced the company's shut down. Even at this late stage in the company's history, they still manage to mess up the translation! I strongly suspect that in the original version, Chiyoko is a high school student. It would certainly explain why there are moments where the Mille Fille staff worry about her being a minor. Yet this conflicts with other lines of dialogue which state that Chiyoko is in college. I'm almost certain that these changes, as inconsistent as they may be, were done to avoid anyone accusing this series of advocating for underage drinking. This is normally something that an editor should have caught, but by this point Tokyopop had very few editors left and those that were left were almost certainly overworked and underpaid.
RATING:
This series was published by Tokyopop. This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available. 1 volume was released and is currently out of print.
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