KING OF THE LAMP (Lamp no Ou-sama), by Takako Shigematsu. First published in 2004 and first published in North America in 2007.
PLOT:
Long ago, a raunchy king stole 1000 women to fill out his harem. As punishment for his crimes, he was turned into a genie who must fulfill the wishes of 1000 women before he can be freed. Thus, we watch him work his magic with a shy girl who wants her sempai to notice her, an older sister crushing on her baby brother's kindergarten teacher, and an awkward girl in love with her older sister's blind boyfriend. Also included are stories about a young woman with a pair of mysterious guardians and a medium and their guardian spirit trying to shake off an otaku with an eye for the supernatural.
PLOT:
King of the Lamp isn't so much a proper anthology as it is a grab-bag of stories. The main story, the one that's meant to tie together everything, ends after a few chapters with no resolution whatsoever. I guess they could instead be unified by a more generalized theme of women who need extraordinary circumstances to start communicating with the men they love, but it's not enough to make this short-story collection feel...well, collected.
It's a shame because the cursed genie concept was a strong one. It was quick to set up, allows for all sorts of magical shenanigans to happen, and it gives the series a definite (but not too close) goal. The problem is that Shigematsu shoots herself in the foot almost immediatately by starting the genie out less than twenty masters away from freedom. She compounds this error by taking broad time skips, to the point where the genie has less than 10 wishes to grant before the end. For a final touch, she never actually wraps the genie's story up. Why would she skip ahead so far if she never even bothered to conclude the whole thing? As we'll see, this is far from the last time she drops the ball with this anthology.
For what is meant to be a shoujo manga, there is an awful lot of sex going on. More precisely, there is a lot of attempted sexual assault going on. The genie's powers apparently work on a quid-pro-quo system, where every wish requires some degree of sexual contact. Weak ones require only a kiss, stronger ones require a bit of groping, and potent ones require actual sex. It would be one thing if the genie explained this upfront, but more often than not he doesn't explain this until his masters make their first wishes and it is always played as a (terrible) joke.
It doesn't end there, though! All three of the girls and women he helps end up being abused by the men in their lives at some point, and more than once they are threatened with rape. While these moments are mercifully brief, they are completely at odds with this collection's sweet, sentimental tone. What's weird is that immediately after these threats are dealt with, the main couples confess to whatever feelings they have been repressing and then immediate start having sex. It doesn't matter whether it's in the middle of an empty classroom, the roof of a hospital, or the same bed where another man handcuffed the heroine and burn her to death. There's no time for things like light conversation over coffee or a couple of dates when there's sex to be had!
You'll notice that I've not talked much about the heroines of these stories. That's because there's simply not much to say about them. They're all starry-eyed ingenues who are too timid to voice their feelings and are convinced that increasingly ridiculous tricks are needed to win the hearts of others. The unrelated side stories don't fare much better. The first of them flirts with incest, as a young woman falls for her kinda-sorta guardian (who also happens to be a kinda-sorta vampire). The other is so boring as to not merit mention. It's little more than filler for a book that's half-assed and needlessly tawdry.
ART:
Shigematsu doesn't fare much better as an artist. Her girls are vaguely cute with simple, vacuous faces. The men are not much different save for their ridiculous giraffe necks. They also all have these huge, blockly, crudely drawn hands that only get more distracting with each new chapter. The only character with any sort of visual charm is the genie, as his smarmy grin and slinky body language helps sell the reader on his lustiness. The backgrounds are mostly blank, only to explode into screentones once the sex scenes starts. This isn't a hard book to follow visually, but it's utterly lacking in elegance or talent.
RATING:
King of the Lamp is an unfocused collection of love stories with weird, unpleasant tone shifts, a wasted premise, and awkward artwork. I can't imagine anyone wishing for this to be licensed when it was new, and I definitely can't imagine anyone wishing to read it now.
This book was published by Go!Comi. It is currently out of print.
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