THE HEIRESS AND THE CHAUFFEUR (Ojo-sama no Untenshu), by Keiko Ishihara. First published in 2010 and first published in North America in 2016.
PLOT:
Sayaka Yoshimura is a lovely young girl, one of the many fine ladies at her ladies' school. As a refined young lady, she is escorted to and from school by her family's chauffeur, Shinobu Narutaki. Narutaki is handsome and dedicated, and naturally rumors are constantly swirling that he and Sayaka are in love. When Narutaki defends Sayaka for an offense she did not commit, her school demands he be dismissed or else Sayaka will lose the privileges as top student. Will Sayaka cave to social pressure or stand in defense of a loyal servant?
STORY:
What makes The Heiress and the Chauffeur remarkable to me is not what it does with the characters or the story, but in how it manages to capture the mood of Taisho-era girls' fiction in a way that doesn't feel outdated.
Shojo manga got its start in shojo magazines, the oldest of which date back to the mid-1900s. They flourished during the Taisho era, a time where a fine education was just as necessary to a young lady's refinements as her family name and elegant hobbies. That meant there was an increasingly large audience of highly literate teen girls in need of entertainment, and these early shojo magazines were there to supply that need with plenty of short stories, articles, and the occasional comic. These magazines (and the works within them) purposefully cultivated a particular atmosphere. It was a world where everything seemed dreamy and languid and young ladies were encourage to refine upon their thoughts and heightened emotions, but also a world that was carefully bound by social class and convention. You could dream all you want and bond intensely with your friends, but in the end you were expected to pack these dreams away upon graduation and eventual marriage.
The Heiress and the Chauffeur manages to capture something of the mood of Taisho-era shojo culture, but also blends it with modern shojo manga sensibilities. Nowhere is this more evident than with Sayaka. She is classy and elegant, but also possess the spirit of a more modern shojo heroine. When she is alone with Narutaki, their conversation could be that of any pair of childhood friends from a modern shojo manga. Yet the plot is all about social and romantic scandals taking place entirely in the confines of a ladies' school, and the social division between the two is this constant undercurrent to everything going on. It's this combination of new and old that feels not only very fitting for the setting, but helps elevate what is otherwise average work into something worth reading.
ART:
Ishihara's art is very much of our current time, but she makes a lot of effort at capturing some of the period detail. This is most evident in the costumes, as Sayaka and the other girls at her school have lovely hakama with all sorts of busy (and period-appropriate) patterns. This fanciness seems to extend into the panels themselves, which are bursting with blooms and scrollwork. The panels themselves are heavily layered, but Ishihara manages to wrangle them just enough to keep the story moving visually.
PRESENTATION:
There's a short story included with this volume, about a pair of siblings sold into servitude at a disreputable saloon. They end up calling upon a roguish thief to help steal them away, and in true shojo manga fashion it turns into love. Again, the twist is obvious and the story beats here are fairly well-trod, but they're assembled in such a way as to still be entertaining.
RATING:
The Heiress and the Chauffeur manages to fuse the dreaminess and drama of Taisho-era girls' fiction with modern shojo sensibilities in a way that works far better than it has any right to. It's downright underrated in my opinion, and more people need to discover its charms in the same way I did.
This series is published by Viz. This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available. Both volumes have been published and are currently in print.
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