More often than not, maids are used as fetish fuel in manga, and today's review is one of the more unfortunate examples of such.
ENMUSU (Renai Shusse Emaki En X Musu), by Takahiro Seguchi. First published in 2002 and first published in North America in 2004.
PLOT:
Gisuke Arakawa is a high school senior down on his luck. He's constantly bullied, struggles to maintain his grades, and his brilliant but icy classmate he's crushing on won't give him the time of day. Then a tall, busty Russian maid named Sonya shows up at his door bearing a special good-luck charm just for him. This charm grants Gisuke a chance at inheriting a vast fortune, but to do so he must defeat the other charm bearers at a series of punishing academic tests. Worse still, the other boys and their maids want Gisuke out of the way and are prepared to do that by the dirtiest means possible.
STORY:
Looking at Enmusu, you would presume that this is just another shonen battle series, and you would be half-right. It is a shonen ecchi battle series, so you get this weirdly off-putting mix of childish earnestness with fetishes a-plenty.
Seguchi wasn't even trying when it came to writing the cast. Gisuke is downtrodden, Sonya is a ditz, Shizuku the love interest is as frigid as the Arctic, and the villains Tendo and Satoshi are sadistic creeps. Nobody really changes save for Shizuku, and that's only because she's torn down to nothing in the kinkiest way possible first. Gisuke is meant to be endearing with his perseverance and innate decency, but mostly he comes off as a blank, reacting to fanservice moments and spouting platitudes about The Power of Friendship (tm) like a shonen-manga-themed robot.
The characters may be simple, but the plot is needlessly convoluted. It's like Seguchi and his editor picked tropes out of a hat or threw darts at them at random, and what they got was "dead business mogul," "maids," "Japanese good-luck charms," and "competitive academic testing." If that sounds like a random and nigh-impossible collection of ideas to tie together into a coherent story, you are absolutely correct. That's why Seguchi doesn't even bother, relying instead on shoving in as many fetishes as possible.
Some of the fetishes are obvious, like all the focus on maids. Every boy that gets a charm also gets a maid of their own, and Seguchi clearly savors every opportunity he can get to have these boys bathe with their maids, molest their maids, or in some other way sexually exploit them. Others are less expected, like the heavy focus on submission, bondage, and other S&M stuff. We're talking dog leashes, demeaning nicknames, verbal and physical abuse, and so much more, and all of it is piled on Shizuku before volume's end for the terrible crime of not beating a sadistic little kid on a practice test. She's clearly traumatized by this, and all Gisuke can offer is a pep talk. To say that this is tonally out of whack with everything else in the book (including the other ecchi scenes) is an understatement. It felt like an unwelcome peek into the mangaka's mind and BOY did I not like it one bit.
ART:
The art for Enmusu might somehow be worse than its story (which is saying a lot). The character designs are all weirdly short and squat, which makes most of the characters look like children. Looking at Gisuke on the cover, you'd sooner presume he was 10 than you would 18. Their faces are like a teen's caricature of an anime character drawn on a squashed jellybean. The only thing Seguchi seems to draw competently are nudes, so not only are there are a lot of fanservice scenes with the girls and Gisuke but also a surprising amount of man-ass. The panels are framed uncomfortably close to the action and at low angles to best capture both the frequent panty shots as well as to emphasize the looks of scorn and hate thrown at Gisuke and Sonya.
RATING:
This manga was published by ADV Manga. This series is complete in Japan with 6 volumes available. 1 volume was published and is currently out of print.
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