That's not to say that modern maid manga can't be horny either. They just tend to be a little less obvious about it.
THE MAID I HIRED RECENTLY IS MYSTERIOUS (Saikin Yatotta Maid ga Ayashii), by Wakame Konbu. First published in 2020 and first published in North America in 2021.
PLOT:
Somewhere in the countryside, a young man lives alone in a large house with a beautiful new maid. He can't quite pin down why he finds her so fascinating. Is it her excellent cooking? Her ability to guess his every need? Her somewhat revealing uniform? Her exotic purple eyes?
There's only one sensible explanation: she can't be human. She must be some sort of demon or something! That's why he can't stop thinking about her everyday! It can't possibly be that he's attracted to her! Clearly, the best response is to confront her with this truth, along with overly honest confessions of how much he thinks of her and how he wants her to stay with him forever. That'll show her!
STORY:
Like My Maid, Miss Kishi, this is very much a one-joke manga. This time it's a teasing-style romance, in the same vein as manga like Teasing Master Takagi-san or Don't Mess With Me, Nagatoro. Thankfully, this is closer in tone to the former than the latter. Like Miss Kishi, though, this is a joke that wears out its welcome very fast.
Let me walk you through the premise of each short chapter here:
1. The Young Master is fixated on some particular physical quality or behavior of The Maid.
2. The Young Master confronts The Maid about the suspicious (if not supernatural) cause of said quality/behavior.
3. The Maid gently teases her young charge, playing along with his silly accusations.
4. The Young Master takes this teasing to be a truthful confession, and in his excitement blurts out a statement that sounds like a romantic confession.
5. The Maid walks away, flustered by The Young Master's statements.
The details may differ from chapter to chapter, but the end result is the same. It's the sort of mildly amusing comic that works as filler in a monthly magazine but putting them all together in a book only underlines how repetitive things get and how little progress it makes.
That's not even getting into the power dynamic between the two leads. Usually these teasing rom-coms have a bit of give-and-take between the leads so that it's not just one party relentlessly dunking on the other. That's harder to pull off here considering both their status as master and servant as well as the large age gap between them. Of course the maid is humoring her master in a gentle way - he's a literal child who is too young and too isolated to truly understand the nature of his feelings! The only part that gives me pause is that last part. This entire premise was already dangerously close to the Shota Zone, but having her respond emotionally to her master's suggestive statements (however accidental it may be) is taking things just a step too far to be comfortable, even if it's all meant in jest.
ART:
There is one remarkable thing about the art here. It's not the character designs, which are pretty ordinary save for the fact that the maid's uniform leans more towards the fanservice than functionality. It's not the backgrounds, which are pretty sparse and keep things vague as far as the time period and specific setting go. It's that the maid has purple eyes, and those eyes are printed in vivid color. It's not just for the cover and first few pages, though. They do it for the entire book! I've never seen such specific color printing in a manga, and it certainly helps to sell this woman's mystique.
RATING:
This manga is published by Yen Press. This series is ongoing in Japan with 7 volumes available. 6 volume have been released and are currently in print.
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