Sometimes a series is just exactly what you thought it was going to be and what you were looking for, and the josei manga series You’re My Pet! was that for me. This 14-volume manga series is comedic, soap-operatic, a little weird, romantic, and hopeful. While I can’t say it’s flawless, I nonetheless loved it.
This series was originally released in the US as Tramps Like Us in the 2000s by Tokyopop (although I think You’re My Pet is much closer to the original Japanese title) and it’s recently gotten a digital-only rerelease by Kodansha through Comixology. I tore through all 14 volumes within a couple weeks back before my state went on lockdown, stealing minutes here and there to charge through chapters on my phone.
The premise of this manga is that gorgeous, super-accomplished career woman Sumire, who is single and approaching 30 after a bad breakup, finds a much younger guy sleeping in a box on her doorstep one night. She takes him inside, feeds him, and lets him sleep at her place. When it becomes clear he doesn’t want to leave, she somewhat jokingly tells him he can stay if he will be her pet–and he agrees. Sumire decides to call him “Momo” after her beloved childhood dog and they carry on from then on as mistress and pet.
While everyone around them who finds out Sumire is keeping a young man as a pet initially assumes it’s a sex thing, it’s not a sex thing!! It’s actually a pretty literal analogy to a human-animal pet relationship. Sumire gives Momo food, shelter, and snacks; she shampoos his hair; she is worried about leaving him alone at home for too long. Momo provides the kind of total acceptance of Sumire ( when she’s at home in sweatpants, watching trashy television, and in the throes of perpetual anxiety) that a pet does, demands to be patted on the head, and tries to sneak into Sumire’s bed at night for cuddles (okay, that last really does sound kinda sexual but I SWEAR it mostly is not). The manga is about both of them having a lot of personal growth separately and together and how their relationship eventually shifts beyond the confines of the initial pet paradigm.
If you think, “haha, that sounds kind of funny and weird!” you are the target audience for this manga. If you are really squicked out by the idea of someone keeping a human as a pet, no matter how beloved and pampered, I think this is probably not for you as it is a pretty essential element of the story and character arcs.
Assuming you are on board with the pet thing, there is so much to enjoy in this manga. First, the art is GORGEOUS. I mean, this is the chapter art for the very first chapter:
I also loved most of the characters, especially Sumire, who may be my favorite josei heroine of all time. Sumire is gorgeous, accomplished, and successful in her career. Unfortunately, she also has incredible social anxiety that makes her come across as cold and snooty, when she’s really just desperately shy and afraid of doing the “wrong” thing. She is also terrified of showing weakness or vulnerability even when she actively wants to. A lot of the series is about her struggle to open up to people, but it also explores quite seriously the idea that people around her have been wrong to misjudge her. The exploration of how hard it can be from a social perspective (particularly romantically) to be a successful woman or woman-presenting person really resonated with me.
I also loved Momo, who is a bit of a feckless ne’er-do-well, but he knows it. I enjoyed the way he represented a more nontraditional masculinity. He’s slight, sweet, mischievous, and sensitive, but still portrayed as a desirable man even though he meets none of the typical romantic criteria of Sumire’s echelon, e.g. older, taller, and more professionally successful in an office-type job.
To that end, I loved the relationship between Sumire and Momo. While I initially thought the “pet” element of things might involve some sense of a power imbalance, it does not come across that way. Instead, it seems like Sumire and Momo need each other equally.
Sumire needs Momo because she needs someone (other than her best friend from childhood, Yuri) that she can be fully herself with. By setting Momo up as her “pet” she can relate to him as she did to her childhood dog, e.g. with the knowledge that there is nothing she could do that would make her unacceptable to him.
Obviously Momo gets free housing and food from Sumire, but it’s about more than that. At the outset of the series, Momo is a budding professional dancer, but also a bit of an aimless itinerant. Getting close to Sumire motivates Momo to make more mature decisions and to take control of his professional life. They both change each other for the better, and they both need the support and stability the other person brings to their home life.
The way that their relationship shifts into a romantic one felt very nuanced and beautiful. For Sumire especially, the gradual realization that Momo is not just the one who she can be completely herself around and give and receive comfort with, but a person she desires and loves is a satisfying, slow build. Momo seems to develop romantic feelings for Sumire quickly, but mostly suppresses them because a) he knows that is not what Sumire needs from him and b) he does not think she will return his feelings. But when the time is ripe, so to speak, it is ultimately Momo (whose real name is Takeshi, BTW) who realizes that he has to essentially sever the pet relationship so that a new and different relationship can form. In some ways it is like friends-to-lovers (pets-to-lovers?? I’M SORRY EVERYONE) except they become friends because they are in some kind of bizarre live-in LARPing scenario together.
Another strength of this series is the way that it artfully mixes genres. There is a decent amount of situational comedy, especially in the early volumes, including plenty of workplace comedy. There are also soap-operatic twists like scandalous photographs, dramatic marriage proposals, and blackmail threats. Still other plot arcs have a slice of life feel with the daily vagaries of living for Sumire and Momo. There are even elements of magical realism in some volumes. It all weaves together into a rich, full story.
While overall, I loved this manga, there were pacing issues and some plot elements around the handling of consent that I did not love.
In terms of the pacing, in the late-middle volumes (around 7-11) the plot starts to drag somewhat. Sumire spends a lot of the series in a hot-and-cold dating relationship with an older man named Shigehito who represents everything Sumire has been told to want all her life. In spite of a lot of mutual effort, it becomes clear within a few volumes that they aren’t actually all that compatible. In the late-middle volumes they are in a barely-there long-distance relationship that drags on for quite a bit longer than it needs to as Sumire angsts about both being with Shigehito and giving him up. I think at least an entire volume’s worth of material, maybe even 2, could have been cut and I would not have missed it. (FYI, I don’t think there’s anything I would characterize as cheating on Sumire’s part, but her relationship with Momo is deepening and shifting while she does still technically have a boyfriend in case that’s a big no-go for anyone).
The other thing that I felt was a bit hit-or-miss was the way the series handles consent. Now, dubious consent is unfortunately a staple of a lot of adult-audience manga, and I felt that in the overall universe of sexually explicit manga, You’re My Pet is actually quite low on the dubious consent spectrum (how sad that this spectrum is a thing!).
However, there were a couple of times when characters (even “good” characters like Momo) would spend a couple of pages considering taking advantage of another character in a way that momentarily inspired gross and uncomfortable feelings in me. For example, there’s a brief subplot where Sumire gets amnesia and Momo considers telling her that he is her boyfriend so that he can sleep with her. While he ultimately does not do it and specifically thinks to himself that he would never take advantage of her that way, it’s definitely weird. It does feel like the message is that a man is Good and Trustworthy if he decides not to assault you when he has the opportunity, even if he has to…think about it??? Needless to say this way among my least favorite chapters in the entire series.
There’s also another situation between two characters (not Momo and Sumire) where a woman who is sort of a recurring antagonist in the series drugs a man and then tells him that they slept together in order to blackmail him. While this is definitely not treated as an acceptable action in the narrative, and it is eventually revealed that she did not actually assault him, I did not feel like she faced sufficient consequences. There seemed to be a bit of a muddled message in this particular character’s arc along the lines of “we all make mistakes and hurt people!” Okay, but most of us don’t have drugging and blackmail among our mistakes that have hurt people.
In the general vein of consent in this series, I also want to mention that there is a kind of running bit where Momo often tries to kiss Sumire and she avoids or otherwise rebuffs the kiss. I personally read this as somewhat of an inside joke between them and not as Momo actually expecting or seriously attempting a kiss, as when Sumire does not rebuff a kiss attempt later in the series, Momo is actually confused and concerned. However, I can certainly see how it could be read more troublingly as consistent, low-level pressure.
So while I think You’re My Pet handled consent better than a lot of josei manga does, I can’t say that its handling of consent issues was stellar. Yellow flag from me on consent-related content; nothing that made me feel like I could no longer root for the main couple, but certainly no plaudits.
With all of that taken into account, in spite of its (sometimes quite noticeable) flaws, I devoured You’re My Pet. I would give the best volumes of this series an A, hands down, and the worst ones a C, so it all kind of averages out to a B for me. If you want an adult audience manga with a combination of wacky contemporary comedy and offbeat romantic drama, I don’t think You’re My Pet can be beat.
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I don’t think the pet element is my thing, but it’s available on KU so that’s a good way to try it out with minimal commitment if someone’s thinking about it.
Recommendation – are there any manga where the main protagonists are over 30 – and not because they’re 1000+ year old teenage vampires, or something like that, but legitimately middle aged?
I’ve never seen anything that wasn’t teenage or new-adult. Is that just what the genre is?
Looking for this and found out there’s a J–drama adaptation? Which sounds even wilder than a manga!
I’ll be checking out the manga on KU!
I started reading the manga back in college in the early 2000’s, but moved abroad and didn’t get to finish it, so I’m excited it’s available for my immediate gulping consumption! I think there are two.Jdrama adaptations—one from the early 2000’s ( with a young MatsuJun) and one from more recently. The more recent one is free on Viki Rakuten and really focuses in on Sumire’s emotional growth. It really got me in the feels, the way she’s consistently judged as cold by others when she’s just trying to do her best at a job she’s awesome at! Trigger warning for a brief scene of overt sexual harassment and misogynist retaliation early on.
There are two Japanese drama adaptations (2003, 2017– the 2003 one starring Jun Matsumoto) and a Korean film adapation of Kimi Wa Petto (You’re My Pet) by the way! All versions of Momo have faithfully fluffy, curly hair (Jan Geun Seuk of the Korean film has longish hair like a cocker spaniel)
@MsCellanie- I wouldn’t consider You’re My Pet to be new adult at all. I think Sumire may turn 30 by the end of the series, but either way, it’s definitely framed as a story about an established adult woman, although she isn’t middle-aged.
Manga isn’t really a genre, it’s a medium; there are manga written in Japan for pretty much any potential audience you can imagine. A lot of what is available in the US is dependent on what distributors will think will sell well with American audiences but there are definitely manga about middle aged individuals. Not sure about romantic ones with heroines specifically older than 30, but some manga series about middle aged individuals that come to mind include the comedy the Way of the Househusband and the historical drama Descending Stories.
Another with protags over 30 i just thought of—tokyo tarareba girls. I haven’t read it but it’s been billed as a sort of Sex and the City-esque ensemble comedy about single women friends in Tokyo
One of my favourite manga! “Tramps Like Us” was taken from one of the Bruce Springsteen songs used in the text in an early volume, but “You’re My Pet” is definitely a direct translation of “Kimi wa Petto.
The J-drama version of the series is very sweet as well. 🙂
I can’t think of any manga/anime off-hand with older female protagonists, but there is the kdrama “Romance is a Bonus Book” about Dan-i, a 37 year old former advertising copywriter who is trying to get back into her field after her divorce and winds up in a temp position at the publishing house where her long-time younger friend (who has had a crush on her since he was in school) is the company’s youngest editor-in-chief and successful author. The romance is sweet, and I loved that they were constantly surrounded by books and waxed lyrical about the joy of bringing books into the world.
@MsCellanie
The manga genre is huge and contains comics for every reader, including books aimed at middle-aged readers. But unfortunately most of the manga that’s translated into English is targeted at a younger/teen audience. Some recommendations with non-teen main characters: The Full-Time Wife Escapist, A Man and His Cat.
I loved this series so much! I was studying abroad in college in Tokyo during true original run of Kimi wa Petto and it was one of my favorite series at the time! They came out with a best of volume that was one of my comforts reads for a while.
@MsCellanie: At the moment I can’t think of many manga (let alone romance-oriented manga) where the protagonists are over thirty, either. That’s sort of what the josei “genre” (manga targeted at adult women) is supposed to be for, but in practice most of the heroines in the few translated josei works I’ve read tend to be in their mid- to late-twenties, like Sumire in “You’re My Pet.” I think the heroine of “The Full-Time Wife Escapist,” mentioned above, which is available digitally from Kodansha, may be as young as twenty-four. But she’s been floundering both romantically and career-wise since graduating from college, which largely explains why she’s quick to grasp at the chance of a fake (at least to start with) marriage with a slightly older man for whom she’s been working as a sort of freelance housekeeper. (This heroine both admires and fears following the example of her aunt, a kick-ass career woman who had many affairs in her youth, but never married and now obsesses over having allegedly missed her chance.) In Japan there’s traditionally been so much pressure for women to get married by age twenty-five that, at least in manga, even those just a few years older than that are often prone to recurring freak-outs about whether they’ve already forfeited all chance at not winding up permanently single and childless. These freak-outs and fits of desperation–as well as decidedly sexist verbal abuse (“old hag,” etc.) from one of the male leads, not to mention the talking bar snacks the main viewpoint character hallucinates(?) mocking her whenever she (rather frequently) gets drunk–are unfortunately a significant recurring feature of “Tokyo Tarareba Girls,” also mentioned in one of the comments above. This is despite the fact that the three vaguely “Sex and the City”-ish heroines are all of thirty-three when the story begins.
While parts of “Tokyo Tarareba Girls” can be entertaining and/or funny, mangaka Akiko Higashimura (who had already been married, had a kid, and gotten divorced by the time she started this series) appears to subconsciously buy into her society’s sexist assumptions about the alleged defectiveness of women who don’t manage to get married by the “appropriate” age, even as her author’s notes and postscripts dismiss her never-married friends’ franticness over their single state as unenlightened and silly. It’s worth checking out the first volume or so from the library (if that ever becomes an option again; some libraries may have the manga available as an e-book). But Higashimura’s earlier manga, “Princess Jellyfish,” is much more unproblematically enjoyable in most respects, even though the main female and male leads are both in their early twenties and could be categorized as new adult. (The main male lead is an allegedly straight, cisgender college student who frequently crossdresses, apparently largely because of an obsession with fashion that originally stemmed from his attachment to his glamorous long-lost mother. He also has a much more conventional aspiring-politician older brother who eventually becomes his unwitting romantic rival. The heroine, on the other hand, is a shy, nerdy college dropout who lives in a sort of commune of similarly slacker-ish [mostly] twentysomething women who are all so obsessed with their respective fandoms [jellyfish, kimono-making, trains, feudal-era epic Chinese literature, and boys’ love manga] that they have difficulty functioning in the outside world.)
“Complex Age” (available both digitally and in hardcopy from Kodansha) is another pretty well-done manga that deals with a relatively young woman (I think its protagonist is about twenty-six) going through the sort of age-related anxieties about getting “too old” for romance and other activities that would be more typical for North American women in their mid-thirties or older. By day, heroine Nagisa is a regular office worker. But what she really lives for is cosplay–dressing up as various anime and manga characters and doing photo shoots in costume with fellow enthusiasts at conventions. This sort of thing is apparently considered even more out there in Japan than it is in the U.S., since Nagisa obsessively conceals her cosplay habit from not only her co-workers and prospective boyfriends, but her parents, even as she spends most of her waking hours at home creating and sewing new costumes and otherwise working on various aspects of cosplay. Judging by this series, the mostly teen-oriented world of Japanese cosplay is, if anything, even more sexist and ageist than the larger society, since the mid-twenties Nagisa is beginning to be the victim of snide comments about how it’s past time an “old lady” like her gave up this “childish” hobby and stopped making a spectacle of herself. (Nagisa also experiences a lot of internal conflict–and occasional gibes from the peanut gallery–over the fact that, since she’s unusually tall for a Japanese woman, some of her younger, more petite friends look more like the dainty, cute characters she tends to prefer than she does, no matter how meticulously she attempts to recreate said characters’ looks via costumes and makeup.)
As you can see from some of the examples above, manga originally intended for the josei/adult female market often tend to be noticeably angst-ridden. For further details (unfortunately primarily about manga that are now mostly out of print, although the works of Erica Sakurazawa are definitely worth seeking out used if you can find them on eBay or various secondhand book sites), see my 2008 article “Comics for Grown-Up Women, Part 1: Tramps Like Us and Other Josei Manga” for the online feminist comics fanzine *Sequential Tart* ( http://www.sequentialtart.com/article.php?id=1101 ).
“Tramps Like Us/You’re My Pet” is definitely more upbeat than average. The good news is that Yayoi Ogawa has a new series, “Knight of the Ice,” that’s available in English from Kodansha both digitally and (on a slightly delayed basis) in hardcopy. “Knight of the Ice” is about two childhood friends–Kokoro, a rising star in men’s ice skating, and Chitose, the neighbor girl who’s known him since kindergarten and now works as a journalist at a popular health magazine that sounds vaguely like a Japanese version of “Self.” Kokoro is good-looking but introverted, socially awkward, and prone to performance-undermining fits of self-doubt which can only be countered by Chitose–and only Chitose–reciting the magical powers-unleashing spell from their favorite childhood anime before he goes out on the ice.
Kokoro is obviously crazy about Chitose. But Chitose, who is so short and flat-chested that her handsome male editor (who also appears to be interested in her), teases her about looking like an elementary-school student, is convinced that Kokoro, whose good looks and enigmatically close-mouthed public persona (imposed by his manager to prevent him from lapsing into his native hick accent or geeking out about magical girl anime on camera) have made him the idol of female ice-skating fans nationwide, is way out of her league. When Kokoro’s intimidatingly glamorous and overbearing female manager browbeats the two of them backstage about how damaging it would be to Kokoro’s image if they were perceived as more than friends, Chitose immediately panics and denies that she regards the slightly younger Kokoro as anything but a surrogate kid brother–to his subtle but visible dismay. Volume one of “Knight of the Ice” is available now both digitally and in hardcopy. I believe the digital version of volume two is supposed to be released within the next two or three weeks, with the hardcopy release currently slated for July.
Unless you count Yuuko the space/time witch in CLAMP’s series “xxXholic” (who is the boy protagonist’s mentor rather than the actual main character and looks as if she might be thirtysomething, but is probably a centuries-old immortal), the only other over-thirty female manga protagonist I can think of right now is Yuki Ichinoi in Kaori Tsurutani’s “BL Metamorphoses.” This is the story of a seventy-five-year-old widowed calligraphy teacher who unwittingly buys a boys’ love (m/m) manga at her local bookstore, then becomes sufficiently invested in the story that she keeps going back to the store in search of the next volume. In the process, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Urara, the teenage girl clerk who helps her order the sold-out volume three. Urara eventually starts loaning Ichinoi other BL titles from her own collection because she doesn’t know anyone else offline who also reads boys’ love and is desperate to discuss her favorite titles with somebody. At the end of volume one, which was released recently in both digital and hardcopy form by Seven Seas Entertainment, Urara and Ichinoi are on their way to a book-signing-type event featuring their favorite BL mangaka.
It’s only slightly easier to find manga titles of any sort with male protagonists over thirty, at least in English. (There’s a whole Japanese subgenre of manga about the job-related adventures of businessmen of all ages, but even “Middle Manager Tonagawa-san,” which was made into an anime a couple of years ago, has never been legally translated into English, as far as I know.) Well, I guess Osamu Tezuka’s manga “Black Jack,” about a wonder-working rogue doctor/mad scientist (a number of volumes of which are actually available in translation), probably counts, since there was a whole spin-off anime called “Young Black Jack” about the title character’s adventures in medical school, and he looks considerably older than that in the main/original version.
There’s also “A Man and His Cat,” mentioned above, which is the touching story of a middle-aged widower who adopts an aging cat which had been rejected by all the other pet shop customers for being too uncute and funny-looking. And “Descending Stories,” also mentioned above, which intertwines fifty or sixty decades of the life story of one of the last surviving classical masters of rakugo (a form of traditional Japanese storytelling that in some ways resembles stand-up comedy, although many of the stories are actually serious or tales of supernatural horror) with the antics of the goofy young ex-convict who’s determined to become his apprentice after being wowed by the rakugo master’s charity performance at his prison. And, on the superhero/action end of the spectrum, there’s “Inuyashiki,” a series about a sixty-year-old white collar worker who gets no respect either at work or from his family, but finds a literal new lease on life when he’s accidentally killed by a flying saucer landing in a Tokyo park, then brought back to life as a super-powered cyborg by the penitent aliens.