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nohrianseneschal · 6 months

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Paradise Kiss: A Lesson on Dreams and Being Happy (heavy spoilers) Part 1

Thanks to this totally random tweet about anime endings, I'm reminded of an old shoujo manga flame of mine from the early 2000s: Paradise Kiss, nicknamed ParaKiss by its mangaka and fans. In stereotypical Ai Yazawa fashion (baddum tss), this manga revolves around a hopelessly flawed yet peak relatable girl undergoing the trials and tribulations of self-discovery. It just so happens that the setting takes place in a generic, average-sized town in Japan, and it just so happens that this town is home to an eclectic ensemble cast of aspiring fashionistas and designers. And it also just so happens that this cast is at a crossroads: their 3rd year in high school. Yukari was initially on the conventional path of graduating with top marks and entering into a prestigious university. By the time we get to the 2nd chapter of the manga, we see Yukari cast all her mother's dreams aside to become a model in the cutthroat fashion industry.

We begin with our protagonist Yukari, who is enrolled in an elite private high school. She spends her days studying for college entrance exams, but early on, we discover that her hard work is very extrinsically motivated. Specifically, her mother has had an iron-clad grip on her life, and if not for a chance encounter on the street, Yukari would've continued on in this way. Living without living. Doing things that don't make her happy or give her any meaning -- a shell for others' aspirations and desires.

As I said, a chance encounter brings her to the hole-in-the-wall atelier, which was an antique bar rennovated into an... well, atelier for fashionistas attending the local art school. Yukari has been scouted by one of the students to model for their upcoming fashion show in the school's Culture Festival. Although she vehemently opposes the idea at first, Yukari decides to model for them, after witnessing firsthand the extent of their conviction and earnestness of their efforts.

I am deliberately downplaying George's role in here, because I do think future readers should get to know George (the manga's romantic lead and 90s toxic boy) at their own pace and through Yukari's perspective. Describing him would remove some of the magic that is necessary to experience through Yukari's besotted eyes, and Yazawa does a great job staging the cognitive dissonance Yukari herself feels when she's around George. What you should know right away is that George is the de facto leader of the Atelier group and designer behind the label Paradise Kiss. It is his word that becomes the final voice in asking Yukari to model, and it is his intoxicating presence that drives her to join them.

All this to say, that there's a reason -- I think -- that ParaKiss, out of many other Shoujo or even Shounen romances of the 2000s, is still the only one being reprinted. Its 20th-anniversary edition was reprinted back in 2019. In the wake of Nana's permanent hiatus (Yazawa's more popular manga), ParaKiss's fandom is alive and well. More and more people are discovering it, thanks to the reductively short anime adaptation making its way to streaming services. The promise of a (very satisfying) conclusion provides a healing balm of sorts for deluded Nana fans, and the story in its entirety holds its own as a romance masterpiece. The art style, the fashion, the romance, and the writing are all top scorers, but something about ParaKiss remains startlingly unique despite more than 20 years passing us by. Very few shoujo manga dare to try what Yazawa has done with this story, and very few shoujo manga do it so seamlessly -- devoid of the mandatory witticisms and marvelizations so common in today's media. ParaKiss is honest. Brutally honest. Yukari's inner monologues and expressions anticipate what the audience is thinking, not because she's so clever but because we can all relate to her. We've all made that mistake we can't help making. We've all watched ourselves undergo the consequences of our stupid actions, with nothing but self-pity to help us weather the storm. And all of us have known the beauty of believing the world is full of limitless possibilities, and we've tasted the bittersweet revelation that limitations do exist, and that's okay.

In other words, you don't have to be an intellect to enjoy and feel the takeaways of ParaKiss. The mangaka isn't trying to wink and nudge you into believing you're a smart consumer, because Yukari's story (or perhaps, Yukari herself) speaks of a hurt deeper than narrative conflict. Her hurt comes from one's first love, whatever or whoever it may be. First love isn't always romance (although it's a huge part of Yukari's story in ParaKiss). First love is the feeling that everything is new and ripe for discovery. First love is the disappointment that this period of discovery is finite, but you're so much stronger and better for having gone through it, brief as it may be. That is Paradise for Yukari: first love as the Edenic coming-of-age journey she needed to become who she is meant to be.

Many fans and critics agree that Paradise Kiss is a story about one's first love, and how you can have an impactful romance without it ending into a happily ever after. Of course I agree with this take. George is the 2nd protagonist, no question. His presence, actions, and personality catalyze the journey of self-discovery that Yukari finds in her last year of high school.

That said, I don't think enough attention has been paid to the other first love Yukari goes through: the world of fashion. Indeed, the story begins and ends with Yukari's time in the fashion world - her first thrills of modeling and her final, bittersweet acceptance of its inevitable end. This part of the story is so underhanded yet profoundly philosophical, I'm surprised discussions of fashion have become afterthoughts in any serious commentary of ParaKiss.

It's worth noting that Yukari doesn't exactly have insecurities directly related to her physical appearance. It's probably the most unrelatable part of her. When people comment on her beauty, she doesn't deny it, but she doesn't affirm it. We're meant to see and understand Yukari's natural beauty as a fact of her life, like the color of her hair or her height. She even brags about being able to stay skinny no matter how much she eats, which is the closest I came to hating a shoujo protagonist to be honest. Rather, her feelings of self-inadequacy stem from her immaturity, lack of style, and overall lack of self-confidence. In other words, when she starts the story believing her crush on classmate Tokumori is hopeless, she reasons, "Tokumori won't go for girls like me." Yukari doesn't mean she's too ugly for him. She means she's too inferior; too stupid; too 'uncool' for someone she perceives as the ideal. Even when she swiftly moves on to George and sets her sights on him, Yukari's feelings of worthlessness influence her behavior and decisions in the relationship, ultimately affecting how George himself treats her.

If Yukari's psyche sounds incoherent, it is and it isn't. It's realistically incoherent. Women are socially conditioned to find themselves inadequate in some way, and that self-perception is ultimately dictated by how men receive and project it back. This is the genius of ParaKiss. Whether or not you relate, this facet of Yukari's personality is an apt observation on what it means to be a woman as a high schooler, and I don't think it's an accident that prior to meeting the ParaKiss fashion team, Yukari's self-worth came entirely from her mother. For Yukari, growing up and leaving the nest means learning your place in the world in relation to men, and perhaps that's why Yukari's first love is riddled with so much pain, beauty, and joy.

In this cut-out of a panel, Yukari finally asks herself the question that must be in the fore of everyone's minds: 'What am I to George?' What is she to the man she considers the most important to her? What are we in relation to men? It takes Yukari 6 months to figure out that she doesn't need George to answer the first part of that question. By the time the series ends, Yukari is able to ask the same question without George.

These romantic pitfalls and triumphs become more meaningful when you realize this occurs in the context of breaking out into the fashion industry. Similar to Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost, Yukari looks at a mirror and discovers herself. She falls in love with that image. She falls in love with what fashion (not George!) reflects back at her -- a confident, cool woman who can don all sorts of masks and clothes.

When she asks a veteran model for advice on how to walk the runway, the model cryptically replies, "Just tell yourself you're the most beautiful woman in the world." This is a hurdle for the likes of Yukari, whose low self-esteem has prevented her from truly being alive prior to the events of the story. When she does walk down that runway, fully confident and basking in the crowd's reaction to her beauty, Yukari finally understands what it means. Telling yourself you're the most beautiful woman in the world is akin to believing yourself a woman; akin to believing yourself a woman worth existing and hogging the spotlight, without a man to justify it. Yukari might have been wearing clothes that George designed, but one can argue that the dress would not exist without Yukari. Indeed, he designed it with her face and body in mind. Yukari herself inspires the art George believes he's creating, and Yukari herself embodies and imparts the meaning of that art for the audience when she walks down the runway.

Thanks to the fashion show and Yukari's success, George himself realizes he cannot design for ready-to-wear clothing lines. Yukari too discovers that modeling isn't something she can just do. It's something she can work hard at, succeed, fail, and still enjoy. Unlike the grind of studying endlessly for exams she'll never pass, Yukari finds fulfillment in trying and failing in the fashion industry, and this self-realization lets her redefine what it means to succeed and fail, as we all come to understand by the end of the manga.

Given that Ai Yazawa studied fashion, it's no surprise that clothing, design, and the industry's connections are all important for Yukari's coming-of-age. Modeling and wearing George's clothes aren't all butterflies and roses. As we later see by the end of the manga, fashion leaves Yukari feeling dehumanized at times, which Yukari outright states in an inner monologue by calling herself a 'doll.' The liberating potential of modeling becomes a prison, in the right context. When another woman -- particularly one who rejects modeling or being a man's muse and instead aims to be a designer herself -- enters George's life, Yukari feels helpless. The autonomy she gained by modeling bites back in a mocking display of her own shallow disregard for other women's agency. Indeed, she acts vile toward Kaori (the aspiring designer in question), solely because she's threatened by how George sees her as an equal. The potential of self-fulfillment comes crashing down when the implication here is that, as his muse and model, Yukari will never be his equal.

I'm going to take a second and point out how brilliant this brief love triangle is on the part of Ai Yazawa. We are so used to shoujo protagonists who are sweet, understanding, and unfailingly good. Yukari is a surprise, to say the least. She's not afraid to be mean and flaunt her beauty to intimidate her competition, and at the same time, she's not afraid to own up to her faults and wallow in self-pity when humbled. Although George is the intermediary in the love triangle, you can also see how the fashion industry itself pits women against each other. Yukari can't measure up to Kaori, the talented and mature designer with true compassion for her peers and classmates. The culture festival led Yukari to believe that she, as their model, takes center stage, but with the show over, her status as model reduces to her one of the many cogs that prop up designers' creativity and will. If God is the designer in this paradise, then Eve is just a shell of and for his designs, just as Yukari recedes to a doll when George no longer respects her. Life, it seems, is difficult for a fashion model who seeks to affirm her existence and purpose in a world that devalues such traits in the first place.

Spoilers: George and Yukari's relationship lasts only 6 months, but Yukari's relationship with fashion lasts much longer: 10 years. In the manga's epilogue, Yukari is nearing retirement, and she mentions 'plateauing' in her career as a model. Although as a teenager she aspired to be a world class super model, her work only takes her to other cities in Japan, and she is content to end less with a bang and more like a firm sense of dignity and pride at her work.

It's also no shocker that, rather than confirm her retirement, the manga ends with an announcement of her engagement and imminent marriage to her Tokumori, her high school crush and classmate. The last panels mock the sense that first loves are more powerful than the present love they experience (which is so amazing and Part 2 will be about that), and while these lighthearted panels tell us it's a joke, you can easily see how those words apply to Yukari's love affair with fashion.

Her crush and first love spur her to 10 years of a successful career. Perhaps she never realized her ambitions of modeling in the West, but she nevertheless finds and declares herself successful. This is what first love is. You might start out believing it needs to be 'happily ever after,' but you can end it and grow and realize that 'remembered ever after' is just as good, for the role it had in your life and your growth.

Yukari isn't just telling us the story of her first love with George. She's also telling us the story of how she fell in love with herself through fashion, and how her job as a model helped her live the many lives she otherwise would've never experienced if she had stayed on her mother's preplanned course.

Fashion isn't just about the clothes, the romance, or the glamorous lifestyles. Fashion is looking back and basking in being looked at. Fashion is making meaning out of how others perceive you, and fashion can be a cruel reminder that those meanings are already preordained and predetermined. Yukari doesn't necessarily fight against that. She embraces it all and learns from it.

I'm going to stop here, because I don't think an essay about ParaKiss and first love is complete without talking about George's own implied ending and Tokumori's constant presence in the beginning, middle, and end of Yukari's story. There's still so much to say, so I'll save it for Part 2. For now, let me conclude with the argument that Paradise Kiss is so unique in so many ways. It takes on the typical rhythms and beats of a shoujo manga, but it also embraces the flaws, ugliness, and messiness of love as it manifests in romance and fashion. You can't appreciate and love ParaKiss without understanding how Yazawa carefully crafts and packages a coming-of-age story into a seemingly typical love story. To use the jargon of the trade, we come into ParaKiss believing the firm and distinct boundary separating haute couture from ready-to-wear. Fashion is both, and to fall in love with it is beautiful.

#paradise kiss #Ai Yazawa #lia rambles #meta #ParaKiss

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