I was completely blindsided by Mononoke Sharing. I bought it blind from the three-page preview on Comixology, and I thought after the first volume it was just an exploitative ecchi manga. But I don't mind a good exploitative ecchi manga once in a while, and the characters were pretty likable, so I bought the second volume after a while, and then, inexplicably charmed, the third and fourth.
Mononoke Sharing follows Yata Kagami, an extremely poor high school girl who lives on her own. Searching for cheap rent, she finds a house full of classical Japanese folk creatures trying to blend in with humans as part of an experiment to see if they can live in human society. They want to take the experiment to the next level by having a human in the house with them. At first, Yata wants none of it, but she realizes that everyone in the house seems nice and that living among a bunch of supernatural creatures gives her a chance to feel less singled out and alone.
The series is by Coolkyoushinjya, the same manga-ka behind Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon, and there are a lot of similarities. Both are harem series that have a normal girl with mean eyes at the center of the harem instead of a generic loser guy. Both harems are made up of supernatural beings who either dislike humans or have a certain disregard for human life. Both have acceptance and tolerance of those different from you as major themes. And it's obvious that Coolkyoushinja likes big boobs, because both Mononoke Sharing and Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon are full of them. Mononoke Sharing takes a sharp turn into the serious in its second half; having only seen the Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon anime, I can't say if that series does the same.
The manga's first half follows the characters' daily lives in the house as Yata gets closer to them and deals with weird roommate troubles. The first chapter introduces all the characters by showing Yata get annoyed at them for their various bad behaviors with the trash. Kappa Mizuchi sheds bowls out of her head that jam up the trash compactor, while devil Momi's horns shred the bags and make them leak. Fox spirit Youko has a voracious appetite for sex and throws out huge numbers of used condoms, and rokurokubi Kuro has a bad habit of taking out the trash without going outside by holding the bag in her mouth and stretching her extremely long neck from the window over to the trash cans. Only snow woman Yuki has no problematic trash behaviors, though she has to bundle up in a winter coat and scarf to avoid freezing the trash bags with the cold air that constantly surrounds her. Subsequent chapters show how Yata first moved into the house, how she became closer to each of her housemates, and what happens when she goes with them to the pool or to a summer festival.
In the second half of the series, a high-ranking mononoke official named Chiehime, a hannya, appears and tries to disband the shared house. Chiehime insists that mononoke and humans shouldn't try to live together and is disturbed that mononoke are slowly becoming more human. She challenges the house to a contest to determine if they'll be allowed to continue living together, and uses all sorts of underhanded tricks, recruiting friends and family of the housemates to fight against them. Even though Chiehime and Yata oppose each other bitterly, they also recognize there's something similar about the two of them. In the end it's revealed that Chiehime is a mononoke with no mononoke powers; time and interbreeding with humans is making them slowly lose their unique abilities. When she's attacked by a group of mononoke who were using their shared house as a front for bad behavior when she disbanded it, Yata saves her, earning her gratitude. At Momi's behest, Chiehime starts living in the house and quickly comes to see the appeal.
The series ends rather abruptly; Yata finds out that Momi is one of the gods who created the world, and that in her loneliness while she waited millions of years for humans to appear, she created mononoke, much like Aule creating the dwarves in The Silmarillion. Yata grows up to be a liaison between humans and mononoke, and takes part in creating a mononoke district where the mononoke can be out with who they are while they slowly lose their powers and are absorbed into the larger population. The series ends with a new girl moving into the shared house and Yata showing up to greet her.
Surprisingly Good…
Mononoke Sharing is, to my surprise, a really good series. The dialogue is surprisingly clever and fun. The characters are unique and charming. The sweet and shy Yuki is the kind of character I'd usually pick as my favorite, and she definitely ranks high, but I never expected to like Youko as much as I did. Her unbridled sexuality comes off like a cheap excuse for sex scenes at first, and the series definitely takes advantage, but she's enjoying herself so much, doing exactly what she wants, just because she wants it, that she was a lot of fun to watch, and I had to admire it. And Kuro was the character who made me laugh the most, as she aspired to become a manzai comedienne with an array of terrible neck-based jokes. Kuro in particular is a weird, unique character that no other harem series could have come up with. While it would have been easy to just put the characters in the usual array of cliched harem situations, the stories take full advantage of the premise and focus on the daily challenges and oddities of mononoke living in a human world. When Yuki steps on the carpet, she freezes it, and later it melts and leaves behind little spots of water. Mizuchi usually absorbs the water, so no one notices this until she's gone on vacation for a few days and there are damp spots all over the carpet. Mizuchi's colleagues have noticed she has an odd habit of pouring water on her head to refill the dish hidden under her wig. At one point Yata walks into Kuro's room and finds her with her entire neck unraveled, which she has to do sometimes to exercise it. It's so long it fills up the entire room, and it's so strong that she can make a chair or bed for Yata, and massage Yata by vibrating it.
To my even greater surprise, Mononoke Sharing transitions to a darker tone really well. It keeps its humor, but it does so without cheapening the more dramatic parts. In Volume 3, Mizuchi's stage of the contest becomes a life-or-death swimming race with her younger sister, whom her kappa relatives have elevated above her because she has pure kappa heritage while Mizuchi is part human. When it looks like Mizuchi will win, the kappa cheat by pushing a boulder on her, but her younger sister, who was deeply shocked when she discovered that she was chosen only for her heritage, pushes her out of the way and is injured. The series follows this serious plot with a silly plot where Youko and her old friend Souko compete to see who can seduce and bed the most men, but it handles the transition and the other characters' reactions so well that what could have been horrible tone whiplash instead feels natural. Yata and Chiehime discuss serious issues of ethics, philosophy, and morality around mononoke-human relations for an entire volume, then begin the next volume with Yata accidentally molesting Chiehime in her sleep, and somehow allow both characters to retain their gravitas when they need it. A lesser series would have debased and degraded Chiehime when it did this, or when it showed her forced to pose for pictures in a micro-bikini, but Mononoke Sharing allows Chiehime to keep her grace and confidence even though she's not accustomed to erotic things.
…but a rushed ending that leaves a bad taste
While Mononoke Sharing does a lot of things really well, it's not very good at following up on all the threads it introduces. The ending leaves so many interesting and funny stories on the table, and there are so many things about the characters we never learn. We know a lot about Yata as a person by the end, but we never find out much about her past or how she got to be the way she is. There's a tiny mention that she was abandoned in an orphanage, which helps explain the loneliness that Mizuchi points out early in Volume 1, but we never find out more. We don't find out a lot about Chiehime's past or her family or how she attained her position of power in the mononoke community. We meet Yuki's and Mizuchi's estranged sisters in Volume 3, but we don't get to see them interact or slowly rebuild their relationships. We never meet anyone from Youko's or Kuro's families or find out much about their pasts. The last to take place before we skip ahead a few years to the finale concerns Yata getting permission to reveal her housemates' mononoke nature We don't get much development or any closure with Yuki's and Youko's crushes on Yata. I especially wanted to see Youko's crush develop more, because it's unexpected for her to fall in love; she has sex with both men and women constantly and never seems to fall in love, so she must see something special in Yata, but we never get to explore that feeling. The ending just implies she's been carrying a torch for Yata for years.
Speaking of the ending, it comes so abruptly that I assume the series was cancelled or Coolkyoushinja just lost interest all of a sudden, and in trying to wrap up the plot with such haste, it makes a weird point about minority populations that I don't agree with and which bears some examination. In Yata and Momi's conversation where Momi reveals that she created mononoke, Momi also mentions that mononoke are supposed to lose their powers over time and be absorbed into the human population, which she did so that the history set out by the other gods, where there were no mononoke, wouldn't go too far off course. The ending shows that Yata, working with the mononoke government, came up with a plan to reveal the existence of mononoke and establish a special cordoned district of the city where they can live freely and openly. The expectation is that the mononoke will learn to integrate with human society in the special district, slowly lose their powers, and eventually disappear from existence and be subsumed by the human population.
It's not hard to see mononoke as a metaphor for minority or immigrant populations within a larger society, and the series helpfully establishes this reading for us during Chiehime's first appearance. She asks Yata how Yata sees mononoke, and Yata replies that she sees them as like humans but different, sort of like a separate race. After this, the parallels between mononoke and minority communities abound. Throughout Volume 3, Chiehime's argument against allowing humans and mononoke to integrate is based around two points. First of all, that mononoke are dangerous, unpredictable, immoral, and deceitful by nature, and humans cannot tolerate this, so conflict is inevitable. Second, that mononoke will lose what makes them special and unique by integrating too closely with humans. She uses the first point mainly to berate Yata and the others, trying to persuade them that humans and mononoke can never live together, as many a separatist firebrand has done in real life. When the kappa try to kill Mizuchi to prevent her inferior lineage from triumphing over the eugenically superior Mamizu, Chiehime says with cruel glee that this too is part of mononoke nature.
But the second point pains Chimehime. She's proud of her mononoke heritage, but she considers the powers a fundamental part of being a mononoke. She plays up her heritage by wearing a hannya mask and very flamboyant kimono, agitating for mononoke pride, and fighting for segregation and against integration with humans. In doing so, she's attained a high rank and a lot of respect and influence in the community that she loves. But without any powers, she can't see herself as a real mononoke, and she fears other mononoke will feel the same, so she lives in terror of being outed. Her inability to fully consider herself a part of the mononoke community has driven her to fight twice as hard to preserve it while living in constant fear of losing her right to be a part of it. If mononoke symbolize a minority population within a larger society, then their powers, customs, and oddities symbolize their unique culture and history. Chiehime is like a child born to an immigrant population within the United States who never learns her parents' language, grows up celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving instead of her parents' holidays, and prays to the Holy Trinity instead of to her parents' gods, who realizes on becoming an adult that she's proud of her parents' culture and becomes an activist, fighting to preserve it despite knowing little of it herself. While she can do her best to learn their language, their customs, their religion, she'll always trip a little over the unfamiliar sounds of their language, and the words of the prayers will never quite come to her naturally. And she might live in fear of other members of the community discovering just how Americanized she actually is as she goes around berating the young people for eating burgers and pizza instead of their heritage foods.
But at the conclusion of the story, we find out that Momi made mononoke to lose their powers after a few generations and be absorbed into the human population. And the special district that Yata helps establish at the end is known, at least by some, as the last gasp of mononoke identity. In the final chapter, the building manager for the shared house tells the new girl moving in that "Mononoke are slowly trying to become human" and "In time, mononoke won't be so rare anymore…and they'll eventually just be called 'people'". The new girl responds, "That means it's the last chance in history to meet someone this mysterious, right?!" So people know that mononoke are going to soon become indistinguishable from regular humans. This is viewed as a great victory by everyone, including Chiehime, who once fought so hard to maintain what made mononoke unique.
If mononoke symbolize a minority population and their powers and quirks symbolize their culture, language, and customs, then mononoke losing their powers and becoming more like humans symbolizes cultural assimilation. This assimilation is presented as a good thing by the story and is seen as such by both Yata and Chiehime. So the message of the ending is that minority populations should assimilate and disappear into the dominant culture, possibly after a period of living in a special ward where they can mix with the dominant culture and learn how to assimilate better. That's a weird and kind of disturbing message. The way Coolkyoushinjya presents themes of tolerance and understanding both in Mononoke Sharing and in Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon makes me think that is not at all what he was trying to get across. Nonetheless, that's what this rushed ending says.
There's an entirely different, also interesting thematic thread that the manga doesn't explore enough to say much about. In real life, cultural assimilation happens because of social pressures: the minority population learns the majority population's language because they need to communicate with monolingual members of the majority, and they have to send their children to public schools where the majority population's language and culture dominate. But real-life minority populations can resist assimilation to an extent. In the United States, there are Chinese schools and Hebrew schools where Chinese and Jewish children born in America can go to learn their ancestral languages. There are Mexican markets and Russian delis where they buy familiar foods and speak their languages. In many regions the local governments will publish forms in multiple languages. Mononoke, on the other hand, can't resist assimilation in the same way, because their loss of their powers was imposed on them by their creator, Momi. It's an inevitability of who they are. They were literally made by God to assimilate. This, and the entire idea that destiny in this world is an inexorable force set from the beginning of creation, mentioned during Momi's tell-all conversation with Yata, introduce questions about free will and meaning that are too quickly dropped and too scantily sketched out to impact the story much.
