As usual, I picked up Yuri is My Job! for the most superficial of reasons. I like yuri, I like the subgenre of yuri about yuri girls schools, and the art on the cover was really cute. Then it sucked me in with its interesting plot and characters, and I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened next. But Yuri is My Job isn’t really about yuri girls schools. It’s only tangentially about yuri. The characters aren’t even in an actual yuri girls school; they’re in a cafe themed as a yuri girls school, where they all play characters and act out scenarios as if they’re in Maria-sama ga Miteru or Strawberry Panic. That’s fitting, because the series is actually a lot more concerned with social facades, the constructed personalities that people adopt to make it easier to live in society and relate to others, than it is about yuri, and the fiction of the cafe is an integral part of exploring that theme.
The cafe at the center of Yuri is My Job! plays the part of a yuri girls school, Liebe Girls Academy, and the patrons play the part of honored guests visiting the school and being waited on by a special cafe team formed from the school’s most beloved students, who the cafe staff play. The main character is Hime Shiraki, an extremely small and cute girl who’s adopted a peppy, sweet character to match her appearance. However, she’s actually manipulating everyone to like her, and hopes to someday use her appearance and constructed personality to marry into money and live a comfortable life. Hime accidentally knocks over Mai, the manager of the cafe, and with Mai’s wrist injured, she press-gangs Hime into working there so they have extra help until her injury heals. Mitsuki, another waitress who’s tall and cool, takes an immediate dislike to Hime, and Hime responds by laying on the sweetness as thick as possible. Hime takes advantage of the appearance of friendliness that Mitsuki has to maintain out on the cafe floor and arranges for she and Mitsuki to become schwestern—“sisters”, like the soeurs in Maria-sama ga Miteru. Hime discovers that Mitsuki dislikes her because she’s actually Mitsuki Yano, a former friend of Hime’s from sixth grade. Mitsuki thought Hime had betrayed her, and she was so hurt by it that she told everyone about Hime’s facade. This damaged Hime’s relationship to her classmates so much that she was alone until graduation, and Mitsuki transferred away, so they never had a chance to clear the air. Hime’s best friend Kanoko also joins the cafe to spend time with her and ends up in conflict with Sumika, the most senior member of the floor staff. Kanoko is secretly in love with Hime, and Sumika finds real romance to be a threat to the facade of the cafe.
All the characters in Yuri is My Job! have complicated relationships with social facades, which is fitting, since Liebe Girls School is also a facade, and the way each character engages with that tells us something about her. Hime’s facade is thickest and most obvious of the main characters. She treats her entire daily life as a performance, a game with the goal of winning everyone’s love, and she slips easily into the same pattern while working at the cafe. Yet over and over we see her contempt for people who are charmed by her facade. She doesn’t seem to be that happy to be tiny and cute, and she doesn’t seem to enjoy being peppy and perky and lovable. Early on, when some girls in her class compare her to the pure, beautiful heroine of a shoujo manga, she demurs, saying she’d rather be like the tall, cool beauty, who she sees as more practical and effective. She’s very taken with the tall, cool, beautiful Mitsuki the first time they meet, and later tells Mitsuki she’s jealous of Mitsuki’s body and appearance. She seems to think being pleasant and lovable and relying on the goodwill of others is the only way to make it with the hand she was dealt, and that she’d have more options to forge her own path if she were more of a cool beauty. She wants to marry a rich man because she sees herself as otherwise outmatched in the world; people won’t take her seriously because she’s tiny and adorable, so social “soft” power is her only option. To Hime, netting a rich husband is a high-level act of social power. It’s not really what she wants, but it’s something she can get with just her cute face and her constructed lovable personality. If she can net a rich husband, she’s set; all she has to do is keep her husband on her side, and his money will make her way for her in the world.
And in pretty much every situation, that’s what Hime does: she tries to make everyone love her, and then she aims for the highest level of social power she can achieve with that love. When the cafe runs an election for Lady Blume, Hime insists on campaigning for the title even though everyone tells her it’s not quite proper for a first-year student and she probably won’t win. It’s important to her, even though Lady Blume is a completely fictional construct that only exists inside the fiction of the cafe. The election is somewhat rigged. They do collect customer votes, but each of the staff members gets 90 votes to simulate a student body voting, and those votes are combined with the customer votes to decide the winner. And even within the fiction of the academy, Lady Blume isn’t a position of any real power. Mai vaguely describes the Lady Blume as a model student who evokes an image of “they’re all so wonderful”, but the Lady Blume has no official duties or privileges even within the fiction. It’s purely about influence. The Lady Blume does get to make one decree, but it’s a decree within the fictional world of Liebe Academy, so its scope is sharply limited. Hime doesn’t even have a real decree in mind; she says she wants to decree that everyone must love her, which Kanoko reminds her is something the Lady Blume already has. Yet Hime still sees it as a desirable position of social influence, and after she accepts that she can’t win on her own, she throws her weight behind Mitsuki in the hope that some of the sheen will reflect onto her as a Blume Schwester.
Yet even though Hime, the master of facades, tries to secure positions of social power in any group she finds herself in, she also gravitates towards people like Mitsuki and Kanoko who aren’t good at social facades. The first time she meets Mitsuki in sixth grade, Mitsuki is crabbing at her and some other girls for being in the way when Mitsuki’s trying to clean. The other girls are annoyed at Mitsuki, and try to hurt her by convincing Hime to replace her on piano at the upcoming school recital, but Hime lies that she can’t play the piano to protect Mitsuki. Later, she goes out of her way to make friends with Mitsuki and tells Mitsuki about her social facade. It’s similar with Kanoko. Kanoko is quiet and unsociable, prefers to be alone, and can’t stand her sociable classmates. But she doesn’t know how to refuse when the other girls push off a project they don’t want to do onto her alone. Hime starts seeking her out, trying to help her, even telling her she should speak up if she doesn’t like the work she’s been asked to do. When Kanoko gets angry and breaks the sign she was asked to make, Hime covers for her, then opens up to her, telling Kanoko about her facade and advising Kanoko to construct a facade of her own so it’s easier to get by in class. In both cases, Hime could have been content to join in her classmates’ disdain, but she was drawn to the outcast, to the person without a facade, and she went out of the way to use the power of her own facade to help them.
Kanoko does develop a facade of her own, but it’s not quite the one Hime had in mind. Kanoko maintains a facade that she and Hime are just best friends, when she’s actually in love with Hime. She’s terrified of anything that could interrupt the status quo, such as Hime finding out Kanoko is in love with her, or Hime developing feelings for someone else, so she sees Mitsuki as a threat. Just like Kanoko, Sumika is trying to maintain a status quo facade, but in her case it’s the facade of the cafe itself. She sees real-life romance as a threat to the image of Liebe Girls Academy friendship the staff portrays for customers, because in the past, a bad romance between coworkers put her at the center of problems for the scenario. So when she discovers by accident that Kanoko is in love with Hime, it brings them into conflict. Sumika seems to understand better than anyone else that the fiction of Liebe Girls Academy can’t exist unaffected by the reality of the staff’s own lives. Kanoko insists that Hime will never discover her love, so it will never affect their performances at the cafe, but Sumika doesn’t believe that’s possible when Kanoko’s feelings are so intense. And her meddling, big sisterly nature drives her to worry about Kanoko, to keep trying to help her even when their goals are at cross-purposes. Eventually, Sumika becomes for Kanoko what Kanoko is for Hime. Kanoko is the only person in Hime’s daily life who knows that her personality is a facade. She’s the only one who sees Hime behind the scenes, who Hime can talk to naturally without putting on a performance. And Sumika, having discovered the facade that Kanoko hides her love for Hime behind, offers to play that same role for Kanoko, to be the one Kanoko can talk to about her love for Hime. These developments in real life do affect the fiction of the cafe, just as Sumika predicted. With Kanoko’s and Mitsuki’s votes, Sumika wins the election for Lady Blume. She asks Kanoko to be her schwester, and Kanoko accepts. Sumika decrees as Lady Blume that all the cafe staff keep being friends, asserting the status quo of the fictional scenario that she did all she could to maintain.
Sumika’s real personality may be caring, sisterly, and meddlesome, but Kanoko only discovers this after unwrapping several layers of Sumika’s own social facade, which she only does at Hime’s urging. Inside the cafe, Sumika plays the character of a bookish, caring, but flippant sempai. Sumika’s fictional character is always reading, shirks responsibility, and flirts shamelessly with the younger girls. Outside the cafe, Sumika presents herself as stylish, confident, and carefree. Hime and Kanoko are both shocked at the contrast between her character in the cafe and how she appears outside. Kanoko at first takes her at face value and assumes she’s shallow and that her character inside the cafe is a complete fabrication. But Kanoko discovers that Sumika’s character is drawn from elements of her real personality. She may dress stylishly, but she actually does enjoy reading. She actually does care about the other staff both personally and professionally, and she wants them to enjoy and learn from their time working at the cafe.
Mitsuki is even more hopeless with social facades than Kanoko. She’s literal-minded, terrible at reading social cues, and not good at guessing intentions. She’s also strongly emotional. When Hime starts working at the cafe, she can’t stop herself from being angry whenever they talk behind the scenes, but she is able to put on a convincing enough performance inside the cafe that even Hime is thoroughly confused as to how someone can hate her so much yet pretend to be nice to her. But even though she’s grown, she still has trouble with facades. Her serious, tempestuous character in the cafe is essentially her real personality reacting to the fictional scenarios. When she and Hime were friends, she saw Hime blow off the other girls in class to hang out with her over and over again. She saw Hime tell them lies, and then come to her and tell her that it was a lie and her friendship with those girls was all a sham. Yet when Hime quits the piano recital and lies to the other girls for Mitsuki’s sake yet again, Mitsuki is so shocked and angered by what she overhears from the door that she bursts in and tells the other girls Hime is lying. Not only is Mitsuki unable to construct a facade for herself, she’s also unable to distinguish the facade from the real thing. Even though Hime always used her facade against the other girls and never against Mitsuki, Mitsuki couldn’t understand that what she was hearing Hime tell the other girls was a white lie. She spends three years puzzling over why Hime turned on her like that. But she does make some progress. She does realize it made no sense for Hime to turn on her, and wonder if Hime had a reason for what she did. She even feels bad for the way she lashed out at Hime afterwards, and hopes to someday learn to understand social complexities so she can avoid hurting anyone like that again. So when Sumika and Mai invite her to join the play at Liebe Girls Academy, she sees it as an opportunity to learn.
When I first started reading Yuri is My Job!, the setting of a cafe themed after a yuri girls school seemed weirdly complex and overly meta. If it were just a setting for a modern-day girls romance, like Girl Friends or Hana and Hina After School, which I thought the series was at first, then it would be. Those stories get by just fine with basic school and work settings. So why does Yuri is My Job! have such complex, meta window dressing?
Noticing the theme of social facades answered part of the question: a themed cafe is perfect for a story about social facades, because themed cafes are a very extreme form of social facade, one that the customers willingly submit themselves to, and which they still respond to emotionally even in full knowledge that it’s fake. When we see others act pleasantly, and hear them speak pleasantly, some sub-logical part of our brain translates that into a pleasant feeling, even if our logical brains are fully aware that they aren’t behaving that way naturally. So customers at themed cafes can enjoy being waited on by maids or having a tsundere go from tsun-tsun to dere-dere towards them over the course of a meal, even though everyone knows the wait staff are just putting on a show. Hime uses the same facade personality for her classmates as she does for the cafe customers, but the cafe customers are one step ahead of her classmates, because they already know it’s a facade.
A maid cafe or tsundere cafe would have also given us a fitting backdrop for a story about social facades, but a yuri girls school cafe is uniquely suited for telling this story, because facades and formalities are a constant preoccupation of anime and manga about yuri girls schools. Lillian Girls’ Academy in Maria-sama ga Miteru has a strong image of elegance, purity, and cleanliness. It expects certain standards of behavior and appearance from its students. The student council uses an elaborate system of titles—Rosa Gigantea, Rosa Chinensis en bouton, Rosa Foetida en bouton petite soeur. Several stories in the series revolve around certain characters’ suitability to hold these titles, and passing them on is regarded as a very serious affair. Yet these titles confer little more actual power than the title of Lady Blume does in Yuri is My Job!; they’re mainly about social power, their holders expected to exemplify the academy’s attributes most highly. Or in other words, Lillian expects its girls to maintain a certain type of social facade, and the Rosa title holders are those who are best at maintaining it.
The soeur system of Lillian Girls’ Academy, referenced by the schwester system of Liebe Academy in Yuri is My Job!, represents multiple layers of facade. Soeurs are formally bonded under an institutional system, but in Maria-sama ga Miteru, their actual feelings often lie somewhere between a very close friendship and a romantic yearning. The soeurs system gives them a facade to cover up feelings of romantic attraction. They can be together like girlfriends without anyone questioning it. Even the name is part of this facade—it implies that they’re close like sisters, not like romantic partners.
But in Japan, the sort of relationships between schoolgirls that we see in Maria-sama ga Miteru have also been recognized as something different than friendship or sisterhood. The modern yuri girls school anime and manga descend from a genre of literature called Class S that existed in the early 20th Century in Japan. Class S literature co-evolved with an actual thing that was happening in early 20th Century Japan. According to the essay “Women Loving Women in Modern Japan”, “Even if [two schoolgirls] engage in a homosexual relationship (or simply experience feelings of attraction for a member of the same sex) during junior high or high school, they are not considered to be lesbian or bisexual—Class S is seen as a phase, nothing more”, even in modern Japan. Japanese society doesn’t regard Class S relationships as real romances; they are at best play-acts of romance, a practice run for a relationship with a man later in life.
But Yuri is My Job!, draws a clear distinction between that sort of Class S relationship, which mostly exists inside the fiction of the cafe, and romantic attraction between girls. Romances between girls outside the fiction are treated as romances, not as a phase or a sisterly bond or a spiritual connection. Kanoko’s feelings for Hime are not the gently ambiguous feelings between Yumi and Sachiko in Maria-sama ga Miteru; they are very much the intense and slightly creepy feelings of someone with an unrequited love that they’re afraid to act on because it might ruin a friendship. When Sumika tries to talk to Kanoko, to understand how she can feel so intensely for Hime and also be so dedicated to hiding her feelings, Kanoko decides to trust Sumika because Sumika always took her feelings seriously as romance. And the relationship between two of the previous staff that led Sumika to be afraid of the effect of romance on the fiction is also unambiguously a romantic relationship. One of the pair was Sumika’s schwester, and Sumika tells Kanoko, “We got along just fine, but we weren’t in love”, clearly distinguishing a schwester relationship inside the fiction from a love outside it. Mitsuki even discovers that one of her female classmates is in love with another, and her social interactions with them both have gone awkward because she’s trying to find an opening to confess and Mitsuki is getting in the way. In Yuri is My Job!, romance between girls is not a facade that can be hidden behind an institutional bond wrapped up in a cute name like “sisters”. It’s real romance, with all the complicated, tender feelings and raw emotional power that comes with it.
That’s why Yuri is My Job! had to take place in a cafe themed after a yuri girls’ school. Social facades are integral even to the fictional genre that the cafe is based on. That makes it the perfect setting for the girls to grapple with social facades in their real lives, to learn more about the complicated ways they interact with the truth of things.
