Spotlight #2: Captive Hearts

English Title: Captive Hearts
Japanese Title: Toraware no Minoue
Author: Hino Matsuri
English Publisher: Viz Media
Anime?: No.
Summary: Kuroishi Megumi's family has been cursed to serve the Kogami family since the Muromachi era. As the Kogami family's been missing for fourteen years or so, no one bothers to tell unsuspecting Megumi about the curse until Kogami Suzuka shows up. Megumi has fits of intense servility around her; Suzuka has fits of non-curse-induced shiness around him. The two spend their days being dumb and adorable at each other.

It has finally happened. I've waited not-so-patiently as Merupuri, Vampire Knight and even Wanted cropped up on the shelves of my local bookstores, and Hino Matsuri's Toraware no Minoue has finally been licensed in English.

Toraware no Minoue, or Captive Hearts, was one of the first "femdom" manga to catch my attention back when it first started making the scanlation/fansite circuit. Intrigued, I ordered the five tankoubon online and taught myself kana by trying to translate the first few volumes from Japanese to English on my own. (I'm, uh, still working on that . . . yeah.) For this reason, I have a fairly strong personal attachment to the manga, though I suspect that my (blind) admiration for the work predates my days as a discerning manga consumer, so I'll do my best to try to remain objective in this "spotlight."

Art: The art is pretty and technically well-done, though it's clear that the mangaka was still getting a feel for the look of her characters, especially in early cover and filler art. Hino Matsuri tends not to focus much on differentiation in character design. The primary cast of Captive Hearts is thankfully small enough (1 adult male, 1 young male, 1 young biological female and 1 transgender female) that eye shape and hairstyle are usually sufficient as distinguishing features. (This is a different story than in, say, Vampire Knight, where the huge cast of bishounen vampires should really come with a chart or something--actually, this being shoujo manga, they may very well come with a chart. I will have to double-check.) The page design is busy to the point of looking a bit frantic, but this suits the rather slapstick humor that the series occasionally delves into, and I find it a nice change of pace from the more standard shoujo images of wide-eyed closeups and flowery backgrounds.

Plot: The servant's curse is a nice twist on the standard shoujo "boy meets girl" fare, and I like that we see the action from both Megumi's and Suzuka's points of view. Thankfully, the romance picks up pretty quickly, so we don't have to wade through the "Now I like him now I don't, now he likes me and I don't like him, now I like him but he stopped liking me, etc." mood swings that a lot of shoujo titles have fun tormenting us with.

Characters: Suzuka is sweet as a puppy, cute as a puppy, innocent as a puppy, enthusiastic as a puppy, and probably about as smart as . . . you get the idea. Megumi is ever-so-slightly more complex, and would probably be a pretty unbearable Standard Issue Bishounen Jerk(TM) if his curse had never shown up (though we only see a scant few pages of his life before Suzuka, so nothing is certain on that front). Megumi's overly enthusiastic father is pretty enjoyable, though he's mostly used for exposition and recurring "discipline" gags in the first volume.

Side Stories: The first volume has two side stories that take up too many pages for my taste. These are more or less Standard Issue shoujo stories, and lack the imagination and sense of fun that make the main plot so enjoyable.

Captive Hearts has romance, an ancient Chinese curse, an ancient Chinese dragon, and just enough bondage gags to qualify as femdom fanservice. All in all, it's a fun little title that touches briefly on the relationship between service and love, but mostly just takes its "servant curse" premise and runs with it.