Hitogoto Desukara, Volume 1 (ヒトゴトですから!) , by Yuni is a very funny, outrageous and ever-so-slightly enraging workplace comedy manga.
Komori Mio is a self-proclaimed sales ace. She’s got skills closing contracts, especially with beautiful female clients. Komori hopes – and expects – to be rewarded for those skills…and is quite put out when the next transfers are announced and instead of a high-flying position overseas, shes transferred into HR. In HR she is assigned to very plain Yamanobe Kyouko to learn the ins and outs of helping employees with their problems.
Let me stop here and unpack this situation, (and my feelings about it.) I don’t know the specifics of how internal company transfers work in Japanese companies, beyond that annual transfers happen regularly between departments and locations but, based on 4 decades of working with larger corporations I have some thoughts: 1) This is enraging. We know no top male sales employee would be be transferred into a support position. 2) This is ridiculous. A top sales person in any industry is usually moved up into management where those same skills that are great for sales are toxic for managing people. 3) This is parody. Every company I have ever met has HR for one purpose – to protect the company from the humans they employ. This is not to say that all HR everywhere is terrible, it’s just that I have never met, or heard of any, that isn’t. ^_^;
One night Yamanobe and Komori end up running into each other as they, separately, bring a date – female in both cases – to a hotel. They suddenly realize that, for the first time ever, they have a true peer in the company and agree to support one another in their womanizing. And so Komori learns that the skills she used closing contracts and getting women into bed, work for reassuring coworkers. And, separately, getting women into bed.
4) This is a comic. Let’s just agree that we should accept that absolutely nothing we’ve seen or are about to see can be used to be angry about this enraging, outrageous, ridiculous manga, shall we? If we don’t agree on that, we’re just going to spend 174 pages being angry. ^_^
Despite this appalling premise, Komori and Yamanobe are serious about their job. After a young employee fails to return to the office, they visit her, only to find that she really hated everything about the job. “Kids today,” Komori says, and Yamanobe who, like Komori is not old at all, says “Do not go there.”
Under Yamanobe’s guidance, Komori begins to really get the hang of HR and helping people find solutions to their problems. Komori’s a little intrigued by Yamanobes refusal to take on a lover, but we can guess that powerful, beautiful, annoying as fuck, Kujou Natsu might be at the root of that.
Komori’s passion for HR comes to a screaming halt at the end of the volume, when Yamanobe declares her disqualified to be an interviewer. Why? Tune into Volume 2 to find out!
I love Yuni’s stylish art, I think the characters are a riot and the premise is so awful that I enjoyed it immensely. ^_^
Ratings:
Art – 9
Characters – 9
Story – I won’t. I can’t.
Service – 1? Even in bed, everyone is covered up
Yuri – 9 Between the two of them, we see them with at least half dozen women
Overall – 8
I’ll be definitely getting the next volume. This is not so much a Yuri story in the office, as an office sitcom about 2 lesbians.
This sounds ridiculous and wonderful
It is exactly that.
From realistic manga about queer women to ridiculous “sitcom” about womanizing lesbians. I am surprised by the development of Yuni’s career.
But if it’s no joke, then I don’t quite understand why you found this manga outrageous. From your description, it looks like a typical romantic comedy for a young adult audience. At least in my opinion.
I have a question, and I apologize if you already answered it.
Is this an all-female workplace, or are there male workers as well?
One cliche I dislike in yuri works is “error 404 male not found.” I’m okay with “female-only spaces” However, 0 acknowledgment of males makes the entire world the story is set in feel cheap. I prefer realistic worlds that acknowledge that queer individuals are a minority. That doesn’t mean queer individuals should suffer abuse & ostracization. It means that a world set in a hetero-normative society is at least grounded in reality. In this “realistic” world, lesbians are the way they are because they are born that way. Not because they have no other choice (because males are not present.)
There are male colleagues in the story. At least one, Matsui-kun, is a semi-regular character, who becomes more prominent towards the end of the volume.
That’s good to hear!
In many of the “yuri” works I’ve watched and read, male characters primarily serve as NTR material or reaffirm the female characters as bisexuals and not lesbians. It’s refreshing that this manga has a prominent male character, which does not affect the leading female’s sexualities.
Given that the female leads here seem to have no problem seducing any cute girl without any reference to LGBTQ identity, I don’t think realism is a big issue here.
This is Josei and also given that Yuni has written a realistic queer story before, I doubt they have the same prejudices as the male authors (in the past Takahiro was even proud that Yuna Yuusha doesn’t have a single male character) of many all-female titles. I understand the reason for your complaints, and judging by Bloom into you, some authors do too, but in this case it’s not a case, I think.
Komori and Yamanobe originated as doujin characters and then the commercial serialization added the premise of them being in HR and that Komori is new to the department. It’s drawing on Yuni’s time working in HR and I can see it wants to inform readers a bit about what HR do and push back against the attitude of the sales people looking down on HR, so I think the premise is a reasonable way of turning the characters into a vehicle for doing that by having Komori be a transfer, but I do find it jarring that a series which turned out to be trying to be positive about HR starts with the protagonist going through something that did look like it could have been a case of gender discrimination or constructive dismissal (like Kozuka’s transfer in IchiMasu).
That was my feeling, as well. It does really try to inspire confidence about HR, too…which is vastly at odds with my real-world experience of HR for the last 35 years working with top global companies, that that also is kind of jarring. ^_^;
I think of it as a kind of Yuri equivalent to Murder Must Advertise, in which Dorothy L. Sayers absolutely *nails* what it’s like working in advertising, because she worked in advertising – as I did at the time I read it. It’s both absolutely real and entirely fictitious at the same time.
Reminds me of my experience watching the early seasons of Silicon Valley, having just left working for a tech company in San Mateo. It was painful to watch because of *just* how close to reality it was. So many of the situations were only barely exaggerated. “Absolutely real and entirely fictitious” is a great way to describe the feeling. ><;
Exactly that energy.