Pink is a total orgy. Kyoko Okazaki gathers up all this stuff going onthe nonstop consumption the decadence these different genres and forms these debates over what modern women should beand hurls it onto the page to get hot and bothered. Then she makes it noisier. She mixes it up. She fuses pieces of explicit porn with shoujo sparkles in a stillsoggy collage. She creates a chemistry experiment a freeform explosion a latecapitalist fairy tale that twists and transmogrifies femininity into a shameless freewheeling decidedly crocodilian creature or perhaps just regurgitates the base form. The manga could turn you away with its puppychomping shenanigans or more likely delight you with how unabashed it all is: how funny how free how quick to deliver a roundhouse kick to highminded literature and anything else Okazaki thinks needs a good walloping. As with everything this woman writes Pink is polarising and it tackles some lofty ideas within a small pocket of prettily scrawled ink. Lets look at some of those ideas. Spoilers ahead CW for suicide and lots of profanity. PART ONE: WELL IM MEAT TOO 220https://i.ibb.co/s9PkL6j/pinkimage12.png A forebear of gyaru manga Okazaki is famous for her bold autonomous sexually active female characters representative of an expanding category of young Japanese women who rebelled against traditional gender roles and became giant girlbosses. Pink presents one of the loudest and proudest examples of the archetype in her work. Yumi an office lady by day and a prostitute by night prances through the streets of late80s Tokyo and keeps a crocodile in her apartment. She navigates her consumer society with evident relish. Yumi is actually from a richasfuck family so she wouldnt have to sell her body if it werent for her unusual pet and its expensive food. But that crocodile is important. Its a testament to her individuality. Its a mirror to her material appetite. Its a hungry little dinosaur that gobbles up the sleepy conservative conception of the Japanese woman and nibbles on the boring bones. Its a deadass crocodile. Without it Yumi would be sad. Yumi sells herself as meat to buy meat for her crocodilethis transaction makes her life worthwhile. As we move through the story we learn that Yumi is not the only body in this meaty merrygoround even if she is the most iconic one. In Pink everything and everyone is commodified and consumable. Characters keep pets of their own which they keep or buy or feed. Theres a play on words here by the way. The word for keeping a pet kau is read the same as the word for buying something also kau. The cast of Pink is like a broken food chain where everyones exploiting each other. The older men fuck Yumi. Yumi keeps her crocodile. Yumis stepmother fucks Haruo. Haruo ends up fucking Yumi. Yumis father fucks the stepmother. Yumis real mother keeps Yumi... or she did before she killed herself. Its a brutal grinder of situation and this meat stuff I keep mentioning is very heavyhanded Okazaki is not known for her subtlety lol. Over and over well see characters call themselves meat compare themselves to food or joke about eating each other. The most provocative example has got to come when Yumi is eating dinner and she explicitly compares the sight of her dead mothers body to a piece of bloody steak on her plate. Its a fuck or get fucked world bitch Okazaki makes an entertaining story out of it employing her usual approach to a cast: her characters pop up and collide and the perspective ricochets seamlessly between them theyre all zigzagging crisscrossing moving out of focus or into the path of a speeding motor vehicle. In Pink the world waits for no one. If you want to survive as long as you can youll have to surf the wave of blood and guts. PART TWO: ALL WORK IS PROSTITUTION OR SOMETHING 220https://i.ibb.co/HB9Sxz5/pinkimage2.png It kind of goes without saying that this system is busted. If the crocodile is meant to represent Yumis pure wild at heart human nature its telling that the thing is stuffed into a cramped Japanese bathroom a world away from its realworld habitat and gorged on trafficked meat until it is inevitably hacked up and turned into a bag. Pink doesnt offer respite and you wont see Okazaki bitching about whats happening or even examining it beyond a kinda flat this is how it be. But Yumi does give us a certain attitude and she sets a rocking example of how to live. What we see is not a rejection of the broader system but a woman who takes the bull by the horns in a way she isnt really supposed to and even if that bull is running off a cliff Yumi is having a great old time bouncing around on its back trampling conservative rules and controlling her own narrative. In that sense Pink is madly empowering. Lets take a look at Okazakis afterword which can unify some of this discussion: All work is prostitution according to JLG and I agree... There are those who think it those who try not to know it those who pretend not to know it and so on but I repeat: All work is prostitution. And all work is love as well. Love. Yup love. Love isnt that tepid and lukewarm thing people like to talk about I think. Its a tough severe scary and cruel monster. So is capitalism. She tosses around some big concepts here and in her characteristic manoeuvre smushes them together. The JLG here by the way is JeanLuc Godard a French director who probably inspired Okazaki with Vivre sa Vie a 1962 movie about a prostitute. There are plenty of stories that follow prostitutes but the prostitute in question is rarely happy. Even Godards movie from what Ive read is pretty sombre as youd prolly expect. Its not like Pink where sex work is nonchalant. There is not a moment where Yumi is shameful or insecure about her profession as she instead comes at it with a type of swashbuckling frivolity like its the most based thing in the world and all the other girls should be doing it too if they need money. Its the same attitude she has for her office job. Any moral qualms obviously lose their power when Okazaki is at the helm. Morality is basically a nonentity in Pink bludgeoned out of existence by a stream of hilarious immoral moments treated with zero gravitas. And the same applies to any semblance of ethical consumption which feels so ludicrous and false in this manga even that animal rights activist keeps a crocodileskin wallet yanno?. There is a levelling effect to this choiceOkazaki cuts everything down to the same slutty level. Like if Im a slab of meat fine But so are you fucker. This manga is a fierce proponent of sex work and a demolition of anyone or who thinks theyre above it like Yumis patronising client or her capitalL literary boyfriend who is made a whore for money himself. Yumi doesnt care that were all rotting together. Her philosophy is simple and childish. If she wants a crocodile shes so pushy that she really gets one. If she wants some nice pink flowers she works hard to buy them. If she wants to turn her apartment into an Amazonian rainforest shell do just that and not consider the toiletclogging consequences. Whichever way she chooses is just as valid as any other. She straddles her own life and for Okazaki thats what love is conflated with work and the world at large. PART THREE: FUCKED FAIRY TALES AND PATCHWORK PORN 220https://i.ibb.co/g6tZjB0/pinkimage8.png The fairy talewhich is kind of inextricably shoujo manga toois an important part of this manga. Look at the characters roles: Okazaki frames Yumi as Cinderella Haruo as her Prince Charming and her stepmother as a literal wicked stepmother who plots her daughters undoing and posts poisoned apples to her door. Look at the images of the chapters: they include Snow White Tinkerbell and this princessy colouring book. Look at these scattered quotes throughout the story: little red riding hood has to watch out for the big bad wolf and was it the seven little goats who mistook their mother for a wolf and got eaten? which are clumsy mishmashes of different fairy tale narratives. That tepid lukewarm love that Okazaki denounces in her afterword is essential to these storiesparticularly shoujo manga which makes a banging commodity out of that shit. Its not a secret formula or anything. Love innocence comfort and idealism all make up the DNA of these typical stories aimed at young girls. Okazaki is aware of this of course and there arises an innate absurdity when she shoves shoujo tropes and fairytale imagery into adult bodies. Every character in Pink except Keiko a true child does a lot of fucking yanno? And not the magical romantic loveydovey kind. Early in her career Okazaki wrote pornographic eromanga for a male audience and you see this in Pink too. The chapter covers also include Yumi with her tits out with a collar onstuff out of a pornographic photo shoot. And then there are the sex scenes themselves. They come in these kinds of disjointed montages that avoid the totality of sex while never not acknowledging the more unattractive fragments of it like an old man coming on Yumis face or a depressing shot of male ass. What we see is this provocative mixture of femaletargeted and maletargeted media: innocent and happy fairy tales combined with unchaste porn. Its a fun little collage. For example when Yumi sleeps with her Prince Charming she does so in an apartment blanketed in beautiful red roses that are really just strewn tissues drenched in her period blood making their magical honeymoon a messy and adult affair. When the gang plant a magical seed that grows instantly into a magic flower that can and does grant any wish they want This gift is a literal seed from an impotent old man traded in exchange for Yumis material possessions I was for real when I called this a capitalist fairy tale yeah?. Speaking of collages we see some very funny and literal collaging when Haruo and Keiko pick up some scissors and start writing novels via cuttingandpasting pieces from existing novels into a new one. That novel goes on to win one of Japans most expensive literary awards whittling serious literature down to the same derivative pastiche as everything else. It also making Haruo rich and famous just like he wished hed be. Anything is possible if you dont take it too seriously. PART FOUR: THAT ENDING WHEN HARUO TOTALLY DIES 220https://i.ibb.co/7y8T0yC/pinkimage4.png Viewed in a certain truncated way the barebones plot of Pink looks kinda lame. Youve got a struggling writer boy who collides with a quirky woman. They have some funny interactions catch the feels for one another and the girl sparks new inspiration in his creative work. In a shoujo move they end up moving in together due to unforeseen circumstances and this kickstarts their dreamy domestic life together. Okazaki turns away from the type of idealistic love found in fairy tales in favour of the tough love inseparable from the real world but she still acknowledges the pull of the former. When Yumi moves in with her boy she flirts with the domestic fantasy quite enjoying her brief stint of being Haruos housewife. She imagines having a bunch of kids and making him breakfast every day. It wouldnt be an awful thing. It might not be that different from what shes doing currently. What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? angela carter quote btw As much as it memes them and preferences something else Pink does not feel like it hates traditional gender roles. I think that reading would clash with the overbearing do whatever the hell you want no matter how dumb it is that twinkles above everything. Still I think theres this certain malecentric malefantasy reading Okazaki is conscious of with Haruo and Yumis future and she goes pretty far to disable it once and for all. After only a few panels of wifery Yumi goes off to work and resumes her boss bitch tendencies. Haruo isnt too happy about this revealed as he cries Ive waited so long to hear those words when Keiko imitates her sister giving up work/croc to be his personal prostitute. But of course she doesnt do that. Without the hustle shed lose the croc. Without the croc shed be miserable. Shes the hurricane that sweeps him along not the other way around. And in the end Haruo fucking dies. Its a neat decision. Ive been ambivalent about this ending before but after my last reread Im grateful for it. Like Im not antiHaruo hes the character I relate to the most but its so effective. Chasing after his dream with reckless abandon he gets caught up in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo and dies. One might expect this to happen to Yumi because she seems a lot more automobilemagnetic and also because its more often the woman that crashes and burns at the end of a story. Not this one Its weird in that its both a total tragedy and a squeal of joy. The man is the tragic death the compost for Yumis future and we conclude with a panel of her unfettered happiness. Nothing more or less. PART FIVE: ON HAPPINESS PARTICULARLY AS A FEMALE TRAIT 280https://i.ibb.co/3M4Mwj8/pinkimage6.png Remember that bit in chapter somethingorother when we learn how pollution is so fucked that the ozone layers been shredded and the airs so thin that you that you can somehow see the stars shining overhead in Tokyo? Those stars sure are pretty. Ive touched on this already but one of the awesomest most lowkey rebellious parts of Pink is that this twentysomething female prostitute stuffed in a fuckshit system working two jobs with a fractured family is happy. Honestly. She isnt perfect and theres a chapter of gloom and panic attacks after she loses her crocodile but she always gets back on track. She always finds the beauty in things. She finds something else to be thrilled about. Shes dumb enough to do that. Hey it probably wont last. Yumi might grow into her bitter stepmother lamenting the loss of her youth. She might go even further and become Ririko from Helter Skelter: a miserable model who is literally falling apart. She might be wrecked like Zelda Fitzgerald a comparison Okazaki proposes and end up going the same way as her mother. There are a lot of dreary possibilities for young women but you know what? They dont matter. Pink isnt worried about them. Have a look at this other bit of Okazakis afterword: But being scared like a kid who cant swim is scared of a swimming pool is lame. If you just fearlessly dive in strangely enough you can swim all right The difficulty of leading a normally happy life plagues everyone in Tokyo. But me Im not afraid of happiness. Because Im a Tokyo girl through and through. If only we could all be Tokyo girls. We cant obviously. Yumi is superlative and Okazaki is a onceinageneration mangamaking bitch. Most of us are more like Haruo too gloomy to go after what could make us happy. But that doesnt mean we cant jump in there and do some swimming. Maybe a bitta breaststroke. Bitta butterfly. Some panicky dog paddling into the mouth of a crocodile? And thats what Pink is to me now at 4:35AM why the fuck is this taking so long in this slipshod paragraph at its core at the centre of its pulsing gory winged whimsical bloodstained cumstained fairy floss fucking heart. Its a hell of a story told unflinchingly told gigglingly told holleringly. Its simultaneously something that floors me with its untouchable awesomeness and something that makes me feel like even I with my nonexistent drawing skills could make a banging manga and have a lot of fun doing so. No need to be perfect. I can be a MESSY BITCH. And Im reminded I think of that cute little moment when Haruo is whinging to Yumi about how hes a failure as a writer about how there are all these bits jostling around inside his head and when he does write them down its all mumbojumbo gibberish and rambling mumbling that doesnt get him anywhere. Well theres plenty of charming rambling mumbling in the world Yumi says. Why dont you just go with that? Then they kiss and maybe fuck or something. Amen