Futsuu no Renai by Konomi Shouko
That, though, is really an entry for another day.
The title of the story is Futsuu no Renai(フツーの恋愛) or "A Normal Love". I'm not going to go to into depth about it because neither it, nor its author, are particularly popular. Its publisher, Hana to Yume, however, is! I think it would be remiss to just gloss over the publishers in favor of the artists as I have been because they are integral to what sort of mangas get published.
Hana to Yume is an fairly old furoku (phonebook manga) that does only shoujo comics. A furoku is a cheap way for manga publishers to get stories out and decide on which ones they will keep and publish into tankoubons and pedal for animes. They are a big phonebook-sized collection of manga chapters written by various authors. Usually, they are accompanied by a survey so the readers literally decide which stories they want to continue or not. This, is probably why SOME mangas/animes go on forever (*cough* Naruto *cough* Bleach*cough* Inuyasha). They are made with very cheap paper, and each story has its own color of ink (blue, red, purple, pink, etc). You're supposed to throw out your furoku after reading them.... Supposed to... Some waste space saving them however... Okay, mainly me. They also try enticing you to buy things by adding little goodies. I, for example, own a charming Gentleman's Cross Alliance muffler.
Since Hana to Yume deals with young love, it's read primarily by females, and in that group, it seems to be mostly high school girls. Granted, that's through my experiences, and I don't have any facts to back that up aside from what I saw. It's also been, in my experience, that they tend to be rather porny in nature. Hooray! Porn!
Okay, and by porny, I mean very, very soft porn. Still, definitely sex is involved.
This is not always true though. One of their most famous serials is Fruits Baskets, which is about as innocent of a love story as you can get, even though it is a bit like the Dragonball Z of emotional drama. Every time Tohru solves on huge emotional disaster, there is an even worse one waiting around the corner!! Seriously, how traumatized can we make these characters?
But, I'm not here to talk about Fruits Baskets today. I don't even own manga or the anime, despite the fact both have made me cry. Instead, I'm going to talk about Futsuu no Renai which is a one-shot volume of manga about a guy who looks like a girl and a girl who looks like a guy. Needless to say, their renai (love) is less than futsuu (normal).
I should say, before I start, that this is a very unusual story for Hana to Yume to publish. The main character is not a high school girl, and it deals with love in a not-strictly heterosexual way, both of which are staples to the Hana to Yume franchise. It's a credit, then, to the story that it made it into at least one tankoubon.
The story starts with a tall and very handsome Akira asking a small and very cute Kazui out. Of course, Kazui immediately freaks out because he's not gay, and how dare a guy ask him out on a date! The people watching this exchange at the bus stop are also flabberghasted to learn that he is a boy. Later, he finds that Akira is actually a girl, and he consents to go out on a date with her after he runs away very dramatically and needs to be rescued. Okay, that is pretty Hana to Yume...
Then... he finds out that she's actually transgender and he immediately regrets the decision to date her. In his wonderfully politically incorrect way, he thinks someone like that can't be normal and all he wants is a normal love. The love story follows him coming to grips with falling in love with Akira despite her surgery to remove her breasts, and the fact that she's more welcome in the male onsen than he is (he even gets escorted out once because they think he's a girl).
It's a fun story, even if it seems ethically questionable in its addressing the topic of transgender love, and slightly inappropriate in that Kazui is still a high school student and Akira is a full fledged adult when they start their love affair.
In this scene, Akira has convinced Kazui to come back to her flat where he tries to come to grips with feelings he may or may not have. The sentence in question is the lower right frame.
- お前 私立の学校で働いているワリに妙に生活レベル低くない？
- Omae. Shiritsu no gakkou de hataraiteiru WARI ni myou ni seikatsu reberu hikukanai?
In order to really understand this phrase, I want you to look at her apartment in the lower right frame. Cracks in the wall. Things in boxes. Patches on the blanket for the kotatsu. The lamp doesn't even have a shade! This is really going to help understand the grammar point.
WARI NI means "for a" or "considering". I like the description given on JGram best, so I'm going to steal it real quick:
「ＡのわりにＢ」＊This grammar expresses a judgement in which the situation expressed by Ｂ does not meet the expectations of Ａ or seem like what Ａ implies.The A in my example sentence is:
- 私立の学校で働いている
- Working at a private school
B is:
- 妙に生活レベル低くない？
- Your standard of living is strangely low.
So, this can be translated in one or two ways:
- Considering you work at a private school, your standard of living is strangely low, isn't it?
- Isn't your standard of living is strangely low for someone who works at a private school?
If you are at all curious after that, he finds out that she has really expensive things like Dreamcasts (wow, this is old) though she doesn't have a TV because she wins things by listening to the radio. I assume she calls in every time they give something away. Oh Akira, I almost want to like you despite your stalker tendencies.
WARI NI is pretty easy, though, right?
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