Heroine's Work by Kamoi and Rudolph
A fun evening depicting the thrills, challenges, and disappointments of manga artists moving from amateur vanity publishing to professionals with "dojin shuppan" fairs. Pastel stage set and properties and flamboyant, over the top acting made for a cheerful, comic rolicking play even when touching on heartfelt tensions of women's career choices, adoption, and
Here is the story as best I could piece it together:
Three friends in a manga-writing circle are seen striving to produce a book-length manga to sell at a vanity publishing fair. Our heroine X is stuck, afraid she wont have ideas, but older mochi shop owner friend encourages her with tough love. A third acts out her manga, miming the panels to draw them more realistically (they all apprently draw and write).
We then visit the office of a laidies toiletries company rebranding itself as more youthful and fashionable. An ambitous, brisk career woman goes over her branding design plan with her manager, who is a hearty boss approving of her vision. But when he leaves, the secretary serving coffee speaks rudely about him and, when pushed, sneers that it's the same old same old. She urges Sakurako the branding expert to convince her boss that an explanatory sheet on how and when to use the creams and oils into the packages. Chastened, Sakurako meets X on a stuck elevator, praising her drawings on her jsut-published manga, and hiring her on the spot to illstrate the explanatory sheet. The bouncy, dreamy X agrees, somewhat reluctantly, to pursue the project.
We see X at her sales booth at the fair, unable to sell any, but the teenager jr high school boy sells out his 10. She recognizes the style as an artist she and her ocmpanions have admired for years, Aizosensei, and they dont know what he looks like. The boy is taken home to his orphanage by his manga teacher (played by the baritone, barrel-shaped F. Japan).
Sakurako is offered a promotion by her boss, even though her attempt to sell items with manga illustrations failed. She then tries to convince X to do more illustrations, possibly quit her nursing job and pursue Manga writing full-time, but X resists: all her free time she wants ot devote to manga writing,even if she only has five regular readrs. Sakurako scoffs at this, and X angrily stalks off, but Sakurako is then told off by the secretary, "you never had your love in this company, you hated the products from the start. Your way of working shows no love." Chastened, Sakurako leaves the company.
The boy Yamada is invited to the group of writers, teaching them how to improve their drawings and story flow. They find him cute, but also his advice resonates with Aizosensei, and eventually X has Yamada take her to the orphanage to meet the artist-teacher. He admits that he had become disillusione dwith the business when, after hcanging his name but drawing the same, manga once thought unrealistic and lacking motion now were praised and sold well. He cannot agree with taking X under his wing until she has told him what SHe wants to say.
Sakurako is having a nightmare flashback to her putting up her child for adoptin as a teen. Her father scolds her and encourages ehr to go to college and get a good job, and mother sobs over her lost grandchild. A strange mochi-faery sprinkes cherry blossoms, saying you have this mochi inside you.
X visits her mochi owner who now employs sakurako, who has invented a fish-shaped cherry flavored mochi. She apologies for her harsh words to X, who has stopped wanting to be a pro, content with her self-publishing stories. They talk about the importance of finding a job they love, and go off for a meal togehter.
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