Review: "Once, It Was Love" by Fumiko Ichi

In this surreal story, a young Japanese career woman’s husband suddenly stops being able to see her. She believes this has something to do with her vivacious little sister, who she discovers is conducting an affair with her husband. This younger sister has spent her life systematically poaching everything the protagonist ever wanted, cloaking the intentional cruelty of her actions with candy-coated manipulation. The explanation for the mysterious phenomenon, if indeed there is one at all, more probably has something to do with the protagonist’s stalker—a work colleague with a similar purposive acquisitiveness and obsession masked by bonhomie. The key difference between the protagonist’s sister and her stalker is, if anything, the two people’s respective seriousness and commitment to their goals. By making his goal the grounded protagonist herself (rather than what the protagonist wants), the stalker seems to avoid the troubles that beset the little sister, who finally chooses to cultivate seriousness by fixating on the stalker himself: her older sister’s new lover, and, in a sense, the protagonist’s most firmly-held possession (whether she wants him or not). 

So why did the protagonist’s husband stop being able to hear or see her? Why does he rationalise away the material proofs of her continued existence in their shared home? The story offers a few explanations (hypnosis by the stalker, guilt-motivated repression, or some simply inexplicable happening), but it’s ultimately impossible to decide which magical realist element or fabulist approach to psychology actually powers the central conceit. In a sense, it hardly matters. We’re more concerned with the protagonist’s listless descent into an unsettling rebound relationship with her stalker (who played some part in the disintegration of her marriage, but who doesn’t ultimately bear responsibility for her husband’s infidelity) and her younger sister’s unraveling grip.

I could have done with more information on the origin of the stalker’s fixation, and why it made sense for him. Yeah, he loves the protagonist—why her, exactly? (Though I do see exactly why he alone sees through the charming younger sister: he knows exactly how disingenuous her games are because he plays them better.) Weirdly I might have appreciated less dogged ‘slice-of-life’ realism—for a piece with such high-key Gothic Romance elements, it’s hard to feel any sweeping, unhinged passion when we’re seeing everything through the lens of the protagonist’s ennui. Even when she's not in crisis, she's a very restrained person.

Nice to read a manga, when I haven’t in ages.