Happy!

Japanese: ハッピー!
English: Happy!
Chinese: 网坛小魔女
Artist: Urasawa Naoki 浦沢直樹
Status: Complete
Volume #: 23
Wiki page: Yes


Yes, complete with the Exclamation Point. Happy!

Right in time for the French Open. But this series almost ruined me a month ago. Now, 23 volumes is a lot to finish in one night, and somehow I got this idea that I should finish it THAT night. I didn't. Ended up going to bed at 7. IN THE MORNING. After I finished 8 volumes.

After that I vowed I wouldn't pick it up again until summer. Well, guess what time it is.

Urasawa Naoki, famous for masterpieces like Monster and 20th Century Boys, both of which I have read and revered (one day I might want to re-read them and review them, but they are such a massive effort). Urasawa Naoki's gotta be my top 3 favourite artists. Some of his earlier stuff (like Yawara, which I started reading too) is less interesting. The art style is also less round and refined.

Some people have said his comics are like movies. They got perfect camera angles that narrate the story smoothly. I gotta agree. His work is like combining two of my favourite things in the world-- comics and movies.

Monster and 20th Century Boys are both thrillers, mysteries, stories that dive both into the past and the future. That's one of my favourite genres, so naturally I liked them better than...

Happy! may be the first sports comic I've read through. When I started it, I had absolutely NO clue what it is going to be about. I didn't even read the back of the book to get the synopsis. I trusted Urasawa-san that much.

Well, it's about sports. Tennis, in particular. I don't think I could have finished all 23 volumes if it was about any other sport. Tennis is the one sport I actually like to watch on TV.

Actually, it's not about the sport as much as it is about the girl, the main protagonist. Umino Miyuki. Miyuki has 3 younger siblings (2 brothers and a sister) and an older brother. Her parents died a few years ago. Her older brother always has these fanciful business schemes to make money, schemes that always crash and burn after he puts a good amount of time and money into them. As a result, he owes a huge debt (250 million yens, or 2.5 million dollars) to some nasty yakuza loan sharks.

He runs away, and the yakuza sends a collector, Sukurada, to Miyuki. They want to force her into prostitution to pay off the debt. She says she has another way to pay them back and goes to the tennis club owned by the family of her senpai (a slightly older guy who went to high school with her), Ohtori Keiichiro. There, she beats a just-turned-pro player, Okiku Kaku, and reveals her plan: she is going to turn pro and pay off the debt with the prize money she wins at various tournaments.

Aha, how can a poor girl who seems she's never had tennis training have this lofty goal? It turns out both her parents were tennis coaches. She herself was a very promising young star who won the national junior championship. But then her parents died and she had to leave the tennis private school and go to a public school because the family no longer has money for her tuition. She had to quit tennis altogether because now she has to help raise her younger siblings.

Keiichiro is a star tennis player (though not pro) himself and has always had feelings for this very special and resilient girl, but his tyrannical mother, a grand dame of tennis in her days, Madame Ohtori, has a grudge against Miyuki's father and forbids her son to help her. She also forbids Keiichiro to turn pro because she says he lacks the intensity, win-at-all-cost attitude necessary for the pro players. Instead, she has the huge club and associated business lined up for him to inherit. She believes he can be very successful as a CEO using his tennis star charisma.

As luck (or misfortune) would have it, Madame Ohtori's tennis club has a fierce competitor, run by Madame Ryugasaki, Madame Ohtori's biggest rival on the court in the old days. Ryugasaki's daughter, Choko, is also a rising tennis star. She does NOT lack the competitive edge and is quite successful on the court as a pro player. She tries her best to seduce Keiichiro, though often it's not clear if she really loves him or she just loves his fame and social status (she definitely thinks only he's got the bloodline and the looks and the talent to match hers).

Madame Ohtori wants to have someone from her club defeat Choko, so she gives Miyuki minimal and highly reluctant aid to help her become pro. Choko tries to sabotage Miyuki every step of the way, both contemptuous of her low status and jealous of the fact she is Keiichiro's true love.

It can be quite heart-wrenching at times, because all odds are constantly against Miyuki. She is so talented and kind-hearted and innocent, and she works so hard, but people (especially Choko) just make her life so unnecessarily hard for her. Of course she also gains some loyal friends along the way. Most male characters also have this habit of being moved by her and falling in love with her after they see how hard she fights against the unfairness of life.

Every time something works out, some obstacles immediately rise. But every time you think she's going to lose it all, she fights back and wins the match in a huge upset.

But it can't be an upset if it happens every time. So yes, that's one of the shortcomings for the series. It gets predictable and unnecessarily frustrating after a few volumes in. Miyuki is a very nice human being, a rare specimen, so she deserves to have all the glory and riches. At least she deserves a break. But no, life (or the author) is constantly beating her down; after a while you are filled with a bit of anger, at the characters, at the author, and at yourself for wanting but not being able to stop reading this thing.

Near the end, I kind of just wanted the thing to be over. I already knew the general direction for the ending (in an upbeat, moral story like this, how could the lovely girl not get a happy ending after all those trial and tribulations?!), but I wanted to see this through. I wanted to see the details but at the same time the details frustrated me.

To be fair, like Urasawa-san's usual works, Happy! is filled with colourful characters (recurring character identities: a homosexual/transvestite, a prostitute, a sagacious small figure, a rich girl who does a lot of evil but may be good or just lost deep down... all these make an appearance in Urasawa's longer works), each with their own background stories. And the plot development is filled with ups and downs.

But as a sport comic... I don't know. It's more about the humanity, the motives of the characters than tennis itself. I dare say I know a bit about tennis, it's about the only sport I play, and I found the tennis part of the story to be lacking. No glaring errors, it's not like the author doesn't know the first thing about tennis, but there's quite a bit of unevenness that a real, long-term tennis fan/player (as opposed to someone who did the research just to write a comic) would notice. Like how it is like to really compete in a match, how much can your life outside of tennis really affect how you perform in the match (if your brother's in jail and your opponent whispers she saw him in the stands right before your match, would you really lose that much concentration?).

Also, there are limits. Miyuki is a very nice girl, she hangs on, but still, there are matches that are just impossible. You can come back from 0-6, 0-5 to have a third set maybe once in your life, if that. It can't happen every other match. If you are tired, you become slower and lose points. As the match drags longer and you lose more points, you don't suddenly have random epiphanies, see the movement of the ball clearly all of a sudden, and come back to win the match. And composure, keeping your cool, can be more than concentration, especially during changeovers. At one point, Miyuki is said to be so concentrated that when the changeover ends, she dumps tea over her head and walks toward the court with a banana in hand, thinking it is her racket. This concentration, this total immersion into tennis, is said to win her that match. But honestly, what is there to concentrate so hard on during the changeover that you would mistake a banana for your racket? I would take that as a sign you've lost your head and forgot about your most important weapon: your racket.

The weights on the tournaments are also misplaced. Wimbledon and the US Open seem to be the ultimate battlefields. When still training for Wimbledon, Miyuki wins the French Open and it is not a big deal at all. The author treats it just like another small win, though a very heartening one. It's a grand slam, dude, and clay is a tough surface.

I guess if I don't know tennis at all, this may be a pretty good sport comic. I really don't read the genre and I especially don't read about sports I don't play or have no interest in. This is more of a human interest story. Perhaps I'll finish reading Prince of Tennis (another one I've started but couldn't finish due to time (and slight interest) issues) someday and have a better comparison.