Kitchen Princess, vols. 1 & 2

Manga by Natsumi Ando
Story by Miyuki Kobayashi
Published by: Del Rey

208 pages each, 358 net.
Original Language: Japanese
Orientation:  Right to Left
Vintage: 2005. US editions January & April 2007.
Translation: Satsuki Yamashita
Adaptation: Nunzio DeFilippis & Christina Weir
Lettering: North Market Street Graphics
Original cover design by Aiko Omo
Publisher’s Rating:  T, ages 13+

Rating: 3 out of 5

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Premise:  She can *really* cook, but will her skills in the kitchen enable Najika to catch the eye and win the heart of one of the dishy Kitazawa brothers?  (this is shoujo, you know she’ll get both…)

Synopsis:

The intro is only 20 pages in the first volume, but it may take a couple of paragraphs to get all the little details in:  Najika Kazami was raised in an orphanage on Hokkaido, living a poor but happy life with a lot a friends and in beautiful surroundings.  As an orphan though, she’s always been a little sad at losing her parents — both award-winning pastry chefs — and her depression when she first arrived at the orphanage as a young girl was particularly deep.  She didn’t speak, and hardly ate, and would spend a lot of time just wandering around in a daze.

While lost in her own dark reverie she trips and almost drowns in a pond, but is saved by a young man who just happened to be passing by.  He not only saves her, but to cheer her up he gives little Najika his snack cup of flan.  She doesn’t even know his name, and was never able to properly thank her “prince”, but she does have one clue: the silver spoon, with its unique design, that was in the dessert cup.

– A few years older and now in the 7th grade, this single event seems to have affected many aspects of Najika’s life.   To both honour her parents’ memory (and perhaps, to repay her unknown prince) Najika has resolved to be the best pâtissier ever.  And to pursue that dream (and perhaps, also find her prince again) she has worked hard to get into Seika Academy, noted for it’s ability to produce sterling graduates in many fields, including academics, sports, and the arts.

Special tie-in bonus:  her treasured clue, the spoon, has the design for Seika Academy on it.

Her first days at the new school are a bit difficult, however.

Thanks to a woefully out of date wardrobe (hand-me-downs from the obasan that runs the orphanage) and her own innate clumsiness, Najika makes quite an impression very quickly.  Initially, it’s a bad one.  Her own natural sweetness and her skills in the kitchen in due course endear her to a few, including Sora Kitazawa — the student body president — but her rapid rise and the attentions of Sora and his brother Daichi make her some enemies as well.

It turns out that Najika was accepted to the academy because she really does have a true talent in the kitchen (how the school director knew this is a mystery) and also has something called “perfect taste”, a culinary analogue to perfect pitch.  While her natural aptitude and bubbly personality help, Seika Academy is a very competitive place and in the end Najika is still just a “chick from the sticks,” way out of her element at the prestigious school.  At least to start off with–

How she adapts, and her friendships with the other students (including the two Kitazawas — so far the dynamic with that pair is still safely in the “friends” range) forms the over-arching plot, though there is always something food-related in the details.  Whether it is her part time job (at a café), her project for the school festival (both the “failure” she was tricked into attempting and her final “victory” involve baked goods), or helping a enemy-slash-potential-friend overcome complex personal issues (with a home-made peach pie), it seems there is no problem that can’t be solved with a pat homily and just the right recipe.

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Review:

Just when we might be ready to write this off as a below-average shoujo recycler, writer Miyuki Kobayashi does come through with some twists that take the story into darker (or at least grey) territory with a couple of insightful chapters on eating disorders.  Najika’s main foil through a volume-and-a-half, the resident spoiled-little-rich-girl and aspiring model, Akane, finally gets her big break but because of issues she has with food almost sees her career end before it can even get started.  The set-up is trite and contrived, but it makes a good point and helps to humanise a secondary character who could easily have slipped into stereotypical villainy.

Now, of course, the story is ripe for another Japanese convention: the former enemy who becomes the hero’s ally.  But I guess that awaits in volume three.

The one drawback to the eating disorder plotline is that now, Akane is perhaps the most developed character in the cast:  Najika is a sweet but bland heroine who’s every move and motivation follows the girls’-comic playbook, alongside Sora and Daichi, the romantic interests, who have superficial differences but are really just two sides of the same coin — one dark, one light.  Neither makes much of an impression yet.  Other than the slacker owner of the café where Najika works (who only shows up on like three pages and has half that many lines, and incidentally is also hands-down my favourite character of the lot) it seems like everyone at the school is just a pretty face and a name.

My other complaint is the art, not generally but rather specifically Najika — whose eyes take up wholly half of her face beneath the bangs and who to me seems much more alien than cute.  YMMV, but this has to be on the very edge of acceptable, even for folks who like the style.  The other character designs seem fine (perhaps by comparison) and the panel layout and pacing work well, with no glaringly-wrong choices that distract from the narrative flow.  Though: if you aren’t a fan of “shoujo sparkles” then you may have at least one gripe with the style artist Ando uses in the books.

A concern but not a complaint is a bit of confusion on my part as to the ages of the characters.  It didn’t actually hit me until I started writing the review, but I really have no idea how old these kids are supposed to be.  I would have pegged Najika and her classmates at 15 or 16, just starting high school (in Japan: grade 10), but the synopsis to kick off volume two states that she’s in 7th grade.  Is this a typo, a mistranslation, or just a misunderstanding on my part?  So far the issue is inconsequential, but depending on the direction the story takes, a detail as small as the characters’ ages may have a big impact on my enjoyment of the series.  Some things acceptable for high school students (like, say, working a part time job) take on a different complexion when the character is only 13.

Extras for the two volumes include recipes for all the of key dishes featured in each chapter (fairly well written, as these things go) along with the usual translation notes (as usual for Del Rey, quite well done — though there is less of a need for them in this title) and previews (in Japanese) of the next volume in the series.

I’m glad I decided to take a chance on this title and bought the first two books; if I had to judge the series solely on volume one I might not have bothered continuing with it at all.  The second book was a necessary follow-up that added some depth to the series, and while I still can’t quite bring myself to care about Najika and her two potential “princes”, I think I might be willing to stick with the series through a few more dishes.  (After reading chapter five and seeing it on the page, I was damn near compelled to cook French Onion Soup)

Kitchen Princess has a decent set-up and a nice gimmick (I’m a foodie; behind-the-scenes kitchen-action and recipes are kind of like catnip to me) so I have to say that even though the story is a bit weak so far, the manga is still worth a look.  For now, I’m giving it three marks, out of five.

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The first three volumes of Kitchen Princess are currently on shelves, volume four releases on 30 October and is availble as a preorder from TRSI.