Why Is Manga and Anime Characters' Hair All the Colors of the Rainbow?

Part 3: Blonds Are Trouble

by Margaret O'Connell

As discussed in the previous installment of this series, in manga and anime certain hair colors such as white (on youthful-looking characters), red, and, occasionally, blond, tend to carry connotations derived from traditional Japanese folkloric beliefs about supernatural beings. Although a number of well-known kitsune, or fox spirit, manga and anime characters such as Inuyasha's sidekick Shippo and Yu-Yu Hakusho's Kurama have red hair in their more human-looking forms, their more vulpine aspects, such as Kurama's silvery fox-eared, multiple-tailed humanoid alternate form and the fluffy golden foxtail the young and inexperienced Shippo tends to retain no matter what shape he shifts into, are usually depicted in paler and/or more metallic colors. This presumably reflects the mythological belief that as kitsune grow older and more powerful their fur turns silver, white, or gold (onmarkproductions.com), as well as the traditional Japanese perception that foxes' fur is not red, but the yellow of fertile soil — an association that led to the animals' being viewed as messengers of Inari, the god of the rice fields.

This in turn brings us to another well-known manga fox spirit of sorts whose coloring provides one of the few tip-offs to his true nature — Naruto, the Bart Simpson-as-aspiring-ninja boy hero of the manga of the same name. Unbeknownst to himself, Naruto, like Kurama, is the reincarnation of a powerful multi-tailed fox spirit. In Naruto's case, a giant nine-tailed fox demon attacked the ninja village of Konohagakure, but wound up being slain by the village champion and had its spirit bound to an orphan baby boy who grew up to be a yellow-haired troublemaker with faint fox-whisker-like markings on his face.

The mischievous, prank-playing Naruto is a prime example of the theory propounded by Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation, that blonds in anime and manga are frequently either deliberate instigators of trouble or at least unwitting sources of chaos. Citing such examples as Rieg, the larcenous archeologist in Explorer Woman Ray; Asuka Ryo, "the cold, ruthless young man who persuades his gentle, good-natured classmate ... to merge with a demon in Devilman"; and C-ko, the dizzy blonde schoolgirl "whose non-existent charms cause so much rivalry in the Project A-ko series," Levi concludes, "Watch out for blonds...! They're usually a sign of trouble if not actual evil." As we shall see, this "blonds are trouble" hypothesis accurately applies in at least some sense to an impressively wide array of yellow-haired manga and anime characters, from the well-meaning trouble magnet Vash the Stampede in Trigun to Momo, the title character of Peach Girl, whose light hair and unusually pronounced tendency to tan frequently cause everyone from quick-to-judge classmates to dirty old men in the street to assume that she is just a beach-bunny party girl undeserving of being treated with respect.

In Natsuki Takaya's manga Fruits Basket (TOKYOPOP), part of which has also been adapted into an anime, there are at least three different blond characters whose fair hair is in some way emblematic of their somewhat troublesome status. Fruits Basket is a high school romance/fantasy series revolving around the growing involvement between Tohru Honda, a recently orphaned girl whose too-nice-for-her-own-good nature frequently leads others (including some of her own relatives) to take advantage of her, and the mysterious Sohma family. As Tohru discovers soon after she begins camping out in a tent on the Sohmas' land while her grandfather's house is being renovated, a number of members of this wealthy and reclusive clan suffer from a curse which causes them to transform into animals from the Chinese zodiac whenever they are hugged by a member of the opposite sex. In some cases, this magically-induced dual nature also appears to manifest itself when the family members in question are in human form by causing them to have conspicuously light hair. Twelve-year-old Kisa, one of the youngest Sohmas to be affected by the zodiac-animal curse, is ridiculed so mercilessly by her classmates for what one website describes as "her naturally orange hair" (which looks more like a sort of dark blonde to me in both the anime and the official Fruits Basket website illustration), that she runs away and hides by remaining in her tiger cub form for so long that when her relatives finally find her, she is initially unable to change back.

Kisa's slightly older boy cousin Momiji comments sympathetically that even though he, too, has blond hair, he has been lucky enough to escape being teased by his schoolmates about it. However, Momiji has other zodiac curse-induced problems. His mother, who originally came from a normal, non-magical family, was so traumatized by the experience of having a child with an unfortunate tendency to turn into an animal at awkward moments (even though in this case the animal was merely a harmless rabbit) that she eventually had a nervous breakdown. Momiji's father reluctantly decided that the only way to prevent this from happening again was to have Momiji move out to live with other relatives and hypnotize his wife into forgetting about the zodiac curse and believing that the boy was his nephew instead of their own offspring. Although this solution was painful for both Momiji and his father (whose main opportunity to see his son now consists of surreptitious visits Momiji makes to his dad's business office), it did enable Momiji's mother to regain her psychological equilibrium sufficiently to resume functioning normally and, eventually, give birth to his younger sister — who, fortunately, is unaffected by the zodiac-animal curse.

Curiously, in the anime both Momiji's "normal" mother and his non-magical younger sister seem to be just as blond as he is. As with Momiji himself, nobody appears to find this unusual in their case, apparently due to the fact that Momiji's mother, who met his father in college, is originally from Germany. (In fact, according to one Fruits Basket website, the semi-bilingual Momiji himself often unintentionally sprinkles his Japanese dialogue with random German words and phrases.) This makes it plausible enough that Momiji's mother should be naturally blonde herself. However, in real life, recessive genes for traits such as blue eyes and blond hair generally do not manifest themselves unless they are inherited from both parents. Since both the zodiac-cursed, or juunishi, Momiji and his non-juunishi sister Momo have blond hair, in this particular branch of the family the offspring's light hair is more likely to be a product of the peculiarities of manga and anime genetics, rather than a side effect of the Sohma were-animal syndrome.

This theory is somewhat supported by a similar case in Yoko Kamio's Hana Yori Dango/Boys Over Flowers (Viz), a more superficially "realistic" manga (and anime) series with no magical or mythical elements which is somewhat analogous to a sort of gender-switched shoujo (girls' comics) version of the Fox TV series The O.C.. In Hana Yori Dango, indomitable middle-class heroine Tsukushi Makino battles endlessly to survive and rise above the various abuses heaped on her by her haughty upper-crust classmates at the prestigious Eitoku Academy, an institution which is literally ruled by the four richest, most socially prominent boys in the school, the so-called F4. At one point, during a brief period of popularity created by a rumor that she and Tsukasa, the domineering but slightly dense leader of the F4, have become an item, Tsukushi has an apparently chance encounter at a fashionable nightclub with a blond, blue-eyed guy whom both she and the more sophisticated wealthy girl classmates with her all assume is a foreigner. This impression is not corrected until Tsukushi eventually asks the "foreigner", Thomas, how it happens that he speaks Japanese so well. The thoroughly European-looking Thomas replies, "Because I'm half Japanese. My dad's from here. My mom's German." In other words, Thomas comes from the exact same mixture of ethnic backgrounds as Momiji Sohma (minus the zodiac-animal curse), and is much more explicitly established as looking so foreign that everyone assumes upon first meeting him that he is a tourist who doesn't speak Japanese. ("Look! He really has blue eyes!" Tsukushi's slightly bumpkinish nouveau-riche male friend Kazuya exclaims ingenuously. "I've never seen them up close! I should say something to him!" Kazuya then begins attempting to converse with Thomas in halting random phrases of Spanish and other foreign languages that he's studied, giving up only after the mortified Tsukushi informs him that [a] Thomas is German and [b] he speaks Japanese.)

Perhaps because of the manga and anime industry's amply-demonstrated preference for variety in characters' eye and hair color even in series set in relatively ethnically homogenous present-day Japan, any character with foreign ancestry (and even some who appear to have no known European or Ainu ancestors, such as Gravitation's Eiri Yuki) is likely to display noticeably "un-Japanese" coloring which is more or less explicitly acknowledged as such in the text — frequently to a degree that is conspicuously inconsistent with the Mendelian laws of genetics. The most extreme case of this "one drop makes you look foreign" principle that I have encountered so far is that of Setsuna and Sara Mudo in Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary (Viz). In volume one of this manga, Setsuna, whose best friend suggests that his notable unpopularity with some of his gang-member classmates may be partially attributable to his blond hair, declares to his younger sister Sara, "Since our grandfather was from England, we both have blonde hair and light-brown eyes ... so everyone's gonna know that we're brother and sister." Similarly, in Sanami Matoh's FAKE (TOKYOPOP), the fair-haired NYPD Detective Randy "Ryo" Maclean's half-Japanese ancestry is evident only in the extreme darkness of his eyes, which are routinely described as black — a color which is considered so definitively Japanese in that country that the manga-ka has both Ryo's new partner, Dee Laytner, and Bikky, the half-African-American son of the victim in their first murder case, correctly deduce Ryo's part-Asian background shortly after meeting him based on that factor alone. (According to the J-List homepage maintained by an American entrepreneur living in Japan, "All Japanese people have brown eyes, although if you ever ask them what color their eyes are, they'll tell you 'black' [because the center of the eyes are black, as opposed to the iris]." Honshu resident/frequent Tartsville poster Rebecca McGregor confirms this: "if you ask a Japanese person what color their eyes are, they will inevitably answer black, although eye colors range from medium brown to almost black... I have brown eyes, and though they are a little on the light-brown side, I still get many comments on how bright they are when the person doing the exclaiming has eyes not much darker than my own.")

Ironically, Dee himself, who is a foundling of unknown, but apparently European-American, ancestry, looks far more Asian to a Western reader than the wide-eyed, light-haired Ryo does. Not only does Dee have black hair and expressive but narrow eyes (belatedly specified as green in the text of the seventh volume of the manga, although they do not appear to have been tinted that color on the covers of any of the American manga editions). He is also drawn in such a way that in one story in volume five, he looks like a slightly older, but otherwise nearly identical, adult version of Lai, an apparently Hong Kong-born Chinese friend of Bikky's — or, more accurately, Lai appears to be virtually indistinguishable from a teenage version of Dee.

Another character of mixed ancestry who displays recessive traits which in real life would be possible only if he had inherited the genes for them from both parents is the popular boy actor Naozumi Kamura in Kodomo no Omocha, a.k.a Kodocha: Sana's Stage (TOKYOPOP). As discussed in the previous installment of this article, in the anime Naozumi's hair is colored a sort of grayish lavender, apparently to underscore the glamorously exotic appearance which inspires one of his more effusive admirers to describe him as "my foreign prince" (see illustration included in Part 2 of this article). Although no mention is made in the manga of anything particularly unusual about Naozumi's hair color, it is specified on more than one occasion that he has blue eyes (which for some reason tend to come out looking light green in most online images from the anime) — a circumstance which in volume five makes it necessary for him to wear brown contact lenses in order to play the part of an ordinary Japanese boy in a movie co-starring series protagonist Sana Kurata as a kimono-clad ghost.

Since Naozumi is a foundling who was raised in a Tokyo orphanage, the specifics of his parentage are unknown. As he tells reporters at a press conference in volume four, "I think one of my parents was Japanese, but I'm not sure." In actuality, in order for Naozumi to be born with blue eyes, both of his parents would have had to have been of sufficiently mixed ancestry to pass on the recessive gene for that trait. However, in the world of manga genetics, where eye-catching aesthetic impact tends to outweigh science, this is only a minor improbability compared to Angel Sanctuary's Setsuna and Sara both managing to have blond hair despite having only one grandparent who could conceivably have passed on the recessive gene for that trait. (At least, they both have blond hair according to the Viz translation. In online stills from the anime, they both appear to have what I would consider light brown or brownish-blond hair.)

Although in the world of anime and manga Momiji Sohma's blond hair, like his non-magical sister's, is probably considered a reasonably predictable consequence of being the offspring of a Japanese father and a blonde German mother, there are other Sohma relatives who, like his cousin Kisa, are evidently more likely to be light-haired even in their human forms as a result of their susceptibility to the zodiac-animal family curse. However, this is by no means a universal side effect. Momiji's father, who is apparently one of the Sohma family members fortunate enough not to suffer from were-animal tendencies, has dark hair, as do about half of the Sohmas who are affected by the curse. The three other notably light- or bright-haired zodiac-animal Sohmas are Ayame, a young man who has long white hair but is so wildly eccentric in other ways that his unusual hair apparently strikes most people as hardly worth commenting on; fifteen-year-old Hatsuharu, whose hair is mostly white, but turns black toward the back of his head from about ear-level down; and Kyo, one of the two teenage Sohma cousins who live in the house where Tohru ends up staying in exchange for cooking and doing other household chores.

Kyo actually does have bright orange hair in both his human and were-housecat forms. But, in contrast to what happened to Kisa, when Kyo transfers to Tohru's school in volume one of the manga, most of his new classmates appear to find this notably atypical coloring more intriguing than peculiar. However, this seems to be mostly because, much to Kyo's annoyance, his new classmates — particularly his new girl classmates — are interested in him mainly due to his blood relationship to the popular and much more socially adept Yuki, the other teenage Sohma cousin from the household that takes Tohru in, whom Kyo hates. Hearing that a relative of their idol has enrolled at the school, Yuki's (literal) fan club seeks out the new arrival in home room, eagerly babbling, "Where?! Where is he?!" "Look, over there! The guy with the orange hair." "Huh? They don't look alike at all!" "He's cute!" "Is that his natural color?" and then smilingly inquiring of Kyo himself, "Hey, are you really Sohma-kun's cousin?" As the prickly and antisocial Kyo begins to freak out from this bombardment of unwanted attention, Tohru's outspoken friend Arisa Uotani, a.k.a Uo-chan, who has been observing this scene from across the room, remarks, "His hair is certainly interesting. It's a little like Kyoko-san's hair color" (Kyoko-san being Tohru's rather dashing dead mother, who is impudently flashing what looks like a gang hand signal in the framed photograph of her that Tohru keeps by her bed even when she is camping out in a tent). "Now that you mention it, it is," exclaims the delighted Tohru, who was already predisposed to like the grumpy Kyo because of her sympathy for the cat in the zodiac legend, who was unfairly excluded from the select group of twelve animals selected for this astrological role due to a trick played on him by the rat (the same animal his cousin Yuki turns into).

In addition to the Sohmas whose blondness (or white- or orange-hairedness) may or may not be a telltale symptom of their hidden were-animal nature, there is a third Fruits Basket character whose yellow hair signals her problematic status. This is the aforementioned Uo-chan, an ex-gang member who carries a steel pipe, flouts the school dress code by wearing her skirt at a non-prescribed length, unrepentantly mouths off to teachers, and often defies Japanese linguistic conventions by using gruff, unpolished speech patterns usually employed by males. According to Gilles Poitras' The Anime Companion, these are all standard indicators of Uo-chan's status as a so-called "Yanki" or "Yankee," a well-known type of Japanese juvenile delinquent who frequently dye or bleach their hair, as the blonde Uo herself evidently has. (Apparently dyeing one's hair blonde can have similarly transgressive connotations in other Asian countries as well. In You Hyun's Korean manwha Faeries' Landing, a sort of Midsummer Night's Dream-goes-to-high-school series about an underachieving class troublemaker type who winds up playing reluctant host to a charming but troublesome female faerie tourist as a result of a prank pulled by the antlered mischiefmaker Goodfellow [i.e., Shakespeare's Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow], the Korean schoolboy protagonist runs into Jina, a pretty but nasty-tempered acquaintance who is one of the school's leading female bullies. When he attempts to distract her from picking on a timid, nerdy younger girl by asking, "Hey, what happened to your hair?", Jina airily replies, "Oh ... my dad made me cut my bangs. That pissed me off to no end, so I dyed it blond to get back at him!")

In Uo's case (and, more informally, in the case of the somewhat analogous Faeries' Landing character Jina), blonde hair functions as a visible badge of ominous juvenile delinquent status. Uo-chan's yellow hair, along with such other telltale signs as her foreshortened sailor-uniform necktie and ironically (from a Western point of view) too-long skirt, make her known-troublemaker position in the high school hierarchy obvious at a glance to both the snobbish girl classmates who try to give Tohru a hard time (but quickly scatter when Uo shows up, sputtering, "Threatening us with your gangster buddy, huh? Don't think we're through with you just because of this Yankee!") and new arrival Kyo Sohma, who reacts to her mocking interpretation of his refusal to join in a card game at recess by snarling, "Fine, I accept your challenge! Just don't start crying when you lose, Yankee."

In gratitude for the help she received from Tohru's mother in getting out of her former gang, Uo-chan has appointed herself Tohru's protector against anyone who might attempt to pick on her. Uo's aggressive interpretation of this gangster guardian angel role sometimes causes additional problems for the naturally conciliatory Tohru, who is reluctant to burden Uo-chan or her other friend, the witchy Goth Hanajima, by taking her grandfather's suggestion that she ask to stay at either of their already-cramped apartments for the several months that it will take to remodel his house in preparation for his daughter and her rather unpleasant family to move in with them. As a result, Tohru winds up lying through her teeth in order to forestall an all-too-likely nasty confrontation between Uo and her own negligent relatives, while emitting panicky thoughts such as, "I can't tell [Uo and Hanajima] the truth. If she knew I was living in a tent, Uo-chan would be outraged. She'd burst into Grandpa's house on her motorcycle!"

Another apparently blond character with a past history involving gang violence is Rei Kashino, the motorcycle-riding bad-boy hero of Fuyumi Soryo's popular teen romance manga Mars. Rei is a six foot three heartthrob from an extremely dysfunctional family who essentially went temporarily insane after his identical twin brother Sei committed suicide by jumping off a roof several years before. Witnessing this left Rei so consumed with guilt over his inability to stop it that he actually told the investigating police officers that he had killed Sei. Although they didn't believe him, within days after his brother's death Rei progressed from smashing all the mirrors at school that kept reflecting what appeared to be his dead identical twin's image to binge drinking and wandering the streets getting into so many fights that his wealthy father had to repeatedly use his influence to get him out of the hands of the police. (Years later, Rei cheerfully admits that if the cops had picked him up for every offense he actually committed, his arrest record would be in the triple digits.) As his father puts it, "He led such a degenerate lifestyle ... Fighting, drugs, calls from the police almost every day ... After Sei died, he just didn't give a damn about anything anymore."

After an extended stay in the mental hospital, Rei snaps out of this perpetual state of berserker rage sufficiently to attend high school and support himself by working construction and/or hustling pool when his hated father, who had initially allowed him to move out and get his own apartment, stops sending him money in an attempt to force him to return home. By the time he strikes up an unlikely friendship-turned-romance with his shy, pathologically withdrawn artist classmate Kira, Rei's notorious wildness has been manifesting itself mostly in transgressive, but not actually illegal, behavior like cutting class, smoking cigarettes behind the teachers' backs, and sleeping with every girl who shows an interest — which includes most of the female student body. However, people who attempt to harm or harass Kira, from jealous female admirers of Rei to a deceptively gentlemanly-seeming teacher who tries to molest Kira after school in the art studio, still find his natural born killer demeanor when warning them off bloodcurdlingly convincing.

As the series progresses, Rei's increasing involvement with the gentle Kira provides him with the motivation he had previously lacked to restrain his destructive impulses and do more than merely live for the moment. However, his violent past repeatedly comes back to haunt him in the form of newly-arrived transfer student Masao Kirishima, a former gang member who had been at least as notorious with the police officers who handled juvenile crime as Rei was. Although the two boys didn't really know each at the time, Masao, a deceptively fragile-looking sociopath who has already been responsible for one death, had become fixated on Rei as his outlaw in shining armor when Rei semi-inadvertantly saved him from a nearly fatal beating by the leader of Masao's gang in a drunken altercation during his feral roaming-the-streets period.

Even after several volumes' worth of Kira's civilizing influence, Rei Kashino is still an irresistible magnet for trouble, despite the fact that he eventually begins making fairly concerted efforts to avoid it. He is also at least symbolically blond, since his hair is never inked in in the manga and, in an unusual instance of manga color-scheme consistency, is colored pale yellow in every single cover and color illustration in which he appears. (Although Kira's hair is never inked in, either, her hair is colored reddish on at least as many of the covers as it is tinted blonde, and has obviously been painted some darker shade in the occasional interior pages which evidently appeared in color in the original Japanese publication.) Actually, virtually none of the characters in Mars have hair that is inked in or even shaded, resulting in a black and white vision of Tokyo in which almost everyone seems to be fair-haired. The few characters who do appear to have dark hair almost invariably turn out to be neurotically malicious ex-girlfriends, abusive stepfathers, cheating rival art students, or other obstructive figures intent on harming one or both of the protagonists or breaking up the hero and heroine's romance. Conversely, some of the most ultimately sinister characters, such as Masao Kirishima and the sexually harassing teacher, are just as apparently blond as anyone else, possibly because these individuals are essentially wolves in sheep's clothing whose menace is not meant to be easily discernible to the readers any more than it is to Rei and Kira.

I spotted only two significant exceptions to this dark haired character=negative influence pattern. The first is the stern, but genuinely concerned, guidance counselor at Rei and Kira's high school. Like the other faculty members who witness one of Rei's more spectacular acts of defiance of school rules (in which he resolves a crisis in his and Kira's relationship by showing up on campus just long enough to drag his girlfriend out of class so they can ride off on his motorcycle for a therapeutic day of heart to heart conversation at the beach), the counselor is initially outraged, shouting angrily out the window after the fleeing couple, "What are you doing, Rei?! If you keep just doing whatever you want, I really won't let you graduate!" However, when the repentant teenagers return the next day, he relents and lets them off with detention and an apology note apiece, then warns, "I hope you've learned not to do anything like this again. Especially you, Rei. Next time an apology note won't cut it. And Kira ... I know you're going through a lot right now, including your mother's illness, but you can't throw your life away." He then offers Kira the paternalistic but well-intentioned advice, "Choose your boyfriends wisely. The quality of a woman's life depends on the man she chooses."

Although this rather unflattering admonition unsurprisingly causes Rei to bristle, on another level it functions as a deceptively conventional-sounding restatement of one of the series' underlying themes — that, whether they intended to or not, in a sense Rei and Kira saved themselves by instinctively choosing each other. Rei's fearlessness and his surprising depths of kindness and sensitivity helped the timid, vulnerable Kira break out of the self-protective shell she had withdrawn into after being traumatically abused by her stepfather in eighth grade, just as Rei's growing desire to develop a deeper, long-term relationship with Kira causes him to reconsider his previous "live fast, because the world could end tomorrow — and that would be fine with me" attitude toward life and the reckless behavior that it had so often led him into. In this case, the only thing wrong with the counselor's advice was that it was too one-sided. In this relationship, both participants improved the quality of their own lives by getting together and changing each other for the better.

Unlike the solidly black-haired guidance counselor, whose advice in retrospect almost seems to give his intervention overtones of a sort of dramatic Greek chorus, the other significant dark-haired character, Rei's father's girlfriend/personal assistant Sonoko Shiina, is somewhat more enigmatic and ambiguous. In fact, so is her short, two-toned hair, which is conspicuously shaded black at the roots and tips, but left blank white on top.

Kira first sees Sonoko from across the street, mysteriously accosting Rei on a downtown street corner. When Rei fails to mention his rather agitated sidewalk conversation with the elegant thirtysomething woman to Kira later, his girlfriend isn't sure what to think, or even whether it was really Rei that she unexpectedly glimpsed from a distance that day.

A volume or so later, Sonoko shows up at the construction site where Rei works part-time, inspiring Rei to exclaim in some alarm, "Oh shit, look who it is!" and his friend Tatsuya to gasp, "Y ... you've even made it with a middle-aged woman?" "Idiot!" Rei replies. "That's my old man's lady." Sonoko takes Rei aside and, after flirtatiously advising the obviously less-than-thrilled teen not to look so unhappy just because he's being forced to talk to a middle-aged woman, delivers a rather patronizing message from his father about how he should move back home because "You're only seventeen. You're still immature, both emotionally and physically. You still need someone to look after you ... In other words, you're still a child." Alluding to Rei's previous cynical remark that his father should stop worrying about him because "Without me around, he can live his life with you. Isn't it much better for him when his no-good son isn't in the picture?" Sonoko goes on, "Why not just be true to your feelings? Your father doesn't think of you as a bother at all ... and I don't either. If there's anything I can do, just let me know. I'll do whatever I can to help." "Really?" Rei asks. When Sonoko replies, "Of course," he leans insinuatingly close to her and suggests, "So then ... let me do you." Sonoko just stares back at him for a moment with a deadpan expression and then calls his bluff: "Sure. Whenever you like. But ... I hope you can satisfy me." Rei, obviously freaked out, looks away in embarrassment and apologizes for asking, but rallies sufficiently to deliver the parting shot, "Hey, could you relay this to the old man? Tell him that he doesn't have to try so hard ... We're not father and son anyway."

Sonoko has somewhat better luck when she approaches Kira, who has now moved in with Rei, two volumes later. After sweeping the overawed girl (who thinks miserably, "Everything she's wearing looks expensive") away to a fancy restaurant, Sonoko tells Kira that when she saw her on the street that day with Rei, she was trying to take him to see his father, who is concerned about Rei's plans to drop out of school a few months short of graduation and marry Kira. "What you're trying to build on your own is admirable," she tells Kira, "but ... you're both too young. Tell Rei ... you shouldn't try to do everything all by yourselves. He'll probably listen, if it comes from you." Although Kira seems inclined to accept Sonoko's assurances that Mr. Kashino is genuinely concerned about his son and future daughter-in-law's welfare, Rei's eventual decision to attempt to reconcile with his father is precipitated by an urgent emergency rather than his fiancee's efforts at persuasion. Still, in her own alternately blunt, Machiavellian, and occasionally slightly disturbing way, Sonoko does appear to have the welfare of the wealthy but "awkward and sad to the point of pity" man in her life — and, by extension, his difficult young relatives — at heart.

Whether artist Fuyumi Soryo uses this overwhelmingly un-colored-in palette of mostly blond-looking characters out of some conscious attempt at visual symbolism or simply out of a desire to avoid spending a lot of time inking in characters' hair remains unclear. Although Soryo is by far the most extreme case of this I've seen so far, some manga-ka do seem to prefer leaving most major characters' hair un-inked in and unshaded, either to save time and effort or because it is more feasible to create various feathering effects when drawing characters' bangs, etc., in stark pen and ink if you don't have to blur the details by darkening the spaces between the individually-delineated strands of hair. In volume one of Shizuro Seino's Girl Got Game (TOKYOPOP), for instance, it's obvious from the covers and the occasional interior page which appears to have been painted in color in the original Japanese edition that both heroine Kyo Aizawa, a girl whose NBA-fan father talks her into posing as a boy so she can play on the boys' basketball team at her new high school, and her prickly boy roommate Chiharu Eniwa have dark hair, even though their hair is never filled in in any of the pen and ink interior drawings. Even Rurouni Kenshin writer/artist Nobuhiro Watsuki, who evidently manages the difficult task of getting a lot of subtle highlights into female lead Kaoru's black hair even in pen and ink by leaving tiny slivers of white space blank to indicate light gleaming off her dark bangs and ponytail, admits in one of the text pages of volume one of the manga that "filling in her hair is sometimes a pain."

Next month: When is a blond not a blond?