Screentone Nightmares: Happy Sugar Life
In this edition of Screentone Nightmares we’re taking a step away from the supernatural and grotesque and diving full force into the psychological side of horror. Happy Sugar Life was created by Tomiyaki Kagisora and ran in the magazine Gangan Joker from 2015 to 2019. It concluded at 53 chapters and was collected in five volumes that have been officially translated into English by Yen Press. Kagisora’s other work leans heavily into slice of life, school drama, and romance, and while the elements of these are present in Happy Sugar Life I assure you, it is anchored heavily in the horror genre. This was also adapted into a twelve episode anime series in 2018 but seeing as how the manga wasn’t complete until 2019 I’m not sure how much the anime actually covers or if it’s worth watching.
I had a vague notion of what Happy Sugar Life was about when I started it but I had intentionally avoided learning too much. Although a cast of characters eventually come in to play the series focuses heavily on Satou Matsuzaka, a teenage high school student. Ok, totally standard. Nothing weird here. Satou is well known around her school for being promiscuous and generally easy to get in bed. We’re sort of hit over the head with this fact, actually. There’s a huge and immediate emphasis on how much Satou gets around and how ok she is with her lifestyle. Or rather, how ok she was with it. The immediate plot point in chapter one is that Satou has changed. She’s serious now; more dedicated, more hard working, and more responsible. She’s even working overtime at her part time job. It turns out Satou has fallen in love with someone. Someone that’s changed her life. Someone she’s dedicated herself to completely and would do anything for.
As a friend puzzles over who her new boyfriend might be, we follow Satou home where she is greeted by her one true love: an eight year old girl named Shio Koube. Ok. Bear with me for a second. I’ll report right now that this is not that kind of manga. Don’t fret. Yeah, things are fucked up from here on out, don’t get me wrong, but not so fucked up you won’t want to read it so don’t worry. So what exactly is the relationship that’s going on here? Well, That’s a little hard to explain or even parse from a reader’s viewpoint at all but Satou seems to have a totally non-sexual yet utterly encompassing devotion to this child. And Shio reciprocates. They eat together, bathe together, sleep together...recite wedding vows to each other every night...Ok, for real it doesn’t get reprehensible, just incredibly uncomfortable. We soon learn that Shio is missing. Like, kidnapped missing. Awesome. We also learn that Satou has a locked door in her apartment full of bloody garbage bags and knives. Awesome. As the plot unfolds we meet our cast of heart wrenchingly unstable characters: Asahi Koube, Shio’s homeless brother who spends every waking hour scouring the streets for his lost sister; Taiyou Mitsuboshi, Satou’s male co-worker and a rape victim who develops an unhealthy obsession with the photo on Shio’s missing child poster; Satou’s unnamed aunt who...Christ I don’t even know where to start with her. Sub-plots and motivations ebb and flow over the course of 53 chapters, all spiraling in a perfect storm around Satou whose warped understanding of human emotion leads her down any path necessary to protect her fantasy kingdom and it’s shining princess Shio. And I do mean any path. Satou is like a force of nature crushing anything in the path of her idea of a “happy, sugar life”.
I really had no idea how I would feel about this manga going in and I certainly didn’t know that the “love interest” (feels bad calling Shio that) was an eight year old. This has been on my list to check out for awhile, but I originally found it on a list of yuri manga, yuri being a genre encompassing anything dealing with romantic love or eroticism between two female characters in manga. Calling this yuri really doesn't seem right to me though. It is, however, an enthralling read. After a couple chapters I still wasn’t sure that it would hold my interest, but it really paid off to stick with it. The shifting plot elements and the revelation at character motivations and backstory really elevated what seemed, at first, like a sort of trashy shock concept. There’s actually a good deal of complexity at play here and it calls into question the definition of concepts like love and family in an interesting way. For real, these characters are fucked up from top to bottom. Every plot development just digs a deeper pit of human depravity. This mangaka really takes the idea of torturing your characters to heart. I was also fascinated by the narrative’s ability to ask the reader who the bad guy really was. Yeah, on the surface it seems like a story about child abduction and…child brides…would be cut and dry in the morality department, but there’s some weird grey area nuance here. The art isn’t something I would gush about but the flowery, romance-manga style juxtaposed with the content adds yet another element of genre bending convolution. If you want something to take you out of your comfort zone with some well developed psychological elements and some mystery/crime dashes to move the story along, give Happy Sugar Life a try.
Join Justin as he chats with actor Lisa Schrage about her vast book collection, Prom Night II, becoming Mary Lou Maloney, long lost film props, her first horror conventions, and more!