Also a pretty good snapshot of the wonderful oxymoron that is Japanese feminism.
In a country whose low birth rate is a cause for national alarm, and where Tokyo women in their thirties who have yet to find a mate are known as “loser-dogs,” the fantasy of rural life offered by the cell-phone novels, with their tropes of teen pregnancy and young love, has proved irresistible. “Love Sky,” by Mika, which has been viewed twelve million times online, and has been adapted for manga, television, and film, is a paradigm of sexual mishap and tragedy lightly borne. Freshman year, the heroine—also Mika—falls in love with a rebel named Hiro, and is raped by a group of men incited by Hiro’s ex-girlfriend. Then Mika gets pregnant with Hiro’s child, and he breaks up with her. Later, she finds out why: he is terminally ill with lymphoma and had hoped to spare her. In the movie version, which came out last fall and earned thirty-five million dollars at the box office, Mika has tears streaming down her face for the better part of two hours. The moral of the story is not that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and so should be avoided, but that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and pain is at the center of a woman’s life.
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