Though the series has recently completed in Japan, Maki Minami’s Komomo Confiserie has a new audience as VIZ released an English language edition starting 
in October.  

Komomo Confiserie is a shojo manga, or “girls’ comic,” and while that is an extremely wide subgenre of literature already, embracing Sailor Moon on the one hand and Heart no Kuni no Alice on the other hand, Komomo Confiserie widens the genre even further with its Cinderella-in-reverse narrative that starts with the unruled affection of children in a one sided relationship of poor boy confectioner Natsu Azumi and rich girl candy consumer Komomo Ninomiya, and ends with the much impoverished latter indenturing herself to the former in order to present a spectacle studded with bittersweet morsels of sadomasochistic servitude, with the grown servant thinking that he is giving the former princess her just deserts, while she considers her wage slavery a sweet, still favoring her childish delight in his candy.
The story is a true reversal of fortunes narrative in which Komomo descends by degrees from princess to peasant, and her former servant Natsu, during the same period, has lived in France and become a renowned pastry chef, so that when he returns to Japan, his fame brings reporters to interview him. Speaking through the TV screen, seemingly directly to Komomo, Natsu says that the person who he’d most like to reacquaint with would be 

…Komomo-Sama, who took such good care of me back when I was little.  She took such terribly good care of me. I’d like to pay her back as best I can.

Komomo takes this revelation at face value (not hearing the more ominous connotations of “payback”), and when the two meet, she trusts him and the now poor girl, now responsible for her own support and having been fired from more jobs than she can count, takes his offer of employment (and residence) in his shop. But by the end of the story, we learn that Natsu’s desert of choice is tormenting his former mistress.

From the reader’s perspective, these moments of torment are funny to various degrees. Natsu’s open interest in Komomo, filtered through this cruelty and his childhood resentments that he hasn’t yet worked out in a mature way, expresses itself In a kind of creepy, possessive, paternalism that adds a gothic glaze to this bittersweet tale. One even suspects at times that Minami is deliberately dipping into the repertory of one of the Bronte sisters for a character likeness, as if she was borrowing a character-shaped cookie cutter of Heathcliff or Rochester.

Overall, the first volume is an entertaining read, and although American comic readers will be familiar with every variation on how love filters through economic inequity from reading Archie Comics, the story is no less powerful for not seeming original to American tastes. Actually, the story has a delightful aftertaste, and the characters have lingered in my mind since my first reading of it, so that, like Komomo is wistful for Katsu’s sweets, I may return for the sweetness of the second volume.

 

Related posts: