Manga Review: Skip-Beat! Volumes 10-11-12 by Yoshiki Nakamura
Note: SPOILERS for earlier volumes! If you are just now finding out about this series, you may want to read earlier reviews first.
Quick Recap: Kyoko Mogami dropped out of school to move to Tokyo with the boy she loved, Sho Fuwa, so she could support him in his show business career. Some years later, the now moderately successful Sho finally let it slip that he did not reciprocate her feelings and was only using her as a convenient maidservant. (In fairness, their relationship had been chaste, though he had misled her as to why.)
Kyoko vows to get revenge in the one way Sho will actually care about, by becoming a bigger celebrity than him. This is going to be a difficult task as she can’t act, dance, or sing at the beginning, but her determination does get her a shot with the LME agency under ecccentric CEO Lory Takarada. He assigns her to the newly-created “Love Me” division along with Kanae “Mouko” Kotonami, a more experienced actress who also had some issues, and eventually became Kyoko’s first female friend.
During her initial odd jobs assignments, Kyoko connected with Ren Tsuruga, a very popular mixed-race actor who is secretly her childhood friend “Corn” who had to move away from Japan for…reasons and is using an assumed name. He blows hot and cold with her, but is the girl he is the closest to having ever been in love with. Which is why, despite Lory noticing he can’t portray love convincingly, Ren agrees to join the cast of Dark Moon when Kyoko is cast as scarred villainess Mio.
This part of the manga is all one big plotline so I won’t be separating out the volumes as much as usual.
Dark Moon (Tsukigomori) is a remake of a J-Drama that was extremely popular twenty years ago. The director, Hiroki Ogata nee Date, is the son of the famous director Hiroto Date, who created the first Tsukigomori. He’s attempting to create an even better version of the television show to come out of the shadow of his father. At first, he’s nervous and oversensitive about the comparisons.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Hiroko Iizuka, who played Mio in the original drama, has joined the cast as the mother of Mio and her favored older sister Misao. Mio was her first big role, and if Kyoko can’t properly play the part, Hiroko’s going to walk, as the unknown Kyoko was a specific choice by the director.
So the first big crisis is Kyoko trying to find a way to play “her” Mio. Naturally, she manages to do so in an extremely dramatic way, digging deeply into her own feelings and trying to understand why Mio hates her adoptive sister Mizuki, the heroine of the story. She manages to impress Hiroko enough to stay, and bring the director out of his initial funk.
Meanwhile, there’s a short interval where Sho finds out Kyoko is co-starring in Dark Moon with Ren, who he considers his biggest rival, and feels a pang of…something. He’s not enough in touch with honesty to figure out quite what.
This also convinces Ren that he must create a Katsuki that surpasses the original. To dig into the plot of Dark Moon a bit, Katsuki is the teacher of Mio and Mizuki, and the fiancé of Mio’s sister Misao. This is part of an elaborate revenge plot due to the death of his family. Despite both this motivation and the fact that teacher-student romantic relationships are forbidden, Katsuki and Mizuki fall in love.
Unfortunately, Ren has never truly loved a girl or woman before, and he can’t rely on his usual shallow tricks because this tormented romance is central to his character’s arc. This causes him to have creative block, which is affecting his performance.
Kyoko uses her other job as Bo, the chicken-suited mascot character of a variety show, to try to draw out from Ren what’s going on. It doesn’t entirely work, but does cause Ren to realize that there are some parallels in his relationship with Kyoko, who he has buried feelings for but for…reasons can never act on them.
Lory forces a showdown. Either Ren will be ready to act by the day after tomorrow, or he’s off the show and will be replaced with a better-prepared actor, forcing expensive reshoots. Ren’s agent, Yukihito Yashiro, arranges a meeting between Kyoko and Ren at Ren’s apartment so that they can improvise a scene between Mizuki and Katsuki.
This is a crash course in improvisation for Kyoko as she has to figure out what Mizuki would do in a situation that isn’t in the script and correctly play against Ren’s interpretation of Katsuki. They come very close to realizations about their feelings for each other, but more importantly in the moment Ren makes a breakthrough about how to act out Katsuki in the script.
So it’s time for Ren to prove himself by playing opposite Mizuki’s actual actress Itsumi Momose. Will he be able to perform?
This section of the manga is a bit more on the serious drama side, though we still get comedic moments when Kyoko’s dressed up as Bo. We dig deep into the concept of trying to remake a classic updated to the modern era but still faithful to the heart of the original material, and also somehow better. Each of our main characters in this arc has to learn to connect with the character they’re playing to understand how best to perform them.
It also goes heavy on the romantic drama, deepening the relationship between Ren and Kyoko while making sure we understand why neither of them is progressing in their understanding that it’s a romantic relationship.
This is some good stuff, though I am hoping for more comedic antics soon.
Still recommended for romance fans who like their female lead to have serious personality flaws.
