Igarashi Yumiko's Candy Candy is among the most quintessential classic shoujo manga. Set in the 1910s (with a heavy dose of 70s fashion), an orphan, Candy White is taken into a family to live as a maid, but her tomboyism soon gets the better of her. Candy easily falls in love with the youngest of the three neighbor siblings, Anthony Lagan. I say siblings rather than brothers as Archie, the middle child, would really fit best into a third gender. The two children and mother Candy has come to live with are quite evil and torment her and eventually force her to live in the stables as a drudge. Candy does little to fight them and they continue to pick on her, the girl Elisa becoming enraged when all three Lagan siblings prefer Candy to her. The brother and sister concoct a plot to frame her as a thief and Candy is to be sent away to Mexico. In the nick of time, a letter arrives to announce Candy has been adopted by the noble relatives of the Lagans. Candy then begins etiquette classes to instruct her to become a proper lady. As with any good classic shoujo, after she's finally put her life together and fallen in love, Anthony dies tragically when his horse steps in a bear trap. Candy is devastated but realizes she must move on and finally meet the family she's been adopted into.

This 1995 reprint of the 1975 manga was published in six volumes, though originally released in nine volumes after the magazine's run. Thus, it's pretty densely compact. The print is... nearly microscopic, though thanks to the presence of furigana, it's perfectly legible. Written for a shoujo audience, the Japanese content is definitely doable for the intermediate to advanced Japanese learner; in Japan it would probably be around a fifth or sixth grade reading level. Despite it's length, the story encouraged me to skip along at a fine clip (if you'll excuse the pun) and I only pulled out the denshi jishou maybe four or five times.

Illustrated by Mizuki Kyouko, the art is cute, expressive and alluring. Not quite to the mibushii style that might tipify an Ikeda Riyoko, Candy Candy is beautifully crafted with an incredible amount of curved lines and the sort of hatching that was popular before screentones. It's also very sparsely imbued with Tezuka-like slapstick and transgressive fashion in the case of Archie's ambiguity.

I really enjoyed volume 1, though some of the characters are laughably archetypical. Candy herself, even after being adopted into a super rich Scottish family, fits perfectly into the bright (green in this case) eyed fun-loving, optimistic feminine shoujo model of the time. Her tomboyish isn't as profuse as it could be and so Candy really comes off like an Ace wo Naere. The story is quite engaging and complex and I'm looking forward to the reading the second volume. ( )