All my Darling Daughters

I have no idea how this manga found itself in my plan to read, but I enjoyed it. It's very short - only 6 chapters long, and each chapter deals with a different set of characters, with appearances by the ones that we were first introduced to in the beginning. All the short stories deal with pretty controversial themes, such as an older woman marrying a man younger than her daughter, arranged marriage (more like in a matchmaker sense rather than forced sense but still), starry eyed staunch feminists becoming housewives, "ugly" girls forcing themselves on male teachers... Now that I laid it all out it kind of sounds like the author wants to say "hey women do controversial things too", but frankly, it's handled with a lot of grace and in a "things aren't so black and white" way, which I really appreciate. In fact, I really loved the controversial themes as a set up for great characterization. For example, the aforementioned feminist-turned-housewife. She talked the talk when she was younger, because it's really easy to say "hey I'm going to be productive and have a hard job to inspire women in the future", but her family situation never allowed her to fully realize herself, so she ended up quitting high school early to escape her parents, jumping from job to job and in the end from relationship to relationship in order to find stability and happinness. Maybe she's a bad feminist traitor, or maybe she's just a victim of circumstance, however you choose to look at it she's a person that got dealt a bad hand in life - and sadly that's just how life goes sometimes. We don't all manage to live up to our potential, and certain things take precedence over our true desires so we could survive.

Anyway, despite these short chapters I think the author managed to portray a really varied cast of characters and situations which is something commendable. I like the classic but true message, "life will never be as simple as you want it to be"...