scans_daily

Chokotto Sister is one of my favourite manga (and anime, but this isn't videos_daily, now, is it?). Which just happens to begin and end on subsequent Christmases. Which makes it a perfect for a series of xmas posts, eh?

The basic premise of the series is that college student Haruma Kawagoe finds himself unexpectedly taking care of his little sister Choco. (Or Choko, depending who's transliterating her name. I'm sticking with Choco.) (The exact details of how she came to be with Haruma will be the point of post 3 of this series.) The series then follows them, the other residents of their building, and a handful of others. Among those others are Kakeru (only son of the family that owns the local public bath), and Yurika, a somewhat snobby rich girl, who Choco befriends. Pretty much against her will in Yurika's case. Read right to left...manga and all.

Yurika's kind of a bitch, yes.

I'm not sure what amuses me more...Choco's incredibly earnest belief in Santa Claus, or Yurika's apparent belief that 'there's no Santa' is a good argument against Christmas parties.

But why is a spoilt rich kid so adamantly against Christmas?

Let's jump back a few years to when she was a spoilt rich girl who believed in Santa:

(Obviously her mom is going to get her the musical jewelry box.)

... Oh. :(

The anime softened this story quite a bit - Yurika only refused to go to Choco's party because she had better plans - she was going to have dinner with her mostly absent father. So, even having seen that, those pages were a pretty sudden hit of the sad.

After that, the jewelry box finds its way to a second hand shop, and we find our way back to the present.

Speaking of presents:

Aaaah! Stranger Danger! Stranger Danger! *cough* Sorry. Kakeru clearly trusts him, so he can't be bad. So, Choco goes with him...

Hey, that box looks familiar. (As it should, Old Man Mita is the same seller of second hand goods that bought it after Yurika's mother's death.)

Obviously, though, the box is way more than 500 yen (just about $5), so Old Man Mita proposes a game. They'll flip the coin, and if she wins the toss, she gets the box for 500 yen, if not, she'll work for him for a little while. She loses. So she spends the day cleaning the shop. (Which is a great little montage, but had to be cut.)

And off Choco goes with the box. Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the box's strange journey. *waves fingers* Ooo-weee-oooo. And tune in on the 25th, for how Choco came to be living with Haruma.

6 pages from 19, and 6.3 from 20.