(I may not have time to post on Friday, so you get this post a day early!)

If you read enough shojo manga, it won’t be long before you become an expert in how Japan celebrates Valentine’s Day and White Day. For those who haven’t yet reached that point of manga consumption, here’s a brief overview. In Japan, Valentine’s Day tradition calls for women to give chocolate to men on February 14. Men who receive Valentine’s Day chocolate are supposed to make a return gift one month later on White Day, March 14. You can read more about the holiday traditions on Wikipedia.

It’s easy to see why these two holidays have become time-honored manga plot devices. Like “the big dance” in US teen fiction, Valentine’s Day and White Day are wonderful excuses for meaningful glances, significant blushes, stammered confessions of love, and truly awkward moments between our favorite emotionally clueless characters. But in the hands of skilled writers, they can also be opportunities for great characterization and entertaining adventures.

One example of this is Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket. In volume 3, our kind-hearted heroine, Tohru, makes chocolates for all of her friends on Valentine’s Day, and the various Sohmas who receive them accept them without thinking about how much they have cost. Later, when they learn that Tohru is having trouble paying some school fees, they realize that she spent too much of her part-time earnings on their chocolates. It’s a moment for the Sohmas to appreciate the extent of Tohru’s generosity, but also a chance for the story to critique her tendency to be overly self-sacrificing.

Valentine’s Day and White Day are put to even better use in CLAMP’s xxxHolic. In volume 4, Valentine’s Day provides another excuse for Watanuki to be spectacularly cranky (something he does darn well on regular days). Not only does he have to watch his rival Domeki receive an abundance of chocolate gifts, he also has to make his employer Yuko’s chocolate gifts for her—for which she then proceeds to take all the credit. And when a smitten spirit decides to give Watanuki a gift, her way of going about it has some disastrous consequences. In volume 5, when White Day rolls around, Watanuki’s left with a second dilemma: how do you give a return gift to someone who isn’t even human? Both holidays provide ample opportunity for comedy and drama, and Watanuki’s adventures in the spirit world give CLAMP’s art—more gorgeous here than in any of their other work, if you ask me!—a chance to shine.

Valentine’s Day and White Day subplots are also present in CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, and I’m told they also appear (in various degrees) in the series Here is Greenwood, Hana-Kimi, Hime-chan’s Ribbon, Vampire Knight, and W-Juliet.

What are your favorite Valentine’s Day and White Day subplots in manga, and what do you particularly like about them?

Links

For those of you who might have missed them, here are two of my favorite manga-related Valentine’s Day posts:

• David Welsh’s favorite manga romantic comedies.
• Manga Xanadu’s favorite non-sappy shojo manga.