Blog#5 Letter To Yumihiko Kawahara

For all you people who don't know, I read a lot of manga and Plant Doll is one that I have finished recently. It inspired me to write my fifth blog to its author, Yumiko Kawahara. This manga is about living dolls that supposedly have the 'smile of an angel' if you nourish it correctly and give it lots of love. They smile only for their owner and people all over the world desire a plant doll for their breath taking beauty.The dolls are kind of like the wands in Harry Potter, you can choose a doll, but you can not buy it until the doll chooses you. Likewise, you can just be visiting the shop and the doll awaken from their slumber and choose you forcing you to buy the doll. The series consists of 4 volumes that each have a number of chapters that vary from 27 to 40 to 69 pages. Each chapter is a new story about a plant doll and its owner and each story has its own twist.

The chapter that I will write about in this blog is called ' Potpourri doll' and is about a man that has recently come to a city and for some reason hates the 'smell' that it has. In order to appease his daughter who does not talk because of a incident in her past, he buys a plant doll that looks exactly like her. The plant doll that he bought is a type of doll that takes scent balls (kind of like a perfumed sachet) with every meal that allows it to release a so-called 'tantalizing scent'. The story progresses and the doll and the daughter start to act alike as well which leads to people not being able to tell them apart even more. The father of the girl also starts to become even more irritated with the horrible smell that the city has and ends up firing everyone one that works for him in a effort to disperse the smell. The smell is still not gone and he goes to his daughter who is the one of the few in the city that does have the smell in order to calm himself down. He picks her up to hug her only to realize that she has somehow managed to give off the loathsome smell as well. He throws her aside in horror thinking that he accidentally picked up the doll and immediately picks it up again to return it to the shop in which he bought it from. When he comes back his female companion asks him where the doll is. Tired from his trip he tells her that he returned it and tells her to go away. Horrified, she tells him that he did not return the doll but instead he returned his daughter. The chapter ends with the plant doll shop owner holding the daughter and asking her if she thinks her daddy will ever return.

Dear Yumiko Kawahara,

I absolutely love Plant Doll. It is amazing and I love how each chapter has a twist in it. My favourite one is the one about the potpourri doll. It's so interesting and it carries a certain kind of ominous feeling in it that I usually don't see in other books. The whole time I was reading that chapter I felt that something creepy was going to happen at the end and it did, the man ended up taking his own daughter back to the shop instead of the doll. I wonder if the man will ever go back to the plant doll shop to retrieve his daughter because his daughter is the one giving off the scent that he detests so much. His daughter is also the one that won't speak and has unfeeling eyes that scare anyone that looks into them. I think that the reason his daughter is giving off the scent is because she was also eating the perfume balls that the doll ate. What I think is weird though is that the lady who was taking care of the man's daughter and the plant doll also ate the scent balls but never gave off the scent that nauseated the man so much. In the end, the man thinks that the doll is the one that gives off the smell but I don't think it's true because the smell was there before he bought the doll. Which means that the poor doll never did anything and it was the man who probably had a problem, not the doll or the city that he lived in. I think that Plant Doll is a fabulous manga, and I wish that you can write more manga that is like it.

Sincerely, Polka Dots