Fat Manga
By the time she received her new series assignment, Myrna was several days into Free-Lancer's Desperation. Despite her editor's assurance that a fresh title was being negotiated, it'd been three long weeks since she'd received her final check for Princess Serendipity - the 18-volume romantic shoujo series that'd been her one steady paying gig for the past four years - so her anxiety was understandable. She'd foolishly grown accustomed to a small-but-regular paycheck, working as the English adapter for a best-selling girl's Japanese comic title. When said series finally reached its sappy romantic finish, her contract with MangaMatic Books was up.
But now everything was coming up shoujo floral patterns; her editor Griff had phoned her with a new potential series: a still-ongoing shonen manga entitled Happy Chef Han.
"A cooking manga? For young boy readers?" Myrna said into her cell phone receiver, as she quickly doffed her at-home casuals for something she could wear to the office. "Yeah," her sardonic inner self couldn't help thinking, "give the Home Ec series to the girl writer!"
"Not a cooking manga," Griff replied, "but the cooking manga! Han is the most popular series of its type currently running in Japan. Its creator, Keiko Shinji, is a shonen phenomenon. If you can come in this afternoon, I'll have all the info you need - and a translated manuscript for the first two volumes. You could start right away."
Even if she hadn't been feeling free-lancer's anxiety, Myrna would've taken Griff up on his invite, if only for the chance to spend some office time with him. She thought her boss was cute, though she was fairly certain he didn't think likewise of her. A slenderly built brunette in her mid-twenties, Myrna sometimes joked that she looked more like one of those androgynously lithe males from a pre-teen shoujo romance than a full-bodied American woman: all legs and arms with big eyes and medium-length wavy hair. Perhaps Griff was more attracted to the zaftig type?
His secretary/receptionist was decidedly more than zaftig, that's for sure. Dressed in a form-hugging denim skirt and a white blouse, Mary Jo was at least three times Myrna's size, though it was clear from the open box of Krispy Kremes on her desk that she wasn't bothered by this fact. "He's waiting for you," the matronly redhead smiled, as Myrna entered the office, lifting a still-warm glazed donut - a mid-afternoon snack, no doubt - with her long-nailed pudgy fingers. She didn't bother to get up to escort Myrna into her meeting with Griff, but that was no big deal. After all, the fat woman had a box of Kremes to attend to, right?
"There's my li'l wordsmith," Griff effused, rising from behind his desk. Dressed in business casual - which seemed to be the standard uniform at the larger publishing concern which owned MangaMatic - he was a comfortably-sized man with ill-combed brown hair, deep eyes and a soul patch on his chin. He looked like he should be editing a small-press poetry mag, not a commercial graphic novel company like MangaMatic, but Griff definitely knew his stuff when it came to Eastern comic art. "Keeping busy?"
"Not really," Myrna confessed. Though she should've been taking advantage of her free time to work on the novel she'd been planning for years, she'd only pulled out her notes once in the past month. Her time had mainly been spent aimlessly web surfing and feeling sorry for herself. (Social life? Pfaw!) "I could use a new series."
"Let me show you this then," Griff said, and he tossed a large yellow envelope across the desk. Opening it, Myrna saw several photocopied pages of character sketches, a story Bible and a series of untranslated paperback covers. The last cover, she was pleased to note had a scribbled "Volume 21" written next to it.
"That our hero?" she asked, holding up an illustration of a wide-eyed innocent in a chef's hat and apron, comically brandishing a ladle like it was a samurai sword. He looked both boyish and intense, not an unusual combination for a shonen hero. Griff nodded. "And this?" she asked, indicating the figure on the second page, a young woman wearing a jumper and a striped tee-shirt. Her face was cartoonishly cute; her hair long and curly; while her breasts were each nearly as big as her head.
"That's Tsuki, the other half of our romance," Griff explained. "She's the daughter of a successful restaurateur."
"Pretty well endowed," Myrna joked. "Sure you're not trying to get me working on a hentai porno?"
"Just a manga visual convention," Griff replied. "Tsuki's breasts become less conspicuous as the series progresses, though."
"How? Her restaurateur papa pay for breast reduction surgery?"
"You'll see," Griff promised, as she flipped the page to a third character. "That's Han's rival Takashi," Griff explained, "Tsuki's half-brother. He sees our hero as a threat to his taking over the family business. Takashi continually strives to out-cook Han in public competitions, but, of course, our hero always comes out on top."
"And Keiko Shinji has managed to keep this one-note plot going for twenty-plus volumes?"
"Yup," Griff nodded. "Both Han and Tsuki are appealing characters - and it's in the national competitions where he really lets his imagination fly, cooking up all manner of outrageous opponents for our hero. As you can see, his art is closer to Western comic art in its attention to detail and the weight and heft he gives his characters, so it's an easy series for American readers to get into."
A cooking manga: as a free-lance writer, Myrna never had the luxury to become knowledgeable about fine dining - though she could definitely hold forth on the nuances of the differently shaped Kraft Macaroni & Cheeses. Part of her wondered whether she was the right woman for this book, but the part that was feeling desperate for a project quickly shouted down this nay-sayer.
"Could use the assignment," Myrna decided, "so I guess I'll have to look at the first two volumes to see how charming and enduring I can make these characters for an American audience." She glanced toward a pile of proofs on her editor's desk. "These the translated pages you were telling me about?" Just one look at the awkwardly translated dialog ("A goose dish formidable skills requires . . .") and it was clear she had her work cut out for her.
"You got it," Griff replied. "You know, I really think you're gonna get into this series. I couldn't think of any other writer but you for it."
"Well, thank you, kind sir," she said, as she stuffed her material into her book bag. In the four years she'd worked on Serendipity, he hadn't once been so complimentary. The man must really want her on this series. "Any particular deadline for the first book?" He nodded and told her a date two weeks away. "Should be do-able," she promised.
Myrna toted her material back to her apartment and prepared to immerse herself in her new manga world. She'd learned to appreciate Eastern comics over the past five years. As a young girl, she'd grown up on American comics, but by the time she'd left home for college, it seemed like there were less and less titles aimed toward her as a reader. It was all fanboy superheroes and hard-assed posturing. With manga, however, the range of material was wider: books for boys, for girls, for teenagers and adults of either sex; fantasy and reality; romance and action. It was comic art in all of its possibility - even cooking manga.
It didn't take long for her to get hooked by Han. Shinji's art was appealing, an energetic blend of realistic and cartoony that made her think in places of Will Eisner. His characters were hyper-expressive, while his renderings of food were practically mouth-watering. As she paged through the untranslated proofs first without bothering to connect them to the Babelfish translation that had been provided, she could tell a lot of the story from the visuals. Hero Han was a good-hearted soul whose basic desire to feed people the best meals possible made him a ready patsy; Tsuki was a somewhat opinionated young girl who first looked at Han with a large dose of skepticism, though his culinary skills quickly won her over. Much of the second volume seemed set in the restaurant kitchen - interrupted by occasional flashbacks - with the young girl sampling dishes prepared for her by both Han and his rival Takashi. There were a lot of panels showing Tsuki with a bulging mouthful.
When Myrna started comparing the translated pages to the graphics, though, it looked like there was an intriguing tension between images and dialog. Though Tsuki plainly was enamored with Han's cooking from the start, her first inclination was to criticize it. And where Han was almost preternaturally eager to please, Tsuki kept holding back. "Not bad," she'd say, cheeks packed with Han's latest treat. "Almost there." When our hero wasn't looking, she'd occasionally let her mask slip and mentally rhapsodize about how divine each plate tasted. "This Sweet Rice Siu Mai is heavenly," she'd tell the audience, holding up a serving plate of dumplings crammed with shredded chicken, rice and shiitake mushrooms which she'd taken to the storeroom to polish off entirely by herself.
"She's a big tease," Myrna thought, at first feeling irritated with the character. But as she progressed through the first chapter of the second volume, she realized there was more to the improbably-breasted girl. A lover of good dining, Tsuki believed it was her duty to push Han into producing the best meals he could. She knew he could do better - could even create the Ultimate Dish some day - and she was eager to be there when this occurred. Like so many shonen mangas, Happy Chef Han looked to be about its hero's struggles to be the best in his chosen field - with the food-loving Tsuki noodging him every step of the way.
Myrna fell asleep on her couch with the second volume spread beneath her chin and woke next morning, aching all over. After completing her read-through of book two, she grabbed a yellow legal pad and quickly went to work. The rest of her week was spent doing a line-by-line rewrite of the first book, making each word balloon read more naturally as she immersed herself in the world of Happy Chef Han. Tsuki provided her a gateway, of course; by the time she'd finished Volume One, she almost felt like she could be that spunky gourmet girl.
She got through the first book faster than she expected, and, by Monday morning, Myrna deemed her work good enough to show to Griff for editing and re-lettering. She could've easily emailed it, of course, but she was hoping for some face time with the handsome editor, and, besides, she hadn't been out of her apartment all week. As she rifled through her closet for an outfit that'd show her to her best advantage, the writer felt a brief moment of dislocation. As she did, a sudden sense that something was different about the world today. But it quickly passed. As usual, Myrna spent the most time picking out a decent top for her FF breasts - being so boyishly skinny everywhere else, she had to work to find an ensemble that didn't look like she was over-emphasizing them - but she managed. (She could never get away with some of the form-fitting outfits Tsuki favored, she thought - but, then, that was the mangaverse, not the real world.) When she arrived at Griff's office, her boss was all business.
"Ahead of deadline, as usual," he said, after quickly flipping through her inkjet manuscript. He pushed a stack of new proofs her way. "Got volumes three through five here, if you want 'em. So what you think of the series?"
"It's the perfect match for me," Myrna replied, and as she said this, she realized it was true. She really wanted to know what was going to happen next. "Do Han and Tsuki ever get together?" she asks, "Or does Shinji just keep stringing us along?"
"That'd be telling," Griff said knowingly. "Let's just say there are some big changes in store for our heroine. She really grows as a character, thanks to Han's talents." Though she didn't even notice doing it, Myrna licked her lips at the mention of her hero's culinary activities. On her way out of the office, she even stopped to ask Mary Jo for a couple of Krispy Kremes.
She took her new translations home, but not before stopping at a Japanese buffet near the office to try out some of the dishes she'd read and written about. Each one, she was happy to learn, tasted the way she'd expected them to based on Shinji's art and descriptions. Sometimes at home, when she was engrossed in the material, it almost felt like she was eating alongside the characters - well, at least this proved her imagination was getting it right! At one point, while working on her second platter of Siu Mai, Myrna dropped a bit of ginger on her white blouse and had to dab it off with a splash of iced water. A nearby waiter, noting this moment, couldn't help thinking of the full-breasted teacher in a comic manga that his teenaged son followed.
When she arrived back at her apartment, Myrna immediately plopped down to scan her newest proofs. Without looking at the translations, it appeared as if Han's concoctions were growing larger and more elaborate, in some cases requiring two-page spreads to capture their full glory. Tsuki was being less circumspect about gluttonously devouring each offering, and, more surprisingly, she was even displaying the effects of this ongoing gorging. By the end of Book Three, the girl sported a noticeable little belly, while her once-boyish face had grown more roundly feminine. This was pretty unusual for Japanese comics, she knew: few established heroines, in her experience, ever changed their appearance so markedly - at least for the long haul. There was a character in a tongue-in-cheek samurai series who would periodically grow fat after indulging in an extended binge, but this usually only lasted for a few panels. Looked as if Tsuki's growth was an intrinsic part of her character, though. As her attachment for Han grew, so did the young girlish glutton.
Curious, Myrna flipped through the fourth and fifth volume proofs. By the end of Book Four, Tsuki had a clear paunch - emphasized by the tight clothes she continued to wear. By Book Five, it had grown into a full-blown potbelly, with her hips widening to accommodate it. The girl's breasts no longer looked as outlandish, resting atop the rest of her fattening forefront. So was this what Griff meant when he said her boobs became less conspicuous over time? The manga heroine still looked cute, Myrna thought, and Han himself never once commented on her obvious growth. Rival Takashi - who at one point contemplated wooing the girl as a means of wheedling his way into the restaurant biz - was another matter, though: more than once, he was shown mentally making jokes at "piggy Tsuki"'s expense.
It took longer for her to work on the second through fifth volumes, in part because Myrna found herself stopping whenever she arrived at a new fully realized recipe. Each dish - spiced chicken roast, sweet pickled vegetables, charbroiled piglet - was so new and yet so instantly knowable that she'd pause, sit back and mentally digest each one. When she finished, it felt almost as if her podgy belly was itself as full as Tsuki's.
Too, instead of working at home evenings, she'd started eating out nights. Where in the past, Myrna would hold up in her apartment and do takeout when she had a fresh manuscript to adapt, she'd recently grown addicted to a neighborhood Chinese/Japanese buffet. Though none of the entrees there were half as divine as the dishes in Happy Chef Han, it was undeniably filling. She'd leave the restaurant, patting her jiggling belly, and mentally critique each plate that she'd eaten.
She had a little trouble keeping her jeans closed the day she brought Book Five's adaptation to Griff. If she'd thought about it, she would've remembered that one of the book's last panels had been of Tsuki's growing potbelly popping out of her pants, but she was too excited by the thought of seeing the editor again to make any connections. After three months of working on the first five volumes, Happy Chef Han was debuting in American bookstores that week. To celebrate, Griff took her out to lunch at her favorite buffet: they were there for most of the afternoon. Myrna tried every item twice - and in the case of something that she really loved, she'd fill a whole plate with it. The dishes she favored, her editor couldn't help noticing, were the ones Tsuki really went for in the manga. When they finally left the restaurant, Myrna's belly was even more roundly prominent.
She returned home with five more crudely translated volumes: she'd never been handed so much at once before, but perhaps prolonged negotiations with the Japanese publisher had created a backlog. After phoning in a family-sized sushi order, Myrna spent the night poring through the next five books. Midway into her delivered meal, she changed into a pair of sweats that no longer felt very loose on her bulging middle. Her clothes still fit, but like her fattening manga heroine, they hugged every added curve.
To be sure, even if she'd gone out and upped her sweats a size - from XL to 2X - they'd be tight again by the next day. That was how Tsuki wore them, after all. If anything, the manga femme's swelling appetite seemed to've become an improbable source of pride. By Volume Five, the girl was no longer hiding her consumption of Han's meals in the back room, and by Volume Seven, she was wearing outfits long past their expiration date. She'd hover behind Han, her looming belly squeezing out between her top and pants, and she'd encourage him to concoct bigger and bigger courses.
"As a restaurateur, you'll be feeding banquet-sized crowds," she'd say, "and it all needs to taste equally divine!"
Just five books into the series, Tsuki was fatter than any manga heroine Myrna'd seen. Her imposing belly pushed far ahead of her once daunting breasts; her hips and legs had kept up with her growth. Dressed in a sleeveless tee-shirt that had given up the ghost long before it reached her belly's apex and shorts that showed off her massive calves and dimpled knees, she seemed totally oblivious to her obese size.
The only one who ever commented on the change was Takashi, who by now wanted nothing to do with her. "Good riddance!" Myrna thought. When Han's rival, in one of his rare displays of tact, asked the already fat Tsuki if she worried about putting on weight, she replied between bites of banana fritter that she wanted to grow even fatter, to increase her capacity to consume. "Once Han finally creates his Ultimate Dish," she explained, "I'll be able to experience more of it than anybody." Pure, unrealistic comic book reasoning, and it immediately resonated with Myrna.
And so it went for the next five months: Myrna spending most of her days in her apartment, working on the continuing adventures of Happy Chef Han (here's Han beating Takashi in a competition among the restaurant staff; here's Han trouncing the World Sushi Master - an arrogant fool who dressed like a thug in a Tarantino movie - in a nationwide televised cooking contest; here's Han putting together a banquet feast at Tsuki's request only to be told that the main course was changed at the last minute - and here's Tsuki eagerly digging into the scrapped course all by herself). Whenever Griff phoned her (something that happened more often the further she got into this project), he always seemed to catch her with her mouth full, though she didn't always remember when she'd made the order.
Every night, however, she hit one of the area buffets, and that was always a memorable experience. Myrna's prodigious appetite had given her a reputation in the restaurant community. Though she regularly ate more than she could reasonably expect to have paid for, the super-sized diner's appreciation for every item was so sincere that the kitchen staff loved to see her waddling into the place.
By the time she'd finished her adaptation of the tenth volume, Myrna was a living ringer for Tsuki. All the months of mental meals - and of evening buffet binges - had put over three-hundred pounds onto her once-slight body. At 450 pounds, she looked every inch the girlish gourmand that her manga counterpart was. Her stomach pushed far ahead of her breasts and forced them to drape on both sides of her uppermost belly fold; it dropped within an inch of her deep knee dimples. Her once long and slender neck was lost behind her widened face and two more chins; her large eyes squinted from behind the top of her perpetually bulging cheeks. Though she worked to keep her 65-inch waist within her super-sized sweats, the waistband was constantly crawling underneath her belly hang; her tee-shirts might as well have been sports bras for all the good they did covering the top half of her belly.
Whenever she looked in the mirror, Myrna saw the woman she'd always been: a super-sized femme whose abundant love of good eating made her the perfect adaptor for Japan's foremost cooking series. Her job was paying even better than her previous assignment, which was good since she was eating out more these days. She never seemed to want for clothes, though much of it was revealingly casual. When she prepped herself to visit Griff's office, she found a white sleeveless dress that she immediately fell in love with: it rather resembled an outfit Tsuki had worn when she was a judge for the 18th International Noodle Competition in Book Nine.
Griff's sec/rec had a Styrofoam box full of fresh banana fritters (Han had made some in a dessert competition back in Volume Four) for her when she got to the office. "Have you lost weight?" Myrna asked after she'd been handed the super-sweet snack.
"Not hardly," the woman answered. "Think my husband would divorce me if I tried! Perhaps it's my new top?"
"Could be," Myrna said, now puzzled as to why she'd even made the weight loss comment in the first place. As far as she could remember, Mary Jo had always hovered in the mid-300's: skinny compared to Myrna, of course, but fat 'n' happy in relation to the rest of the world. As Myrna happily flipped open the box of fritters, the secretary returned to her afternoon box of Krispy Kremes.
"My best and brightest writer!" Griff effused, once she'd finished her snack and headed into his office. He always was so complimentary, Myrna thought, and was obviously attracted to her, but aside from their buffet meetings, the man had continued to keep his distance. "What's he waiting for?" she'd wondered on more than one occasion.
Griff's desk, surprisingly, was empty but for a single tall stack of Happy Chef Han material. Once Myrna had settled her wide rear onto an armless fat-friendly chair, he pulled a five-pound box of Godivas out of a drawer and handed it to her. "Something to tide you over until lunch arrives," he explained. "I figured that instead of taking you out to your favorite local restaurant, I'd have 'em bring it here."
"Keeping things business-like," she thought, although she had to admit her legs relished the idea of skipping a two city block walk to the restaurant just once. Lunch arrived before she finished her chocolates, so she put the remaining pound aside for afterwards. As Griff set the bags of still-warm food on top of his desk, Myrna felt her mouth watering.
While she happily dug into her first carton of pasta stuffed with green-powdered tea and shrimp, he described how the series had been doing. Though it'd been receiving glowing reviews among American aficionados, the first two volumes in the series hadn't exactly been flying off the bookstore shelves.
"We've got a strong cult following," Griff explained, "but it's up in the air as to whether it'll support a print edition in this country."
"Does this mean I'm off the series?" Myrna asked, worriedly taking a large fork of pasta for comfort.
"Not at all," Griff explain. "We also have a fairly successful on-line publishing concern, and we're thinking of publishing Happy Chef Han as our first web manga. When Renee Branch put out her first solo cookbook, it sold ten times better as an online book than it did in print.
"Your current rate per volume won't change," he reassured her. "If anything, it could go higher if we get enough online subscribers." He smiled as she pried open her third Styrofoam package. "I want to see you sticking with Tsuki and Han through thick and, well, thicker," he said with a grin, then he sat back in his chair to quietly watch her eat.
Myrna's lunch that afternoon proved the most she'd ever eaten in a single sitting - whenever she got close to finishing off the selection spread out in front of her, another delivery showed up at the office.
When she left, she was so stuffed and woozy, she almost forgot her manuscript, and it definitely took some will power to move her massively overfed self out of the building and into a taxi. As she sat in the back seat, quietly groaning to herself (yet also feeling that the discomfort she was experiencing was a small price to pay for all that good eating), she flipped through the artwork of Book Eleven. One chapter in, she saw Tsuki looking as dazed and stuporous as her. Seated at a large banquet table, a greasy coconut battered shrimp shakily held between two chopsticks, she had the look of a woman who'd obviously eaten many plates past her capacity.
"I can relate, girl," Myrna told the manga heroine, but as soon as the words left her lips, her over-full feeling left her. When her cab got close to her apartment building, she directed it instead to her favorite neighborhood buffet. By the time she rode home, another four inches had accumulated on her waistline, and she was up to the size of the Book Eleven 500-pound Tsuki.
Her thin white dress struggled in vain to keep her massive body from jouncing with every bump the taxicab hit. She had to call for the cabbie's help to get out of the back seat; on her own, all she wanted to do was sit back against the seat without disturbing the rock-hard core of solid gluttony within her. "This bending forward routine is harder than it looks," she thought ruefully. She gave her cabbie a good-sized tip for helping her toddle back to her apartment. Once she got inside, she headed to the freezer for a gallon of lime sherbet. "A palate cleanser," she thought, as she carried the carton, spoon and her rough manuscript to her well-worn futon.
Griff had only given her one volume's worth of material this time, but he promised to have another ready for her in a couple of days. The editor proved true to his word, showing up at her apartment on a late Friday afternoon with a manuscript in hand. While she would've thought his catching her at her most casual - cut-off jeans shorts, overwhelmed tank top, hair clipped in two pigtails - would've proved embarrassing, she was so glad to see him that she forgot to feel uncomfortable.
"Hope this isn't too presumptuous," he said, stepping around her through the doorway without miraculously coming into contact against her 72-inch waist. "But I knew I was gonna be in the neighborhood, and I thought I'd bring this by." He smiled and asked, "You have any plans for dinner?"
If she had, she wouldn't have admitted it.
"As long as you're not thinking any place too fancy," she stated. Her one good dress, a size 52, was more than a little tight around the tummy.
"You kidding?" Griff said. "I know a country style barbecue where you'd fit in as you are!"
"Country barbecue?" Myrna repeated. She tried to remember the last time she'd even eaten at an American style restaurant and came up short.
"Gotta get you in tune with the next few books," Griff said. "Volumes twelve through sixteen center on an international competition of western cuisine. Tsuki enters Han to broaden his cooking skills, and though he struggles with the contest at first, he soon brings his own spin on things."
"Of course he does," Myrna said, as she laboriously rose from her futon and waddled into the bedroom to change her top. She couldn't find one that'd fully cover her swelling belly, though, so she settled for a 7X dark red tank top that stopped short two inches from her cut-offs. A quick dab of makeup on her full cheeks and lips, and she was ready.
Griff's restaurant, Dave's Smoke House, proved to be packed with would-be urban cowboys and girls of all shapes and sizes (though none were as large as Myrna, of course). The editor had reserved a room in the back, however, where he recommended that she first try the Smoke House's family variety platter.
"I've been eating so much Japanese and Chinese lately that it's almost like I'm dining in another country today," Myrna noted as she quickly picked through her first basket of butter-slathered Texas toast. The tantalizing smoke was definitely piquing her ever-eager appetite, though. She finished off the family sampler in record time and followed with two racks of spare ribs, a selection of barbecue sandwiches, two servings of pork chops and enough twice baked potatoes to go with each serving.
Griff, after fastidiously dining on a barbecue chicken breast and some slaw, simply sat and basked in her company. Away from the office, he seemed almost as introverted as her - which suited Myrna just fine.
When they left, she was thankful she'd chosen a dark tank top - it hid a multitude of sauces, she knew. She was once more beyond stuffed, a feeling that she felt proud in achieving, but she didn't turn Griff down when he offered to take her out for a large banana split. Took her some time to finish it, but she managed: the ice cream seriously tasted scrumptious and she was able to prolong her time with Griff.
That night marked a change in both their business relationship and Myrna's relationship with food. As she continued to work on succeeding volumes (first item Han cooked for the International Cooking Competition turned out to be barbecued ribs), her editor began showing up at week's end to bring the next manuscript and take her out for dinner - where she constantly worked to surpass her previous Friday feasts. Because the continuity over five books only covered five days in story time, fat Tsuki didn't add much weight to her super-sized self, though her appreciation for a wider variety of prepared dishes definitely expanded - as did Myrna's. The days when she'd be satisfied by a simple plate of mac-&-cheese were no longer even a part of her memory.
At Volume Seventeen's end, though, our heroine - inspired by the world of new foods she'd discovered during the competition - left on a two-month cook's tour of great European restaurants. Though the series' focus remained in Tokyo, occasionally Han would receive rapturous letters from Tsuki, describing each new dish she'd tasted in mouth-watering detail. If the competition in Book Eighteen seemed slighter than usual (Han and Takashi dueling over the optimal way to prepare flounder), Tsuki's letters were fun to work on. She returned at book's end, sixty pounds heavier than when she'd left with a boundless appetite for French and Italian cuisine added to her gourmand's repertoire.
Myrna was glad to see the even fatter character once more grabbing a more active role in the series. At 604 pounds, she appreciated the fact that manga-ka Shinji remained so visually drawn to a woman close to Myrna's size. Though five times larger than the average manga femme, Tsuki still looked attractive and sexy. She'd taken to wearing white coveralls with the restaurant's logo emblazoned on her massive right mam and a sports bra underneath for breast support. Shinji loved to draw Tsuki taking up two-thirds of the frame, animatedly waving her huge overflowing arms as she spoke, while Han or Takashi or a secondary character struggled to hold onto their space within the panel.
As for Han's nasty rival Takashi, he was forced to vamoose in Volume Twenty when he was heard derogatorily referring to Tsuki as "Lady Konishiki," a reference to the largest recorded sumo wrestling champion. "That skinny li'l boy," Tsuki sneered, for at this point the girlish glutton outweighed the 600-plus pound sumo champ by a hundred pounds. "I'm insulted!" At which point, she pushed the stunned Takashi out of the kitchen with her gargantuan belly, taking control of the family restaurant for good.
When Happy Chef Han debuted as a web comic, its cult audience cheerfully followed. Within a month of its premiere, it was selling better on a chapter by chapter basis than it had in print: good news for Myrna, who by now wanted to keep doing Han in perpetuity. Griff had given her a log-in and password to check the site for free, of course. First time she logged on, her monitor momentarily glowed with a blinding green light - for a moment, she thought some add-on had overloaded her monitor - but the story quickly came onscreen. And though she was a bit of a print hound, she had to admit that reading the manga on a monitor made it some to life for her in a whole different way. When she read Tsuki's dialog, it was almost as if she could hear her own voice speaking the words through her PC's tiny speakers; Han's voice "sounded" remarkably like Griff's.
The day she finished working on Volume Twenty, Myrna received a surprise phone call from her editor.
"Shinji-san is visiting the city," he told her, "and we're having a small reception at the end of the week. Of course, you're invited."
How could she say no? She'd been living Happy Chef Han for almost two years now and was eager to meet the man who'd breathed so much vibrant life into Tsuki. There was just one hang-up: at her current size (744 pounds), there was no way she could just toddle down to the plus-size shop and pick a nice new dress that would fit her. Disconsolately picking at her second box of sweet and sour chicken, she thought about calling Griff back and canceling when she heard a knock at the door.
"Be there in three minutes," she said speaking into the intercom to the right of her keyboard (at her size, it typically took that long to rise from her chair and make her way across the room to the door). When she got to the door, she saw a middle-aged delivery man carrying a large box with the company name of Ample Stuffing in the return address corner. He stood there a moment to take in her great globular body, encased in her usual mega-sized sports bra and cut-offs, then he grinned and handed her the package. Only other time she'd seen a man eye her so appreciatively had been when she'd recently caught Griff off-guard.
"Worth the wait," he smiled, and he tipped his cap and turned to leave without even waiting for a tip. On the back of his uniform were the initials "AS," she noticed. So Ample Stuffing did its own deliveries?
She carried her package back to the futon, then took a quick break to finish off a plate of sweet and sour chicken before seeing what was in it. It turned out to be a short tropical smock dress with a red hibiscus pattern; she seemed to remember Tsuki wearing something like this on Volume Twenty's back cover. Amazingly, the dress fit her ninety-plus waistline, though when she was seated, her lowermost belly apron came close to peaking out beneath its tasseled hemline. She'd just have to be careful when she was wearing it in public, she decided.
She did her hair in two Princess Leia buns, lightly made up her face and examined the results. She saw a mountainous fat woman in a bright party dress, her cavernous cleavage and great belly looming ahead of her. Her forefront was so overwhelming that even when she was standing, it looked like she was sitting back and resting. At her weight and size, to be sure, sitting back and resting was Myrna's default position, though, like Tsuki, she was much more mobile than she might appear at first glance.
She had to admit she didn't look half bad for a super-fat chick. Hopefully, Griff wouldn't disagree.
One look at the editor's face when he arrived at her apartment put any anxiety on that account to rest. "Got my package," he said, grasping her fat hands and coming up against her unavoidable belly in the process. "You look wonderful in it," he pronounced.
She took several moments to swallow her mouthful of almond tofu, then backed away from the door to let him in. "Why didn't you tell me that you'd ordered it when we were on the phone earlier?" she asked. "Here I was needlessly worrying about having nothing to wear . . ."
"Wanted to surprise you," Griff answered, "and it looks like I have. Ready to meet our esteemed manga-ka?"
"Could we stop for a little takeout on the way?" she replied.
Of course, they could.
Instead of driving to the office first, Griff headed for the hotel where Keiko Shinji was staying. Myrna waited in the passenger seat, concentrating on a carton of Su Yung Shan Yu, while he dashed up to retrieve the cartoonist. She was into her second carton when he returned with Shinji, who was chattering animatedly as the two men walked to Griff's car. Soon as he got in the back seat and got his first look at Myrna, though, the manga artist grew silent.
"This is Myrna, the talented young woman who's been adapting your story into English," Griff explained, as Myrna strained to catch the artist's reflection in the rear view.
"I see," Shinji said simply before falling silent for the rest of the trip. Though Myrna was too cramped in her seat to be able to turn around and see him, she felt the cartoonist's eyes on her the whole way. It wasn't until they arrived at the office parking garage that they got to meet face-to-face. The manga artist was medium build and round-faced, with rimless eyeglasses perched on top of his wide nose. As he watched Myrna disembark with some help from Griff, the smile on his face grew bigger and bigger. He adjusted his glasses with his right hand, and she took note of the drawing calluses on his fingers. "You're my Tsuki," he said, when the two were formally introduced. The declaration was so heartfelt and charming that Myrna felt herself blush within her dress.
"No," Griff corrected with a chuckle, "she's my Tsuki!"
After hearing that little pronouncement, Myrna barely remembered the rest of the night. That there was a wonderful spread of sushi at the party, she knew from the taste of wasabi still lingering on her fulsome lips. She had a vague recollection of talking with a large group of people. One of them, the dark-haired spouse of another of the company's editors, proved so fat that she made Myrna look like a manga waif; though she couldn't remember the woman's name exactly (Reenie, perhaps?), she did recall the woman had written several cookbooks for the publishing company. Clearly, she appreciated good cooking as much as Myrna.
The next day, Griff brought Shinji over to his writer's apartment to see how Myrna lived. Though she was dressed way more casually than she would've liked - in a much abused faded sundress that she should've tossed out at least one "X" ago - the artist pretty much kept focused on her surroundings. "Tsuki," he explained in his halting but still clear English, "lives in an apartment above the restaurant. But we've never been inside it. Now that Han's proposed, we need to more closely see how Tsuki lives."
"Han's proposed?" Myrna gasped. It felt like she was hearing happy news about a friend she'd known since childhood.
"In Book Twenty-Five," Griff said, as the artist did a quick walk around her living room. She didn't have a lot of furniture beyond her futon, some TV trays with takeout cartons crowded on them, her work table and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves - at her size, Myrna needed plenty of space just to maneuver herself - so she didn't much bother with a lot of extras. "Mind if I show Shinji the kitchen?" he asked.
"Go ahead," she said, settling back onto her futon, after pulling about twenty pages of galley proofs out from under her massive right thigh. "Thankfully, all of the dishes are put away!" Idly noshing on a plate of sugar cookies, she felt an odd sense of pride. To have Keiko Shinji looking to her for visual cues was particularly flattering. So many times in the past few months, she'd felt like she was following Tsuki in the way she ate, dressed and interacted with the world around her. Now, she was serving as a model for this famous manga heroine.
As the artist walked around, mentally capturing the details of her living space, a question occurred to Myrna.
"A wedding's in Han and Tsuki's future?" she thought out loud. "Sounds like an obvious climax to the whole series."
"It is," Shinji replied, as he returned into the room. "And Han's Ultimate Dish will be served at the wedding feast." She would've felt disheartened by the news that her time with Han and Tsuki would eventually end, but the artist followed this announcement with a request. "May I request one more favor of you?" he asked. "Would you mind if I did some sketches of you?"
That night, Griff drove them both to her favorite buffet where Myrna ate past fullness and the artist sketched her as she gourmandized. As one point, when he showed her a sketch, she could've sworn that he'd made her face fatter than it really was - but that impression quickly vanished. She was too focused on the fresh platters Griff was carrying over to her table to really worry about it. When the two men helped her navigate her ultra-stuffed 850-plus pound body out of the restaurant, she saw from a reflection in a mirror behind the cash register that Shinji had gotten her right, after all.
The cartoonist flew back to Japan the next day; after his departure, Griff returned to her apartment to ask Myrna to be his wife.
She married Griff a week after handing in the climactic volume of Happy Chef Han. And though her assignment was clearly over, her Free-Lancer's Desperation was nowhere to be felt. Half-ton Tsuki married Han in the restaurant they would own and run together - and, while Shinji remained coy about the actual ingredients in Han's Ultimate Dish, Myrna knew exactly what it tasted like.
It was, she knew, every meal that seduced you into eating it all and wanting more; it was cooking as the crowning expression of love and human creativity. It was the sight of Griff bringing her another full plate; it was Keiko Shinji capturing the glow on her well-chinned face as she lovingly savored every bite. It was embodied in her own massive Tsuki-sized form: the heavily breathing symbol of a lifetime of happy foodee living.
Seated on her cramped full loveseat futon the morning of her wedding, a half-finished plate of green tea cheesecake resting on a nearby folding tray, Myrna leaned back and reflected on the life ahead of her. For now, she was going to hold off on any further manga adaptations, at least until after she'd fully settled into married life. From his description, Griff's place had been designed with a super-super-sized tenant like her in mind - no stairs, extra-wide doorways, a Tsuki-sized walk-in shower with a bench - as if the man had always known that he'd spend his life with a woman like her. Perhaps he had, she reflected, but he sure took his own sweet time to make a move on her . . .
But why fret about the irretrievable past? What mattered was her present role as a bride-to-be. She smiled and patted her enormous forefront. She'd long ago given up trying to keep her belly in her cut-offs: whenever she rose to waddle across her apartment, her shorts slipped beneath her belly apron. In her futon, her freed forefront came within scant inches of the carpet; if she leaned forward just a little, it scraped against the carpet fibers, so to keep from being bothered, Myrna'd placed a plastic chair mat in front of the futon. Occasionally, she felt a small chill when her apron touched plastic, but that was rather soothing, actually.
She could never remember a time when she hadn't been hugely fat - and a lover of good eating. It'd led to her getting the Happy Chef Han assignment. And though she'd initially had her doubts about the series' skinny li'l big-boobed heroine, over the space of twenty books, the manga girl had grown to match Myrna in size and appetite. According to Griff, the tsuper-tsized Tsuki had a hard-core following in her native Japan - and a decent coterie of fans among American manga heads, too. Myrna liked to hope that in America, at least, her adaptations had helped seal the character's popularity.
A knock interrupted her reveries, and there was Griff, letting himself into the apartment, a large hanging clothing bag draped over one arm. The bag contained, Myrna knew, her wedding dress: a twin to the modern wedding dress worn by Tsuki in Han's climactic nuptial.
Swallowing the last of her cheesecake, she shifted forward and slowly rose to meet the groom. She took a few seconds to catch her breath, then held her great fat arms out for Griff. After carefully hanging up her dress, he came to her. She loved the feel of his body as it pressed against her draping uncovered forefront, even loved the feel of his belt buckle poking into her well-fed flesh.
"Got some takeout in the car," Griff finally said, once they'd separated and Myrna had, "but I didn't want to spill any of it on the dress. Plus, Shinji sent us a little something for a wedding present." He stepped out into the hallway and returned with a large sturdy mailing tube. "It's a wedding portrait that I think you'll like." As she settled herself back onto her futon, her fiancée tapped the rolled-up picture from its tube and unfurled it for her.
It was, she saw, a pen rendering of Han and Tsuki, several years after their wedding. The former was standing in the picture in his usual chef's garb, holding a large tray filled with steaming fresh entrees; his wife was seated on a frameless futon, tipping a plate toward her wide-open mouth. Her uncovered abdomen had grown so far ahead of her that it passed the soles of her fat bare feet. Atop, her breasts no longer looked outlandish, though you knew that without a specially made sports top holding them up, they'd go their separate ways toward either side of her careening two-fold belly. A few suggestions of frayed cloth poking out between her hips and midriff indicated that she was also wearing cut-offs, though most of her shorts were lost from view. Her tiny eyes glinted with what could only be gluttonous appreciation.
"He gave Han a soul patch," Myrna noticed, delighted by the artist's addition. It made the manga chef look more mature, she thought.
"Was thinking of shaving mine off for the wedding," Griff said, as he carefully rolled the drawing back up and replaced it in the tube.
"You'd better not!" she said, half jokingly. She wondered how much the mega-sized Tsuki weighed in that illustration - and how long it had taken her to get to that size. She had a feeling that she'd learn the answer to at least one of those questions in time . . .
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