Saint Tail, vols. 1 and 2, written and illustrated by Megumi Tachikawa. Published in Japan by Kodansha Ltd., 1995. Translated by Anita Sengupta. Tokyopop, 2001.
I was unable to complete this in time for Easter Sunday, but, fortunately, Easter is fifty days. So here we go.
The kaitou, or thief, is such a popular figure in Japanese pop culture that kaitou may be considered its own genre. This is probably thanks in large part to the wildly successful Lupin III franchise, which is written to be a sequel of sorts to the stories of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc. Magical girls had crossed paths with gentleman thieves in franchises such as Minky Momo and Sailor Moon, so a magical girl who is also a gentleman thief—or lady thief, rather—is an obvious next step.
What is perhaps not so obvious is that the magical girl lady thief should be a devout Catholic who steals in service to God, but such is the premise of Saint Tail, and the basic concept of Saint Tail also got recycled, but given a hard twist, in Phantom Thief Jeanne, which we’ll discuss in a later post.
Saint Tail, a manga by Megumi Tachikawa, originally appeared in 1995 in Nakayoshi, a ’zine that has published a lot of magical girl titles. This was during the early post-Sailor Moon era, in which the magical girl genre had received new vigor and taken a new direction. Saint Tail belongs to the same cluster of works that includes titles such as Wedding Peach, Corrector Yui, Tokyo Mew Mew, and Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, many of which have subsequently become obscure. Although Sailor Moon might be an obvious guess as to influence, Tachikawa-sensei indicates that her biggest influences were the kaitou franchises Lupin III and Cat’s Eye (both available on Crunchyroll), and the Studio Pierrot magical girl series Magical Emi.
Saint Tail was published in English, in a flopped format, by Tokyopop. Tokyopop is now a shell of its former self, so the title remains out of print. My experience is that copies are difficult to locate and acquire. The anime adaptation, produced by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, was subbed in English, but it has also become hard to find. I have occasionally gone looking for it, but the only copies I have located were being sold at outrageous collectors’ prices. Attempts to acquire it through interlibrary loan have so far failed.
For these reasons, my knowledge of Saint Tail is in bits and pieces, so this essay should not be taken as a full review. Call it a pseudo-review if you like. Still, it is my understanding that Saint Tail hews closely to its formula and does not present any shocking twists, so I expect that most of what I say here would be the same even if I had access to the whole thing.
The story stars Meimi Haneoka, a fourteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl. Her father is a magician, and her mother is a reformed thief-turned-housewife. Having mastered the skills of both her parents’ professions, Meimi has become the phantom thief Saint Tail, who uses magic tricks to aid her thievery.
This makes her unique among magical girls, in that she supposedly uses stage magic. Nonetheless, we are given no details about how she performs her tricks, and some of them are elaborate enough that in real life they would require extensive planning ahead of time. So the excuse that she is an illusionist is merely a handwave. She pulls gigantic balloons out of nowhere that enable her to fly, she throws playing cards like shuriken, she creates illusory doubles of herself, she makes objects levitate, and, of course, she transforms—and she does it all on the spur of the moment with no need to set up mirrors or anything.
Almost the entire cast of characters is Catholic. Meimi is assisted by her best friend Seira, a “nun-in-training” (more on that in a moment). As a nun, it is Seira’s duty to hear confessions after school in the nearby church, where the townspeople often pour out their hearts to her, usually about precious items that have been stolen from them. Seira then calls on Meimi to transform into Saint Tail and recover said items.
Although Saint Tail works to return valuables to their rightful owners, the police view her as a criminal, and it’s hard to blame them, since even if she is not guilty of theft strictly speaking, she is certain guilty of breaking and entering, as she smashes everything from windows to security systems. Her own classmate, the fourteen-year-old boy Asuka Jr., who aspires to be a great detective, implausibly gets permission from the mayor to do whatever it takes to catch Saint Tail. A pleasant little love triangle develops over the course of the story: Asuka Jr. finds himself falling for Saint Tail, and Meimi finds herself falling for Asuka Jr. To keep the tension going, Asuka is also inexplicably a chick magnet, so Meimi has to deal with jealousy when rivals appear.
Of course, Asuka doesn’t realize that Meimi is the thief who stole his heart, and she’s frustrated with his cluelessness, so while they’re at school together, the two of them bicker like Ranma and Akane. They possibly hold the record as the most quarrelsome couple from a magical girl title (I’m trying to break that record with Jake and the Dynamo, but we’ll see).
Saint Tail is first and foremost a love story, so anyone hoping for an elaborate heist caper will be disappointed. Tachikawa-sensei does not give us any details about how Saint Tail pulls off her seemingly impossible stunts. The real focus is on the developing romance between the detective and the thief. Both the magic and the thievery are treated whimsically.
Saint Tail’s religiosity is the product of what we might call “benign ignorance.” Christian imagery is pervasive, most of the central characters are Catholic, and Meimi and Seira appear to be devout. At the same time, creator Tachikawa-sensei didn’t really know anything about the religion from which she was borrowing, and after being called out (by an actual nun) for her mistakes, she freely admitted to readers that she didn’t do her research. This is common in anime and manga: TVTropes has an entire page called “Nuns are Mikos,” which argues plausibly that writers of manga and anime tend to get Catholic nuns confused with Shinto shrine maidens. Such is apparently the case with Seira, who wears an ordinary school uniform during the day and then changes into a habit after school to work at the church doing some vague sort of nun duty, which is inaccurately depicted as including hearing confessions.
Anyway, in real life, the sacrament of confession as practiced in the Catholic Church actually requires a priest. Confessing to laity when in danger of death and a priest is unavailable is a known practice historically, and making confession to a lay monk acting as a spiritual director is also not unheard-of, but the practice of pouring your heart out to some random teenage girl in a church is unattested outside of manga and anime. Seira’s wearing a regular uniform to school and then switching into a habit afterwards does indeed, as TVTropes suggests, resemble how a teenage girl might work a part-time job as a miko.
However, even if their creator knew zilch about the Christian religion, Meimi and Seira are apparently sincere in their faith. We often see the two of them with their hands clasped in prayer. Meimi asks Seira to pray for her. She sometimes begins her missions by kneeling in front of the altar, and even her catch phrase, with which she initiates her transformation, is a prayer. Variously translated, it is to the effect of, “Lord, forgive me for my deceptions,” though the English manga has the more playful, “Lord, forgive me for the tricks up my sleeves.” She apparently believes herself to be an agent of God and proclaims, “As long as the Lord is with me, Saint Tail can do anything!”
The manga is clearly not interested in deeply exploring the moral ambiguity of its premise. When Asuka Jr first appears, he declares that Saint Tail’s thefts are a “crime against God,” which suggests that he is a rigid moralist. However, in other contexts, he admits that he is aware that Saint Tail is stealing to help people, and he apparently admires her. It quickly becomes obvious that his attempts to catch her come from a mixture of infatuation and personal pride rather than a sense of justice. For her part, in spite of initiating her missions with a prayer for forgiveness, Meimi clearly views herself as an agent of God, and Seira apparently agrees: when people complain to Seira in the confessional, she assures them that God will help them—and then she dispatches Saint Tail to make it happen. Even Asuka’s inability to catch her, Meimi attributes to God: when he fails yet again to seize her during one of her capers, she proclaims, “As long as I have God’s protection, nothing is impossible for Saint Tail!”
Saint Tail is like snuggling into a warm blanket. It is a cozy and undemanding series, but finds a good balance, being sweet without being cloying. The artwork is not great, and it arguably misses some opportunities by refraining from giving any clever details about how Saint Tail accomplishes her heists or dealing with the morality of her peculiar style of vigilante justice. But it does work well as a cute love story with an amusing couple and some light action-adventure.
Phantom Thief Jeanne, its immediate successor, is also primarily a love story, but a much moodier, more tumultuous one, and it can be interpreted as taking aim at the questionable ethics of religiously motivated theft that Saint Tail glosses over. But we’ll get to that in another essay.
