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The Female Groom (花婿、それは女!!, Hanamuko, sona wa onna!!?), or "My Groom is a Girl!!" in the Project ILM Scanlation, is the 155th chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.

Summary[]

Still determined to find a groom, Kurama sets her sights on a new candidate: Ryūnosuke Fujinami!

Plot Overview[]

Aboard her spaceship, Kurama is looking over a series of slides of potential groom candidates, and rejecting all of them... until the very last one: Ryunosuke Fujinami. Judging "him" to pass the looks criteria, she sends her karasutengu to test Ryunosuke's character. They find Tomobiki High's resident bifauxnen returning home from a public bath, and stage tests of strength, courage and kindness for her, which she unknowingly passes with flying colors. That evening, two karasutengu come to the Fujinami's shop/home in Tomobiki High and reveal the tests, before asking her to become Kurama's husband. She promptly throws them out on their ears. Undaunted, Kurama has her minions attack Class 2-4 with sleeping gas and bring Ryunosuke to her ship the next morning, though they inadvertently bring Ataru and Lum along with them. Whilst Ataru distracts Kurama, refusing to accept her refusal of his "proposal", Ryunosuke explains to the karasutengu that she's a girl. They promptly whip out a sex-changer raygun to fix that problem, but she breaks it and leaves.

Characters in Order of Appearance[]

Trivia[]

  • Kurama returns, after having made her last appearance in Chapter 138. That chapter saw her discover the true origins behind the law compelling her to marry a man who had kissed her awake, resulting in her annulling the law and declaring her intent to find a man worthy of being her suitor under her standards.
  • Ryūnosuke makes her debut returning from a public bath house. Known in Japanese as sentō, public bath houses have a history dating back centuries, with records in the Konjaku monogatari suggesting that sentō could be seen in Kyoto during the Heian period (794–1185), whilst official documentation from the Kamakura period (1185–1333) contains references to yusen, the fee one pays to enter a sentō. The bathhouses likely evolved from a combination of the growing influence of Buddhism in the 6th century - Buddhist temples often built steam baths on their premises for ritual cleansing, and would open these bath to the public in the name of hygiene and compassion - and the difficulty of creating small-scale bathing facilities in Japan's often rocky soil and mountainous terrain. The sentō truly came into their own during the Edo period (1603–1868), with documents noting the construction of the first sentō in Edo city (modern-day Tokyo) in 1591, and exploded in popularity during the post-World War II construction and population booms, when it was still very expensive to create individual baths for houses. Sadly, the sentō would wane in popularity over the tail-end of the 1900s and into the 2000s as new technologies made installing home plumbing cheaper and more affordable. Traditionally, sentō were divided into two types; steam baths called furoya and large communal tubs called yuya - ironically, the yuya style came to dominate the modern sentō, but the furoya became the dominant terminology.
  • Ryūnosuke grouses about being wrongfully assumed to be a boy and being ordered to use the men's side at the sentō. Ironically, during the Edo period, mixed bathing was common for sentō, especially in the Kansai region, and many sentō would hire female assistants - called yuna - specifically to hep male customers bathe. The Edo shogunate disapproved of both elements, and issued formal declarations against mixed bathing in sentō as well as restrictions on the number of yuna that a sentō could employ, but sentō would often ignore these rules. It wouldn't be until the Meiji era (1868–1912) when the new government, in the face of social critique from offended Western allies, would formally crack down on both customs and strictly enforced gender-segregation amongst the bathers.
  • Similarly to how Ataru was appalled by the idea that Ryūnosuke and Ran might become a couple in Chapter 151, Lum can be seen declaring that Kurama's desire to wed Ryūnosuke "isn't right".
  • The karasutengu's plan to use a sex-change gun to turn Ryūnosuke into a boy is an indirect reference to Kurama's debut in Chapter 16, where she tried and failed to correct Ataru's out-of-control libido by increasing his mental femininity.
  • The sex-change pistol is stylized to resemble a Mars symbol; originating from horoscopes and alchemy, this symbol became the universal symbol for the male gender, contrasted by the Venus symbol for females, due to the work of the world-renowned Swedish biologist and physician Carl Linnaeus.
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