The Job of a Service Committee Member: hentai, hilarity and outstanding art

This article discusses NSFW topics, and includes images that are NSFW for anywhere except the Rice Digital offices!

As we talked about when we looked at Yuuki Iwasaki’s book Viewer Discretion Advised, one of the great things about hentai in general is that there’s absolutely nothing limiting it to being pure “pornography”. In fact, in contrast to a lot of today’s western porn, hentai with appeal elements other than the sexually explicit content appears to be thriving — and The Job of a Service Committee Member, a FAKKU!-published book by Kiyoshiro Inoue, is an absolutely fantastic example.

In contrast with the blend of horror and hentai provided by Viewer Discretion Advised, however, The Job of a Service Committee Member instead provides a highly entertaining blend of explicit sexual content, the darker themes of giving in to our baser urges, and genuinely hilarious comedy. Much of the volume as a whole acknowledges that sexual acts are inherently ridiculous in one way or another — and by juxtaposing this absurdity with what should be relatively “normal” situations, there’s great potential for both humour and bleakness.

Like many of FAKKU!’s other books of collected hentai works, The Job of a Service Committee Member is more of a collection of short stories than a single coherent manga — though to get things rolling, the first three stories in the book are all fairly substantial, related directly to one another, and involve many of the same characters.

The concept behind these initial three stories is to provide a twist on the idea of day duty and extracurricular clubs in Japanese schools.

In regular society, “day duty” typically involves a rota of individuals performing everyday tasks around the classroom and the school in general — making sure things are neat and tidy, cleaning up and ensuring that by the end of the day the school is left in a state that teachers and students alike would wish to find it the following morning.

In the school that forms the backdrop to the first three stories in The Job of a Service Committee Member, however, those on day duty have rather different responsibilities. Since the school has banned any form of “illicit” sexual relations on the grounds that “school isn’t a place for dates”, they have instead implemented a system where male teachers and students feeling sexually frustrated are able to make use of the girls on day duty to satisfy their urges, whenever and however they see fit.

This is, of course, absurd, and we’ll come back to the absurd angle in a moment, but it also makes another humorous point about the depiction of gender when it comes to sexuality. The boys and male teachers in these stories are all depicted as almost monstrous in nature, giving in to their baser urges like absolute beasts, whereas the girls all take a fairly rational, pragmatic approach, shrugging it all off as an inevitability.

One could argue that this is a somewhat cynical outlook on life in broader society: men are monsters, women are inevitably abused by them. Of course it’s not that simple, but anyone who’s had an argument on Twitter in the last ten years will doubtless attest that some people very much appear to believe this to be the case.

But back to that absurdity element, because this is where the majority of The Job of a Service Committee’s humour comes from: the aforementioned juxtaposition between utterly obscene sexual acts performed in public, and relatively “normal” behaviour for teenagers.

In one scene, a rather bored-looking girl is getting railed by a male student, and looking at her phone while this is all happening; in the next frames, she is being admonished by a passing teacher for “playing with her phone in school” — while simultaneously her partner is reaching a thunderous climax inside her.

In another, the student council president, attempting to address the entire student body for her inauguration, finds herself drilled by the new English teacher Dick McNamara, who has a legendarily enormous penis — and does her absolute best to continue her speech while being turned inside out.

In another scene, the school’s top athlete trains by being chased by horny men, knowing that when she inevitably gets caught, she’ll be gangbanged for the umpteenth time that day.

And in another still, a girl on day duty in the midst of performing her duties is asked by a teacher to read out a passage from the text they’re studying, and finds herself worrying that she’ll “disturb” the class if she allows herself to get too distracted by what is unfolding in her nether regions.

They’re like scenes from the darker end of early 2000s sketch comedy — I could see situations like these unfolding in shows like Chris Morris’ Jam, for example. You know watching what is happening is somehow “wrong” and desperately inappropriate, and yet you can’t help laughing at how utterly ridiculous it all is. Because it is hilarious; there’s absolutely no doubt there, so long as you’re on board with laughing at what can easily also be interpreted as seriously dark and actually quite tragic in many ways.

Inoue knows that the entire situation is funny, too, and enhances the humour with plenty of subtler touches. The school features a “beautification committee”, whose job it is to clean up the gobs of sperm that litter the hallways — all the while complaining about how much it stinks, obviously. On more than one occasion, a character slips over on a spunky floor. And the exceedingly humble, almost embarrassed “thank yous” delivered by those who have taken advantage of the services provided by those on duty is completely at odds with their hulking, monstrous appearances.

After the initial story about day duty, there’s then a two-part series of stories about the titular “Service Committee”, an extracurricular club who are obliged to go around the other school clubs and provide a similar service out of regular school hours — and indeed for the teachers on night duty also.

Once again, the hilariously absurd yet oddly bleak angle is there, with a particular highlight being the deliberately gorilla-esque appearance and rather primal sexual behaviour of PE teacher Goriyama, coupled with his oddly polite and considerate tone when addressing the Service Committee members who are helping out the teachers.

And then, of course, there’s the vaguely romantic angle of the Service Committee member who is in love with her teacher — but said teacher is hesitant to take advantage of her services due to his unusually shaped penis. He doesn’t want to hurt her, after all — but what small price to pay is a tsuchinoko-shaped cock if you get a chance to be intimate with the one you love?

After these initial three stories are… resolved, so to speak, the second half of the volume consists of some relatively more down-to-earth hentai stories, though most of them continue with the absurd and “inappropriate” angles to varying degrees. There’s a student seducing her tutor; a jealous girl trying to have her way with her now-married childhood friend; a manga club who want to start drawing porn but end up banging too much for “reference material” to ever get anything done; a baseball team who spend too much time shagging their overly enthusiastic manager to be in any state to compete in a tournament, and plenty more besides.

All these stories have one thing in common: the art is absolutely astonishing. As the sex scenes build in intensity, the pages become absolutely packed with detail, not just in terms of the explicit angle, but in terms of the sense of raw “energy” that is being depicted. Despite being static black and white images, the best scenes in The Job of a Service Committee Member are filled with dynamism, life and noise. So much noise. If this was a video, you’d be turning the volume down lest your neighbours start hammering on the wall for you to keep it down.

It’s kind of interesting, because between the humorous angle, how darkly thought-provoking some of these stories can actually be if you read a little deeper into the situations, and the sheer level of detail and energy in the artwork, I feel like the actual “sexy” angle of The Job of a Service Committee Member is almost played down in importance compared to everything else.

Make no mistake, this is an extremely explicit, pornographic volume that consists primarily of excuses to get a variety of people bumping uglies in a wide range of different scenarios — and yet, much as Viewer Discretion Advised felt more like a horror book that just happened to include a lot of sex, so too does The Job of a Service Committee Member feel like a dark comedy manga where a lot of the humour is themed around explicitly depicted sexual activity, and an exploration of what life would really be like if men in particular were given complete sexual dominance over society.

To put it another way, if I was after some hentai to provide a quick, cheap thrill and an excuse to bash one out at short notice, I probably wouldn’t pick The Job of a Service Committee Member as my first choice. And yet I’d absolutely describe it as legitimately one of my favourite hentai manga of all time. It’s that beautifully presented, it’s that amusing and it’s that creative that I can’t help but love it. If you want to add just one FAKKU! book to your collection, this is a great one to pick.

The Job of a Service Committee Member can be bought from Amazon or direct from FAKKU! The individual stories are also for sale on FAKKU!

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