Chobits

Hideki Motosuwa, a student from the countryside retaking his university entrance examinations, finds a persocom — a humanoid personal computer — left by rubbish bins. She has no operating system, no stored data, and can initially say only one word.

He names her Chi, and the series follows her development alongside his increasing uncertainty about what she actually is.

He finds a computer in the shape of a girl, with nothing on it, and has to decide what that makes her.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Persocoms are ubiquitous, legal, owned, and treated as appliances, and the series repeatedly puts characters in situations where that framing becomes difficult to maintain.

The philosophical material is more serious than the premise suggests. Several subplots concern people whose primary relationship is with a machine, and the series declines to mock any of them.

The most affecting material concerns people for whom a persocom is easier than a person: a widower, a teacher in an unhappy marriage, a boy who cannot speak to women.

The series treats this with real sympathy and also refuses to pretend it is adequate, which is a difficult balance that it mostly holds.

The premise involves an adult man acquiring a compliant female-shaped possession, and the series is aware of this without fully escaping it.

There is a substantial amount of fan service, including sequences involving a character with a child's body, and readers should expect material that sits badly against the book's serious questions.

She learns language, work, money and eventually something like preference, and the series tracks each stage carefully.

Her acquisition of the capacity to want something for herself is the narrative's actual arc, and it is handled with more patience than the surrounding romance. The stages are also legible in her speech, which moves from single words to functional sentences to something with an identifiable voice.

Elongated figures, elaborate costume, ornamental page layouts and a strong use of white space — the group's house style at its most decorative.

Chi's outfits are a significant part of the series' visual identity, and the drawing is among CLAMP's most polished. The persocom ear units are a good piece of design work, making the machines instantly readable as machines without disrupting the human silhouette.

Interleaved through the series is a children's story about a city of people without hearts, which functions as commentary and eventually as plot.

The device is elegant. It delivers the philosophical argument in a register the main narrative could not accommodate without becoming a lecture.

Written in 2000, the series anticipates ubiquitous personal computing, attachment to devices, and the social consequences of machines that are pleasant to interact with.

Some specifics are dated and the central anxiety is considerably more current now than when it was written. The series also anticipates the economic consequences, with a subplot about people unable to afford a persocom in a society that assumes everyone has one.

The resolution addresses the question the series has been asking rather than evading it, and the answer it gives is more equivocal than a romance would normally permit.

It is the strongest part of the work and is what justifies the eight volumes preceding it.

Eight volumes, which is compact for CLAMP, and the series is reasonably disciplined by their standards.

There is still a considerable amount of comic digression, and readers primarily interested in the central question can find the middle volumes slow. Readers who want CLAMP at their most disciplined will find it here, though the digressions still account for a noticeable share of the page count.

A twenty-six-episode animated series adapts it closely and softens some of the more uncomfortable material.

The manga is the fuller version, particularly for the picture-book sequences, which the adaptation compresses. The anime also reorders several revelations, which changes when the reader understands what Chi is, and the manga's sequencing is the more deliberate of the two.

Readers interested in fiction about machine consciousness who are willing to find it inside a romantic comedy, and who can tolerate significant fan service.

It is a genuinely thoughtful book with a real problem at its centre, and it is also compromised in ways worth knowing about in advance.