Emma

5Reduced, this title gives 5. It sits on The Turn with the rest of a turn.

What it is

Kaoru Mori's Emma ran in Enterbrain's Comic Beam from 2002, with its main story ending in 2006 and further stories about its characters continuing until 2008. It was collected in 10 volumes. Emma is a maid working for a retired governess in London at the end of the nineteenth century. William Jones, the heir to a newly rich merchant family and a former pupil of her employer, visits and falls in love with her.

How it works

The romance is slow and restrained. William's family expects him to marry into the aristocracy, and the gap between a maid and a gentleman is enormous. Emma is reserved and practical, and the story follows both of them as they decide what they are willing to give up.

The detail

Mori is famous for her love of Victorian Britain, and the series is full of carefully researched detail: costume, servants' work, households, trains, the Crystal Palace. The lives of the servants are given as much care as those of their employers.

Why it matters

It received an Excellence Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival and was adapted as an anime in 2005. It is one of the most admired historical romances in manga and the work that first showed the patient, detailed style Mori developed further in A Bride's Story.

The title by its numbers

Emma14total14 → 5

総画 strokes5volumes10 → 1years serialised7debut year2002 → 4

Set against the Pythagorean table, the title totals 14. Reduced, that is 5.

The reference files it as a turn. The number's contribution is freedom, disruption, and restless movement — and with it the 5's restlessness and hunger for change, which is the thread the reference follows here.

Beneath the 5 sit two smaller figures: 6 in the vowels, 8 in the consonants. Responsibility underneath, power on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.

総画 strokes is 5, volumes is 10, a 1, years serialised is 7 and debut year is 2002, a 4. That the 5 turns up in 総画 strokes as well as in the letters is the sort of coincidence this reference collects rather than explains.

Read on the 5's terms, this entry asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.