Heart-shaped Box of Memories: A Princess Ai Retrospective

• Author: Megan D.

• Editor: Alex Henderson

Once upon a time, a young woman was born from the dreams of a fading rock star, a rising manga artist, and a middle-aged businessman. She was an amnesiac princess with the voice of an angel, lost on the streets of Tokyo and caught in a conflict between two worlds. Her story was met with modest success, but her creators demanded ever more from her. Their efforts went in vain and in less than a decade she had disappeared, remembered only by those who witnessed her sparkling debut.

This story is no fairy tale, though. It’s the very real story of Princess Ai. What began as one of Tokyopop’s first forays into original English language content became a fandom-wide joke thanks to the company’s increasingly desperate attempts to make it a multi-media success. Twenty years have passed since its debut, so it’s time to face the music and trace its rise and fall from grace.

A Star is Born, But Who are the Parents?

Who created Princess Ai? If you go by the original announcement in 2003, you would think it was Courtney Love, the former lead singer of grunge band Hole. She was certainly credited as one in both the books and in Tokyopop’s own advertising. At the time she called Ai her “alter ego” and  talked about how Princess Ai was inspired by her own time in Japan as a young woman. It should be noted that Love was presenting a sterilized and heavily fictionalized of herself through this story, as in reality she only briefly spent time in Japan as an illegal topless dancer before getting deported, one of many stories from her troubled youth. Princess Ai was primarily meant to serve as a promotional vehicle for her 2004 solo album America’s Sweetheart, but the series did little to help her sales or her declining career. While many jokes have been had at her expense over the years, it’s unfair to blame Courtney Love for the failings of Princess Ai when all she contributed was her name and a few borrowed details from her life.  

After all, there were two other women with more direct creative contributions to Princess Ai. The first was Ai Yazawa, the celebrated shoujo manga artist behind such works as NANA and Paradise Kiss. Her role was quite small, providing only a handful of concept sketches for Ai herself. You wouldn’t guess that from Tokyopop’s promotional materials, as they leaned as heavily on her name as they did with Courtney Love. The real artist behind Princess Ai was Misaho Kujiradou, a minor shoujo mangaka with only a handful of short stories to her name at the time. It’s easy to see why she would sign on to such a project: not only would Princess Ai be her first serialized manga but it came with a guaranteed international audience. It must have seemed like the fastest way to take her career to the next level. That said, she was just an artist for hire—she didn’t create the character or write the story.

Photo by Stu Levy (D.J. Milky), licensed under Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The true Svengali behind Princess Ai was its mysterious writer, DJ Milky. Their biography was vague and full of nonsense, and no photos of them were ever made public. There was a good reason for this: “DJ Milky” was in fact the pseudonym of Tokyopop founder and CEO Stu Levy. This was an open secret among industry professionals of the time, but the average Tokyopop reader wouldn’t learn the truth until the late Zac Bertschy wrote about it in 2007. This pseudonym served not just to mask the fact that this story was written by a middle-aged executive but also helped to hide the contributions of co-writer Rob Tokar, who was one of Tokyopop’s senior editors.  

Princess Ai came about at the peak of Tokyopop’s fame and market share, after they successfully pushed their way into bookstores with a number of best-selling shoujo manga titles and their “100% Authentic Manga” initiative. There’s no doubt that Stu Levy saw Princess Ai as the perfect bridge between those successful shoujo manga and the original English-language (OEL) comics coming out of his brand new Rising Stars of Manga program. Since it was drawn by a Japanese artist and ran in the shoujo manga magazine Wings, no one could accuse Princess Ai of appropriating the term “manga” like so many of their OEL works.

Yet its status as an original work ensured that Tokyopop owned it in full, which suited Levy’s long-term plans just fine. From the start, Levy dreamed of becoming a Hollywood producer, and in a 2006 Publisher’s Weekly interview he confessed that he yearned to turn Tokyopop’s library of titles into franchises of his own, but working with the Japanese licensors was hard and that it was easier to create original works with borrowed Japanese elements. Princess Ai was in many ways his blueprint of success and Levy was determined to make it the Next Big Thing. She would be plastered across Tokyopop’s books, advertising, and convention appearances, all in anticipation of her debut in the summer of 2004.

The Confusing Adventures of a Tokyopop Princess

Considering its cynical origins and the number of creators involved, it’s not surprising that Princess Ai was a rather flawed comic. Most of its problems lie with its firm three-volume length, a limit Tokyopop imposed on most of its OEL titles. Despite the creators surely being aware of their own limitations ahead of time, there are numerous pacing issues as many plotlines from the first two volumes had to be hastily resolved in the third (if they were resolved at all). 

For example, Ai spends much of the first half of the story trying to recover her memories through a mysterious book and an equally mysterious man, and the small, golden heart-shaped box she possesses. This plot thread comes to a screeching halt in the middle of Volume Two as Ai suddenly declares that all of her memories have returned. This allowed the writers to shift all their focus onto Ai’s rock star antics, the machinations of her managers, and her insipid romance with the sensitive librarian-turned-songwriter Kent (who bears a suspicious resemblance to Courtney Love’s late husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain). Readers received only a cursory explanation of the interdimensional civil war Ai fled from in the first place, a backstory meant to be revealed in a long-promised (and eventually canceled) light novel. The whole series has the cynical reek of a story assembled entirely out of marketing buzzwords to sell back to manga-reading millennial teen girls. There’s romance! J-Rock! Angel wings! Tokyo! Goth-lolita fashion! Girl power! The only thing missing is GIRUGAMESH.

Then there’s Ai herself. From beginning to end, there’s no clear idea of what kind of character she’s meant to be. Is she an innocent lost in a strange new world? A hard-rocking rebel who doesn’t take guff from anyone? An inspirational messiah whose voice touches the hearts of millions? Her personality shifts to whatever the writers need her to be at any given moment, rendering her an utterly hollow heroine.  She’s only marginally more complex than the rest of the cast, which is full of bland supporters, sneering bullies, and mustache-twirling villains.

The worst of the lot has to be Hikaru, Kent’s roommate. He’s a sissy who tearfully clings to Kent, views Ai as competition for his affections, and presumably is also a drag queen because he inexplicably possesses a closet full of goth-lolita dresses for Ai to steal (and trash). He’s a very minor character, but this sort of gay stereotype was no less offensive then as now and it stands out like a sore thumb. The only thing more cringeworthy than Hikaru are the lyrics to Ai’s songs, which consist of the worst high-school level pseudo-goth poetry that “DJ Milky” could conceive.

Despite its many faults, there is something compulsively readable about it and Princess Ai did briefly find a receptive audience. According to the 2005 Bookscan year-end charts, the first volume sold 20,000 copies and its second volume sold 10,000. That audience shrunk fast, however, as the final volume failed to chart in 2006. A smart person might look at those numbers and pull the brakes on a prospective franchise, but all Stu Levy saw was the justification he needed to launch Princess Ai as a multi-media phenomenon.

The Ai-Volution Will be Merchandised

The wave of Princess Ai merchandise began as soon as the first book hit store shelves. Tokyopop slapped her onto notecards, jigsaw puzzles, coloring books, T-shirts, fashion dolls, and statuettes, all of them available at a major bookstore or mall media shop near you. Naturally, there were also plenty of Princess Ai tie-in books. Some were promotional vehicles for the Rising Stars of Manga program, such as the short story collection Rumors From the Other Side or Encounters, a collection of crossovers with the likes of A Midnight Opera and The Tarot Café. There was also Princess Ai of Ai-Land, a prequel comic strip published in 50 major newspapers. The strip itself has the looks and humor of Baby’s First Webcomic and its reliance on the audience’s familiarity with the original story would have made it baffling to most newspaper readers.

Tokyopop also produced Prism of the Midnight Dawn, a direct sequel created by Misaho Kujiradou and TV screenwriter Christine Boylan. It begins with Ai venturing back to the human world to save her beloved Kent from an evil music label that’s forcing him to make music to make people depressed. No sooner is he saved than the two are transported to Ai’s home world, where a new rebellion threatens to disrupt the fragile peace of her realm. The world would never see the story’s end, as its final volume was canceled after Tokyopop’s 2011 shutdown. My personal favorite is also the worst of the lot: the ring-bound art book/poetry collection Roses and Thorns. It pairs the worst of Levy’s embarrassingly, hilariously awful poetry with Kujiradou’s artwork, all while offering the same three pages of stickers repeatedly with Princess Ai ads galore. 

All of this effort was for naught. The Princess Ai craze was a fleeting one and most of those books and knick knacks went straight to the clearance bin. Even now, there are still unsold copies of Roses and Thorns available on the Crunchyroll Store for the princely sum of $2.00.

Stu Levy had a history of producing music for Tokyopop properties under his DJ Milky alias, so it was almost inevitable that he would make music for Princess Ai. He wrote and produced a handful of original tracks with studio musicians playing the part of Ai and her band to sell on Tokyopop’s own compilation albums. He also directed music videos for many of them, using them as ads for the series or other pet projects of his. The most notable of these is “Broken Leash,” which served not just a music video but a proof of concept for Stu’s most ambitious plan yet: a Princess Ai film. First announced in 2005, it was meant to be a mix of live-action footage and original animation by the anime studio Satelight, with Levy as both head writer and director.

The animation featured in the video is fine, even if it’s marred by colored subtitles in an exaggerated Gothic font. The live-action footage is laughably cheap on every level: the greenscreen, the audio mixing, even “Ai’s” Spirit Halloween-style costume. It’s little wonder that the plans for the film kept getting pushed back, as things suddenly started to go very badly for Princess Ai and Tokyopop alike.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmHlSR6w4xA

The Falling Stars of Manga

Princess Ai’s time in the spotlight was well past by 2008, but the Great Recession brought all of Tokypop’s plans for her to a swift end. The company had spread itself thin over the decade, and now they were facing declining sales and increasing returns from major bookstore chains. Most of their best-sellers had been reclaimed by Kodansha, and while Fruits Basket was still a hit it was nearing its end with no obvious successor in sight. The company was shrinking its workforce and publishing schedule to cut costs and stay afloat, all while Stu Levy continued to chase his dreams of being a big-shot producer through his feature-length adaptations of Van Von Hunter and Priest.

Princess Ai was effectively abandoned after 2008, save for the aforementioned sequel comic and an omnibus re-release of the original series. Her last appearance was on Levy’s final vanity project, the failed reality TV series America’s Greatest Otaku. Even then, it was limited to an image on the show’s tour bus and the reuse of the music video costume for a cosplay challenge, a pathetic end for both the property and its parent company.

Twenty years later, Princess Ai serves as an object lesson in the limits of corporate cynicism. It was conceived not as an original work of art but a brand to boost one company’s profits and one man’s ego. It was built on a money-hungry mish-mash of what was considered “cool” and marketable to teen girls, and launched on the belief that its target audience was gullible enough to buy anything with “Princess Ai” on it. So much work was put into hyping it, shoving merchandise onto shelves, and dreaming up tie-in media, yet so little work was put into making the source material good in the first place. Princess Ai was a property built on the weakest of foundations, and because of that it was always doomed to collapse on its creators before falling into obscurity.