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Sweet Blue Flowers, Vol 1

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Sweet Blue Flowers Volume 1 by Takako Shimura

The Viz signature line might not have quite as much hype as it did when it first launched, but it is nice to see it reserved for titles that deserve special treatment, like Sweet Blue Flowers. I had high expectations for this title based on Takako Shimura’s sensitivity and artistry in her other series Wandering Son, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Sweet Blue Flowers starts by showing old friends reconnecting. Akira Okudaira meets Fumi Manjome on her way to school, and the girls fend off train gropers together. They head off to different schools, where Fumi deals with her crippling shyness, and Akira has an easier time fitting in. Akira banters with her family about the possibility of bringing home a girlfriend from her all-girls high school. The girls’ mothers reconnect and they realize that they were kindergarten friend. Back then, Akira served as Fumi’s protector when dealing with all the trials and tribulations of childhood.

As the story unfolded in this manga, I was struck with the economy of Shimura’s storytelling, and how small moments or single panels are filled with significance. Fumi is upset about her cousin’s marriage to an extent that seems slightly beyond the norm, even for a girl who has retained some of her childhood tendency to burst into tears as an adolescent. Shimura captures the hazards of teen girls taking public transportation in a short panel sequence that focuses on a disembodied reaching hand and Akira’s shocked facial expression. Shimura is also wonderful at scattering plot points throughout the manga in a way that makes the narrative feel like it just evolves naturally from the daily lives of the characters. Fumi’s relationship with her cousin is mentioned more as the book unfolds, as Fumi becomes involved with the dashing Yasuko, who takes on the role of Heathcliff in a production of Wuthering Heights.

Akira is steadfastly supportive, and as the manga unfolds Sweet Blue Flowers’ slice of life approach to exploring friendship and romance draws the reader in. Shimura’s subtle storytelling and sensitivity towards character development makes reading this manga a pleasure. I’m disappointed with myself that I took so long to finally read this volume!

After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

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After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness epitomize a small but growing trend in yuri manga licensing: both focus on women in their twenties exploring their sexuality, rather than depicting middle- or high-school aged girls crushing on each other.

After Hours is the more upbeat of the two, a sympathetic portrait of twenty-three-year-old Emi, a recent college graduate who’s just quit her job and is struggling to figure out what comes next. A chance encounter with Kei, a twenty-nine-year-old deejay, is a turning point in Emi’s young adult life: not only is she drawn to Kei’s confidence, she’s also intrigued by Kei’s passion for spinning records. As their connection deepens, Emi takes a more active role in supporting Kei’s career, joining Kei’s circle of friends and trying her hand at “veejaying,” selecting videos to complement Kei’s set lists.

One of the most striking aspects of After Hours is Yuhta Nishio’s sensitive depiction of Emi and Kei’s sexual encounters. He uses a handful of discrete signifiers — a pile of clothing on the floor, a tender embrace, a flirtatious post-coital chat — rather than explicit or provocative imagery. That’s a wise choice, I think, as it allows Nishio to portray Emi and Kei as grown women with healthy sexual urges without reducing them to sexualized objects. Nishio’s restrained approach also emphasizes the aspects of Emi and Kei’s bodily intimacy that foster a mutual sense of trust, familiarity, and affection — a dimension of sexual experience that’s often missing from straight romance manga.

Though the first chapters are largely uneventful, future volumes promise dramatic complications. Emi has yet to disclose her relationship to her friends or her not-quite-ex-boyfriend, with whom she’s still sharing an apartment. More interestingly, Emi hasn’t really thought about what it means to be in a relationship with another woman; she’s initially surprised by her attraction to Kei, but resists labeling those feelings as lesbian, bisexual, or queer, choosing instead to savor the sense of purpose and joy that being with Kei brings to her life. The ease with which Emi embraces her new love is a refreshing development, a quiet rebuttal of the idea that sexual orientation is absolute or easily defined.

By contrast, Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a more complex story, a confessional comic documenting the author’s sexual awakening in her late twenties. Nagata narrates her odyssey with candor, acknowledging the degree to which mental illness dictated her adult life. She describes the bodily ravages of disordered eating — she vacillated between anoxeria and bulimia — and the emotional toll of disordered thinking, noting the degree to which both depression and body dysmorphia prevented her from holding down a job, maintaining friendships, or thinking about herself as a sexual person. She also ruminates on her chilly relationship with her parents, and her profound sense of shame in disappointing them by not becoming a “real” adult with a conventional office job.

After hitting rock bottom, Nagata realizes the degree to which she’s suppressed her sexuality. In an effort to reassert control over her life, Nagata decides to hire a female escort for her first sexual experience. Nagata documents this encounter in an almost clinical fashion, contrasting her feverish anticipation with her stiff, detached response to being touched. For all of her progress towards mental health and self-acceptance, she realizes that she cannot yet surrender to the bodily sensations of desire — a tension that remains unresolved at the end of her narrative, even though Nagata’s final panels suggest her sense of relief and pride for taking such a bold step.

That Nagata’s journey is more inspiring than depressing is a testament to her writing skills (and, I might add, Jocelyne Allen’s artfully wry translation). Though Nagata never shies away from describing uncomfortable thoughts or self-destructive behavior, she finds moments of grace and humor in even the darkest situations, especially as she begins to contemplate what it means to be a sexual person. In three sharp, economical panels, for example, she explores her profound discomfort with binary gender labels, even as she begins to recognize her sexual attraction to women:

It feels churlish to criticize such a personal work, and yet I found myself wishing that Nagata’s art felt more essential to the story she was telling. Writing for The Comics Journal, critic Katie Skelly voiced similar concerns, arguing that Nagata’s tendency to mix big blocks of text with cute drawings keeps the reader at arm’s length when Nagata discloses intimate, sometimes disturbing, details of her eating disorders and self-mutilation. “Nagata can’t find a suitable bridge to mend the gap between the story of her experience and aesthetic,” Skelly notes. “[H]er style can read as generic and her tone never quite finds its mark.” I admit to feeling the same way about Nagata’s work: I admired her raw honesty, but felt that My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness could have been a book, a movie, or a Moth Radio Hour segment just as easily as a comic; nothing about the way Nagata related her experiences felt like it was uniquely suited to manga, as her drawings were more illustrative of what she felt than genuinely revelatory about why she felt such profound self-loathing.

For all the things that go unsaid in My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, however, there’s much wisdom in Nagata’s story, especially for people struggling with what it means to be healthy, whole, and sexual. Nagata’s recovery is a testament to the human capacity for resilience, and her willingness to share her most vulnerable moments with strangers an act of genuine courage. Here’s hoping that she continues to document her journey of self-discovery.

VIZ Media provided a complimentary review copy of After Hours.

AFTER HOURS • STORY AND ART BY YUHTA NISHIO • TRANSLATION BY ABBY LEHRKE • 160 pp. • RATED TEEN+ (for older teens)

MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS • STORY AND ART BY NAGATA KABI • TRANSLATED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • SEVEN SEAS • 152 pp. • RATED OT (for older teens)

Off the Shelf: Kisses & Crosses

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MICHELLE: Hey, Melinda! What did the water say to the boat?

MELINDA: Um. I got nothin’.

MICHELLE: Nothing. It just waved.

MELINDA: Okay, that actually made me giggle a little bit.

MICHELLE: Victory! While I wallow in this feeling, care to introduce our first selection? (I note this is another week in which Melinda and I have two mutual reads instead of just one.)

kissessighs_vol1_fullMELINDA: Sure! Hmmmm… now the question is, which one? I guess I’ll start with the book I read last, since it’s freshest in my mind, and that would be Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink, a double-sized volume of yuri short stories from Milk Morinaga, creator of Girl Friends, a five-volume series that we discussed in this column last year. Though Girl Friends was released here first, Kisses predates it, and it’s easy to see how one grew out of the other.

The volume’s opening chapter, “Not Friends Anymore,” begins the story of Nana and Hitomi, long-time best friends who are about to start high school together—or so Nana thinks. When Hitomi abruptly announces that she’s decided to attend a different school, Nana struggles with feelings of hurt and loss, until she finally realizes that it was her own rejection of Hitomi’s stronger feelings that drove her away. Eventually, Nana comes to terms with her own feelings and the two begin to explore a romantic relationship. Initially they are relieved to have ended up at different high schools, since they’d have a harder time concealing their romance as classmates, but over time they become dissatisfied with living in secrecy and find themselves longing for friends with whom they can share the truth about their relationship.

Though the book is a series of short stories, Morinaga uses Nana and Hitomi’s story to thread the collection together; each story is set at one of the two girls’ schools, utlimately bringing things back to their romance by the end. The stories are lovingly woven together, creating a feeling of real cohesion unusual in the short manga I’ve read. Since short stories aren’t my favorite format for manga, I found this quite gratifying.

MICHELLE: It was that sense of cohesion that kind of threw me, actually, since Sean’s comments about it for the last Pick of the Week column had led me to expect more couples, and more sad stories.

It’s not that I disliked Nana and Hitomi, though I did find them a little dull. More, I liked the stories with ambiguous or less cheery endings, like “Remember This Love Someday,” in which a girl confesses to her boyish friend, only to be kindly rejected by her, or “My True Feelings,” which ends with one girl declaring that she’ll make another like her. It doesn’t really seem likely, in my eyes, so I like it for that, even if it’s played a bit comedically.

MELINDA: I wouldn’t say that I found Nana and Hitomi dull, but the volume as a whole did really make me aware of just how much I crave more grown-up (or at least more complicated) romance. Like Girl Friends, Kisses is nothing if not sweet, but there’s a sameness to even the less overtly happy stories that makes me long for something more. Kisses‘ various romantic protagonists are all nice, pretty girls, carrying on relatively uncomplicated relationships in relatively comfortable environments. Even Hitomi and Nana’s brief stint as runaways is stunningly uncomplicated, as the two shack up in a hot springs resort before heading home to discover that all their problems have magically been resolved. The whole thing is, as I mentioned, unambiguously sweet, and though that’s often enough for me, I couldn’t help wishing for something just a bit meatier.

MICHELLE: “Sweet” is generally enough for me, too, but I think “sameness” aptly describes the aspect that left me feeling a bit blah. Nobody really stands out. None of the background characters is particularly significant. There’s nothing in these girls lives except other girls. It’s like they’re just drifting along, occasionally fancying each other, and not engaging with anything else.

MELINDA: Well said, Michelle. It’s a lovely little collection, don’t get me wrong, just… not much more than that.

So, shall we move on to our second selection?

MICHELLE: Okay!

CrossManage1Cross Manage is a relatively new Weekly Shonen Jump series in Japan, beginning in 2012, but we’ve already got a taste of it here, courtesy of VIZ’s digital manga site. (I have no idea whether there are plans for a print edition of the title.) Given that I generally adore sports manga, I really wanted to like this, and though I was kind of disappointed by its first half, it won me over in the end.

Tsunenori Sakurai used to be the star of the soccer team, but after a knee injury resulted in doctors telling him he’d never play again, Sakurai quit the team and has been adrift ever since, trying multiple clubs in the hopes of finding something that interests him. One day, he comes upon Misora Toyoguchi, who is enthusiastically practicing lacrosse by herself. Eventually, his innate sports sensibilities (or something) enable him to see where she is going wrong, and he is able to coach her through a breakthrough in her technique. When he accidentally touches her chest, Misora decides to exploit the situation and get him to manage the girls’ lacrosse team, of which she is captain, despite her lack of skills. At first, Sakurai resists, but can’t help responding to Misora’s passion for the sport, and ends up unashamedly giving it his all.

I just couldn’t get into Cross Manage at first, and kept seeing it ticking off items on, like, the Hikaru no Go checklist or something. Pro jock who has lost his own chance to play who is now mentoring someone else? Check? Underdog school club that has to undergo last-minute recruitment for a game? Check! First game against the most renowned school, with its super-refined, untouchable ace? Check! Gradually, though, I found myself won over. I like that Sakurai can tell Misora frankly how amazing he thinks she is, and of course the whole “I’ve finally found it” (regarding a place to belong) revelation pushes my buttons in a big way. And though Misora herself is somewhat of a cipher at this point, I like some of her teammates quite a lot, especially chubby, shy Noto, who is actually the most skilled player on the team.

MELINDA: In general, you’re a much bigger fan of sports manga than I, so I’m surprised to report that I had no problem whatsoever getting into Cross Manage from the beginning. Now, I’ve actually been following the series for a while, by way of Derek Bown’s Weekly Shonen Jump Recaps, so it may be that his increasingly positive impressions predisposed me to cut it some slack early on, but I liked both Sakurai and Misora right away and felt invested in their stories from the start. Also, I enjoyed the story’s examination of the difference between Misora’s initial raw enthusiasm for lacrosse and her growing seriousness, and how this progression affects her ability to play without caring about playing well.

Since you’ve brought up Noto, though (who is, indeed, awesome), I’ll take this opportunity to mention my one real issue with the series so far. I’ve complained before about overweight manga characters being portrayed as lacking normal facial features, and while this applies to Noto to a small extent (though even Misora’s facial features are pretty basic, Noto’s are disproportionally tiny in comparison to her over-round face), there is another heavy member of the girls’ lacrosse team whose physical features… well… I can only ask “WTF?”

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I mean… Yeah. I don’t know what to else say.

MICHELLE: I don’t either. I kept being reminded of Kurita and Komusubi from Eyeshield 21, who are also large and fat and small and fat, respectively. Both have very simple facial features compared to the other characters, but they’re male instead of female. (They’re my favorite characters in that series, actually.)

I guess we could look on the bright side and note that (in both cases) they’re portrayed positively, and their characterization is not based on weight at all.

MELINDA: I guess so? It really bothered me, though, I’ll admit. Not enough to keep me from continuing with the series, but enough to cause persistent discomfort, which is disappointing considering how much I enjoyed the volume otherwise.

MICHELLE: Possibly One Piece has inoculated me against being too distracted by strange body types, since that series is full of them. Granted, it feels much more out of place for just one character to look so weird. In One Piece, there’s a bevy of folks looking weird.

MELINDA: Yeah, I know that odd-looking manga characters are nothing unusual, but my discomfort in this instance is specifically related to the portrayal of fat people as having less complete or less “real” facial characteristics than other people, which implies that they are less complete or less real themselves. It’s a thing.

That said, Cross Manage has a lot going for it, and I’m likely to stick with it.

MICHELLE: Yeah, me too!

Off the Shelf: BL GL Bookrack

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MELINDA: Welcome back to Off the Shelf! We’re doing something a bit different with the column this week. Usually, somewhere around this time, we’d be preparing our monthly BL Bookrack column, featuring reviews of a handful of new BL titles. This month, we decide to switch things up a bit, and take on a few Yuri titles—sort of a “GL Bookrack” if you will—inspired by the growing number of Yuri titles becoming available digitally from JManga. But as we talked more about it, we realized we both wanted to read all three of the titles currently available.

So, in the end, we bring you BL GL Bookrack, Off the Shelf style!

Michelle, would you like to introduce our first title?

MICHELLE: Hmm… where to start? I suppose the simplest title can go first, and that would have to be Hayako Goto’s Poor Poor Lips.

Told in a four-panel format, Poor Poor Lips is a comedy about Okashi Nako (whose name is a pun meaning “strange girl”), a deeply impoverished 21-year-old who answers an advertisement for a sales job at a store selling power stones. The manager, Otsuka Ren, is the daughter of a rich family who promptly tells all the applicants that she is a lesbian. When most of them flee, Nako is hired on the spot with the reassurance, “You’re DEFINITELY not my type, so don’t worry.”

Most of the manga involves gags about Nako’s extreme poverty—she eats a lot of bread crusts—and Ren’s growing fondness for her, coupled with her impulse to give Nako everything she lacks, which she is trying not to do because previous relationships have been spoiled by excess generosity. Ren also gets really jealous of Nako’s old classmate, pastry chef Furui, and does various silly things to get him to go away/keep tabs on him, including placing spy cameras in his shop.

All in all, I have to say that I didn’t find this funny at all. That’s not to say that it isn’t pleasant, but none of the gags struck me as funny. I kept thinking, “I wonder what this would be like if Nako was actually depicted as a scruffy young woman instead of looking like an eight-year-old.” I bet I would’ve liked it more then. Ultimately, I didn’t really feel much inclined to read the other two volumes available on JManga, figuring they’d simply be more of the same.

How about you?

MELINDA: I’d say my reaction was significantly different, at least once I’d gotten a ways into the story. What you describe is pretty much how I felt over the course of the first few chapters, but as the volume continued, I have to say it really grew on me. I began to like both of the main characters quite a bit, and I did actually find a lot of it to be quite funny, particularly the running (false) rivalry between Ren and Furui (whose family’s bakery “Furui Cake” could also be read as “old cake”).

Things like the over-the-top spying and even Nako’s young/cute appearance read as humorous to me, which I largely chalk up to its being a 4-koma. I think I would have found most of it unappealing as a regular story manga, but in comic strip format, it really worked for me.

MICHELLE: I was still envisioning it as 4-koma, but with an older-looking Nako. But, yeah, maybe a lot of over-the-top silliness wouldn’t be possible if she looked too realistic.

I will say that I think the story has surprising depth in terms of Ren’s conflicting impulses. She honestly doesn’t know how to make someone happy other than by bestowing money and gifts upon them, and it’s hard for her not to coddle someone or something she likes. Goto exemplifies this rather neatly in a few panels about a stray kitten Nako takes in, and Ren’s sad past with an overfed baby bird.

I guess I should clarify that me not finding something funny doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s worthwhile or, as I called it, “pleasant.” It is at least not outright unfunny.

MELINDA: I’ll point out, too, that this is one of the better localization efforts I’ve seen from JManga. It read really smoothly, the translation notes were genuinely helpful, and the fact that I found it funny at all says a lot. I think 4-koma is very difficult to bring across effectively in English.

MICHELLE: Definitely. I think I saw all of one typo. There are a few print publishers who wish they could make that claim!

So, how about you introduce the second title?

MELINDA: Sure! Let’s take a fairly drastic turn and look at the other single volume we each read, Ebine Yamaji’s Love My Life, originally serialized in josei magazine Feel Young, home of familiar titles like Bunny Drop (Yen Press), Happy Mania (Tokyopop), and Blue (Fanfare/Ponent Mon).

Love My Life tells the story of a young woman named Ichiko who, upon coming out to her father, discovers that he also is gay, as was her mother (who died when Ichiko was quite young). What’s especially interesting about this, is that though the story certainly centers around the relationship between Ichiko and her girlfriend, Ellie, that’s not the only thing Ichiko is dealing with by far. She’s also having to come to terms with the fact that her parents’ relationship wasn’t what she thought, and that even now, her father has been living a life completely separate from the one he has with her. And since we meet Ichiko after her relationship with Ellie has already been going on for some time, it’s neither a coming-out story nor a typical romance.

Ichiko meets her father’s boyfriend (who wants very little to do with her), helps Ellie survive her strained relationship with her own father, struggles with feelings of loneliness while Ellie studies for the bar exam, and poses as her gay (male) best friend’s girlfriend to help shield him from having to deal with his sexuality at school. It’s more of a slice-of-life manga than anything else, but emotionally resonant in a way I tend to expect from serious drama or well-written romance.

I have to say that this was probably my favorite of all the Yuri we read this week, mainly because it was by far the most relatable and true-to-life. I like genre romance a lot, but this contained some of the best aspects of romance manga (including a good amount of sexual content) without having to rely on fantasy at all, which I’ll admit is pretty refreshing. It’s also added to my yearning to see more josei in English, Yuri or otherwise.

MICHELLE: Yes, this was my favorite, as well. As you say, it’s neither a coming-out story nor a typical romance. To me, it reads simply as a growing-up story with a focus on being true to yourself. Ichiko comes out to her father, but learns a truth in return that flips her world on end. It’s a hard thing to learn that something you’d believed in was never real, and that your parents are individuals with thoughts, desires, and lives that may have nothing to do with you. As hard as that is to process, though, she achieves a better understanding of her father as a result, including the realization of how understanding he is.

And then there’s Ellie, who has been fueled by the desire to compete with her father and brother. It’s not that she particularly wants to be a lawyer, but wants to prove, “I can catch up to you. And be on equal footing with you.” Ichiko instinctively feels that this is wrong, but must learn not to meddle and let Ellie have her own journey, come to her own realizations.

I liked that there’s not a certain “happy ever after” feeling to Love My Life. Ichiko and Ellie may not last as a couple. But one definitely gets the sense that, even if that were to happen, they would still be okay.

MELINDA: That was all so eloquently put, Michelle! I’m not sure I could add anything of substance to what you just said. Yes. Exactly. You’re so right-on.

As I attempt to muster some kind of intelligence again, do you want to talk about our third selection?

MICHELLE: Thank you! And sure!

Our last title is Milk Morinaga’s Girl Friends, which is available on JManga in its five-volume entirety (and which will be coming to print courtesy of Seven Seas later this year). This seinen series was serialized in Futabasha’s Comic High! and takes place at an all-girls high school.

Mariko (Mari) Kumakura is somewhat shy and reserved, but accepts an invitation from a more outgoing classmate, Akiko (Akko) Oohashi, to take the train home together. This leads to Akko encouraging Mari to get a haircut, educating her about fashion, and introducing her to some friends, including glamorous Sugi and cosplay addict Tamamin. All of this helps Mari gain confidence and some independence, and as she and Akko get closer, she starts to realize that she not only doesn’t want their friendship to fade, but wants to be more than friends.

Various misunderstandings ensue. Mari despairs that hers is “a love that can never come true,” and decides to date a former classmate in an attempt to move on and be happy that she gets to be Akko’s friend. At one point she kisses Akko, but is later evasive and embarrassed and eventually plays it off as a joke. But soon, Akko is feeling jealous of the time that Mari spends with her boyfriend, and realizes that she too wants to be more than friends. Now if only she can convince Mari that she really means it, or has that ship already sailed?

Sorry, lapsed into a bit of “back cover blurb” style, there!

MELINDA: Well done! In some ways, the “back cover blurb” summary is very much the point. Girlfriends falls into what Erica Friedman refers to as “Story A” for the genre, which isn’t an inherently negative description, by any means, but it is an indication that this is going to be a formula romance on a basic level. It’s a very enjoyable formula romance, in my opinion, but it’s unquestionably romantic fantasy. I’d even say it’s unquestionably romantic fantasy for men, given the particular types of fanservice we see throughout, but even that isn’t really a negative. It’s just a point of fact.

As I’ve said, I absolutely enjoy genre romance, and that’s what Girlfriends is. It’s got all the sweetness and anticipation of most any high school romance you’d find in a typical shoujo magazine, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s adorable. And if the way things work out so neatly and sweetly (after getting through a few typical hurdles) feels unbelievable, that’s part of what makes it fantasy.

MICHELLE: I concur. Reading it, though, I was struck by how little yuri I have really actually read. While I knew it was all going according to formula, reading about a burgeoning relationship between two girls still felt pretty new to me.

I’m glad you brought up the fanservice, because I definitely wanted to talk about that. First off, I should mention that it’s much less than I had anticipated, knowing that this series ran in a seinen magazine. There are a few superfluous bikinis, a few crotch shots, some boobies… but that’s about the extent of it. In contrast, Love My Life has much more sexual content, but because it feels more natural to the story (with no zooming in to specific body parts) it doesn’t come off as fanservice at all.

MELINDA: Yeah, I would never describe the sexual content in Love My Life as “fanservice” and looking at these two titles together really highlights the difference there. But as you say, the service in Girlfriends is definitely restrained. It almost feels like little more than a shift in perspective from shoujo romance, in which the girls are usually drawn just as prettily, short skirts and all, just not by way of the male gaze.

I, too, have read relatively little yuri, but I’m very glad to see more of it becoming available in English, including romantic fantasies like Girlfriends. I’m a big fan of romance, and I’ve pretty much discovered over the years that my tastes in that genre depend very little on the genders of the characters, outside of the fact that it offers more variety in the genre, and variety is always a good thing. Possibly that makes me pretty shallow, but really, I just like a good romance.

MICHELLE: Same here! So thanks, JManga, and more of the same, please!

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Rica ‘tte Kanji!?

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The most basic yuri plotline — what publisher Erica Friedman calls “Story A” — traces its roots back to the pioneering Class S fiction of Nobuko Yoshiya (1896-1973). In works such as Hana monogatari (1916-24) and Yaneura no nishojo (1919), schoolgirls developed intense, often romantic, feelings for other schoolgirls. Given the period in which Yoshiya wrote, it’s not surprising that her characters’ relationships were never consummated; the girls might exchange passionate letters or meaningful glances, but marriage, graduation, or death prevented them from being together as a couple. Fifty years later, when manga artists such as Ryoko Yamagishi and Riyoko Ikeda began writing girls’ love stories, they, too, favored tragic endings; Yamagishi’s Shiroi Heya no Futari (1971), for example, culminates in a melodramatic death (suicide by ex-boyfriend, to be exact), as do Ikeda’s Oniisama e… (1975) and Claudine…! (1978).

Small wonder, then, that manga-ka Rica Takashima saw a vacuum that needed filling. “There were very few manga with lesbian stories,” Takashima explains in the afterword to Rica ‘tte Kanji!? “Only depressing, sad stories about ‘forbidden love’ and with a break-up in the end. For example, ‘If I were a man, I could marry you.’ That kind of thing, but I wanted to read a HAPPY story.”

And “happy” is the perfect adjective to describe Rica ‘tte Kanji!? Rica, the heroine, is a cheerful optimist who moves to Tokyo to attend junior college (she plans to major in early childhood development) and explore the Nichome district, home to the city’s gay community. At the beginning of the series, Rica is nervous about visiting Nichome for the first time, worrying about what to wear and how to handle pick-up lines:

Rica’s fears are quickly allayed when she’s introduced to Miho, a sardonic art student a few years Rica’s senior. The two meet cute on Rica’s first trip to Nichome’s Lily Bar, where Rica confesses that she’s never met “an actual lesbian.” “I grew up out in the country,” she explains to Miho. “It’s the same for everyone in the beginning,” Miho assures her, prompting Rica to declare Miho her first gay friend. Though Miho falls for Rica right away, Rica’s lack of experience and general ditziness makes her oblivious to Miho’s advances. Their relationship has another hurdle to clear as well: Rica is just as nervous about the idea of having sex as she was about making a good impression at the Lily Bar, and keeps Miho at arm’s length — figuratively and literally — as she tries to decide what she’s comfortable doing.

What Takashima does better than most is to find the comedy in these situations, not by creating artificial misunderstandings between the characters, or manufacturing romantic rivals, but by making us privy to Rica and Miho’s thoughts. The two women’s internal monologues are funny, peppered with cute and weird observations, but they’re also very truthful; who among us hasn’t worried about putting the moves on a friend or being naked with a new partner?

Though Takashima’s script is charming, what really makes Rica ‘tte Kanji!? work is the art. That may seem like a funny thing to say about a story in which the characters are little more than well-dressed stick figures with cute, round faces, but Takashima’s illustrations have a warm, handmade quality. Better still, the artwork never panders to male yuri fans; by rendering the characters as cute, paper-doll figures, Takashima directs the eye away from Rica and Miho’s bodies towards their faces, compelling the reader to see the women as two people fumbling through a relationship, not fantasy objects.

And speaking of fantasy, a few reviewers have pointed out the absence of real conflict in Rica ‘tte Kanji!?. Though Miho and Rica’s relationship hits a few minor snags, their romance takes place in a bubble untouched by homophobia or workaday concerns. It’s a fair criticism, I suppose, but one that misses the point; Rica ‘tte Kanji!? is a cheeky, cheerful rebuke to the Tragic Gay Story, substituting a happily-ever-after ending for death and separation.

Impatient readers can find copies of Rica ‘tte Kanji on Amazon for about $24.00. If you’re willing to wait a few months, however, ALC Publishing will be releasing a new omnibus edition that will include the original Rica ‘tte Kanji stories, as well as material written for ALC’s Yuri Monogatari anthologies.

RICA ‘TTE KANJI!? • BY RICA TAKASHIMA • ALC PUBLISHING • 96 pp.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Rica ‘tte Kanji!?

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The most basic yuri plotline — what publisher Erica Friedman calls “Story A” — traces its roots back to the pioneering Class S fiction of Nobuko Yoshiya (1896-1973). In works such as Hana monogatari (1916-24) and Yaneura no nishojo (1919), schoolgirls developed intense, often romantic, feelings for other schoolgirls. Given the period in which Yoshiya wrote, it’s not surprising that her characters’ relationships were never consummated; the girls might exchange passionate letters or meaningful glances, but marriage, graduation, or death prevented them from being together as a couple. Fifty years later, when manga artists such as Ryoko Yamagishi and Riyoko Ikeda began writing girls’ love stories, they, too, favored tragic endings; Yamagishi’s Shiroi Heya no Futari (1971), for example, culminates in a melodramatic death (suicide by ex-boyfriend, to be exact), as do Ikeda’s Oniisama e… (1975) and Claudine…! (1978).

Small wonder, then, that manga-ka Rica Takashima saw a vacuum that needed filling. “There were very few manga with lesbian stories,” Takashima explains in the afterword to Rica ‘tte Kanji!? “Only depressing, sad stories about ‘forbidden love’ and with a break-up in the end. For example, ‘If I were a man, I could marry you.’ That kind of thing, but I wanted to read a HAPPY story.”

And “happy” is the perfect adjective to describe Rica ‘tte Kanji!? Rica, the heroine, is a cheerful optimist who moves to Tokyo to attend junior college (she plans to major in early childhood development) and explore the Nichome district, home to the city’s gay community. At the beginning of the series, Rica is nervous about visiting Nichome for the first time, worrying about what to wear and how to handle pick-up lines:

Rica’s fears are quickly allayed when she’s introduced to Miho, a sardonic art student a few years Rica’s senior. The two meet cute on Rica’s first trip to Nichome’s Lily Bar, where Rica confesses that she’s never met “an actual lesbian.” “I grew up out in the country,” she explains to Miho. “It’s the same for everyone in the beginning,” Miho assures her, prompting Rica to declare Miho her first gay friend. Though Miho falls for Rica right away, Rica’s lack of experience and general ditziness makes her oblivious to Miho’s advances. Their relationship has another hurdle to clear as well: Rica is just as nervous about the idea of having sex as she was about making a good impression at the Lily Bar, and keeps Miho at arm’s length — figuratively and literally — as she tries to decide what she’s comfortable doing.

What Takashima does better than most is to find the comedy in these situations, not by creating artificial misunderstandings between the characters, or manufacturing romantic rivals, but by making us privy to Rica and Miho’s thoughts. The two women’s internal monologues are funny, peppered with cute and weird observations, but they’re also very truthful; who among us hasn’t worried about putting the moves on a friend or being naked with a new partner?

Though Takashima’s script is charming, what really makes Rica ‘tte Kanji!? work is the art. That may seem like a funny thing to say about a story in which the characters are little more than well-dressed stick figures with cute, round faces, but Takashima’s illustrations have a warm, handmade quality. Better still, the artwork never panders to male yuri fans; by rendering the characters as cute, paper-doll figures, Takashima directs the eye away from Rica and Miho’s bodies towards their faces, compelling the reader to see the women as two people fumbling through a relationship, not fantasy objects.

And speaking of fantasy, a few reviewers have pointed out the absence of real conflict in Rica ‘tte Kanji!?. Though Miho and Rica’s relationship hits a few minor snags, their romance takes place in a bubble untouched by homophobia or workaday concerns. It’s a fair criticism, I suppose, but one that misses the point; Rica ‘tte Kanji!? is a cheeky, cheerful rebuke to the Tragic Gay Story, substituting a happily-ever-after ending for death and separation.

Impatient readers can find copies of Rica ‘tte Kanji on Amazon for about $24.00. If you’re willing to wait a few months, however, ALC Publishing will be releasing a new omnibus edition that will include the original Rica ‘tte Kanji stories, as well as material written for ALC’s Yuri Monogatari anthologies.

RICA ‘TTE KANJI!? • BY RICA TAKASHIMA • ALC PUBLISHING • 96 pp.

3 Things Thursday: Love in Disguise

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Yesterday, Deb Aoki posted a transcript of a panel from this year’s New York Anime Festival, Gay for You? Yaoi and Yuri Manga for GBLTQ Readers, featuring Erica Friedman (Okazu/ALC Publishing), Leyla Aker (Viz Media), Alex Wooflson (Yaoi911), librarian Scott Robins, and Christopher Butcher (Comics212), moderated by author/super-librarian Robin Brenner. It was the most compelling and informative panel I attended all weekend, and the only negative thing I can say about it was that I wish it had been scheduled for two hours instead of one.

One of the things I found most surprising during the panel, was how willing its panelists were to recommend yaoi and yuri manga to GBLTQ readers here in the west. Though I can’t speak much to the yuri question (not too surprisingly, I guess, since Erica’s recommendations make it pretty clear that most of the best yuri has yet to be translated into English), I’ve been a guilt-ridden BL fan for several years now, enjoying more than a few books within the genre while cringing at its frequent elements of misogyny and a level of fetishization that sometimes even reads as homophobia. But while the panelists made it clear that they wouldn’t recommend every BL series (as Chris Butcher said, “I recommend comics, but i don’t recommend shitty comics.”), it was clear that they felt that representation, even representation without identity, was too important and too rare to scoff at.

At one point in the panel, Robin, who had conducted quite a bit of research for an upcoming publication, said, “One of my favorite responses that I got from the survey was from a young gay man who said he liked reading yaoi because it made him think that one day he’d get a cute boyfriend too.” It’s pretty hard to argue with that.

Panelists also made it clear that cultural differences could not be ignored, that there were reasons behind the way that BL and yuri are presented as they are in Japan, and that we can’t expect those things to change anytime soon. Still, as a reader, I found myself wishing–wishing that the kind of stories I’d like to see might one day come to be. I love romance, don’t get me wrong. I want romance. But my favorite kind of romance is also so much more. I want action, adventure, mystery, fantasy, or even just really good epic soap-opera. Thing is, these kinds of stories already exist, and some of them even appear to be same-sex love stories of one sort or another. They just don’t quite go there, at least not yet.

So finally, I get to my point. :)

For this week’s 3 Things, I’d like to talk about three same-sex love stories I wish would actually go and BE LOVE STORIES.

1. Banana Fish | Akimi Yoshida | Viz Media – Listed just last week as one of my three favorite “classic” shojo series, it’s too late for 1980s manga Banana Fish to become the love story it might have been, but that doesn’t stop me from indulging in the dream. Though the series doesn’t necessarily shy away from discussion of homosexuality, the close, tender relationship between its two male leads remains chaste and ambiguous to the end.

Yoshida attempts to clarify things a bit in her later side-story Garden of Light (“But they did love each other…maybe the way lovers do”) and her Angel Eyes art book is not terribly shy about it either. But what kind of story might she have written if she’d been comfortable enough (or allowed) to turn Banana Fish‘s generous subtext into actual text? I’d have liked to read that story. I’d have liked to read that a lot.

2. Wild Adapter | Kazuya Minekura | Tokyopop – “But wait!” you protest. “Wild Adapter is BL! It’s published in a BL magazine!” Sure, that’s true, I’d respond, and certainly there’s more overt sexuality in WA than in something like Banana Fish, but six volumes in, I still haven’t seen it. I’m not talking about sex, either. I’m talking about any kind of genuine acknowledgement of the apparently romantic relationship between its two leads.

Obviously this series is still running (and there may truths already revealed in the Japanese chapters that haven’t yet made it over), and its presence in a BL magazine does give one hope. But from what we’ve seen in English so far, Wild Adapter is still a love story that refuses to admit it’s a love story.

So bring it on, Minekura. I’m dying to see it.

3. NANA | Ai Yazawa | Viz Media – Now, most of us who love this series have long reconciled with the fact that we’re never going to see its two title characters finally shake off the screwed-up men in their lives and really shack up together (and at this point, frankly, we’re just hoping against hope we’ll see it finished at all). Still, there’s a corner of every NANA fan’s heart that wishes it might be so. Don’t get me wrong–I adore some of those screwed-up men. But Nana/Nana is the ultimate ‘ship that will never be, leaving us to subsist only on a few voiced fantasies and some super-romantic narration.

“The hand that I was holding then… was the only one I wanted to hold… that night… and forever.”

I mean, come on. *Sigh*

So, time to open up the floor! Readers, what are your favorite love stories in disguise? Respond in comments or in your own blog!

Yuri Monogatari, Volume 6

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Yuri Monogatari, Vol. 6
Published by ALC Publishing

yurimon
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Yuri Monogatari, now in its sixth volume, is an anthology of short comics featuring lesbian life and love, special in both its unity of theme and diversity of art. Written and drawn by artists from across the globe, the vast differences in style and storytelling could easily create a fractured feel over the length of the volume, but instead there is the sense that there is simply something for everyone. Though there were certainly stories that appealed to me less than others, no story was easily pigeonholed from the beginning and I found that I ended up really enjoying some stories much more than I would have expected based only on a first glance at the artwork.

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