While in Japan in October, I was loading up on Yuri manga I probably would not have bothered buying if I had to pay shipping. Yurimekuru Hibi (ゆりめくる日々) was among these. I just picked it up without looking and threw it into my pile without really looking at it. When I got it home, the cover did not fill me with desire to read it, so it just drifted lower and lower in the “to review pile” until I finally had no choice but to pick it up. And then I noticed that it was a Champion Red book and my blood ran cold.

If you are a regular reader, you will be familiar with my dislike of Champion Red, the imprint that brought us such abominations as the Mai HiME manga (and Mai Otome, but I knew to not read it by that time)  and the inexpressibly vile El Cazador de le Bruja manga, among others. While Yuri is a not-uncommon fetish among CR comics, the most common fetish to be seen in this imprint is a pathological dislike of women.

So, with some dread, I opened the pages of Yurimekuru Hibi and found…a perfectly normal, slightly silly gag comic about two girls who like each other.

Saiyuri and Yoriko-sempai are in deep like, with very typical skinship (holding hands, sharing food, etc.). They go to school together, hang out after school together, go to the beach and flower-watching. The only standout quality of their relationship is that Yoriko-sempai is a nutball. Not in a bad way, in a Fuurai Shimai “living in an alternate reality” way. Yoriko is excessively rich, also excessively odd, with occasional lapses of sense, manners and sanity. Sayuri is left to clean up after her, but she’s glad to do so, because she really likes sempai.

Typically of a gag comic, the humor is gentle “heh” as opposed to guffaws. Yoriko gets stranger as the volume goes on, and by the end, this reader felt she had sufficiently plumbed the depths of Yoriko’s reality. But for a CR comic, it was light-hearted and had no trace of the kind of violence against women in which this imprint so often engages.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – There isn’t one. It’s a situation comedy in which the situation is “they like one another + Yoriko does goofy thing.”
Characters – 6
Yuri – 6
Service – 3 Downright low for a CR manga

Overall – 6

Yoriko and Sayuri really like one another.