Yuri Manga: Yuri Hyakkei ( 百合百景)

June 27th, 2017

Arguably, one of the most famous collections of Japanese art is Hokusai’s Fugaku Hyakkeithe One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. From the mid-1830s, Hokusai collected and sold volumes of his work starring the always-impressive Mount Fuji. (No, really, it’s always impressive when you see it.)

In the spirit of this masterpiece, Hachiko has created the Yuri Hyakkei ( 百合百景) which contains work that is less memorable and the subject much less impressive. ^_^

Hachiko’s One Hundred Views of Yuri is firmly rooted in a school-girl world. Most of the “scenarios” show two girls and the caption explains the scenario  for us, “When a childhood friend becomes jealous of her childhood friend Yuri.” Sometimes a girl pins another girl to a wall, or a teacher. Groping is reasonably rare, and embracing is reasonably common so it doesn’t feel gross. Scenarios are one-or-few-panel with little dialogue and make for stressless reading

The color palette of the work is exceedingly strange, with emphasis on blues and browns and sepia, and while every couple shown are given unique names, with the sameness of the palette, the level of emotion and commitment to craft, they tend to blur into one another.  In fact, the fact that 200 character names were picked for the various scenarios is the most creative thing about them.

Ratings:

Art – 6 Competent, with that specific color palette
Story – 4 Scenarios with no particular creativity
Character – 2 Not really
Service – 4 A bit, here and there.
Yuri – 6 There’s some genuine emotion, attraction and interest in there.

Overall – 6

I found that this book works brilliantly on the way to bed. With so little to hold on to, it just pleasantly slipped in my eyes and out my ears and left little behind.

2 Responses

  1. Ching Lam says:

    This was my first item I purchased from JP Amazon and the first yuri artist I followed on twitter. As a result, I am very fond of Hachiko’s work.

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