No YNN report today as I will be at the Rainbow Book Fair, from 12-6 at the The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center at 208 W 13 St, NYC. Come get copies of By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga signed by Rica Takashima and I. See you there!
Archive for the Miscellaneous Category
Whisper Me A Love Song Anime Campaigns in Tokyo & Kyoto, Guest Post by Roxie
Tomorrow, the anime for Whisper Me A Love Song / Sasayakuyouni Koi wo Utau (ささやくように恋を唄う) debuts on Japanese TV and streaming on HIDIVE. Our intrepid Correspondent Roxie is in Japan right now and has found any number of adorable promotional campaigns and items for sale. She’s graciously traipsed all over to grab us pictures of the largest Yuri anime marketing campaign I have ever seen. Settle in for the utter cuteness of Takeshima Eku’s charming first love story. Take it away, Roxie!
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We came to Japan for the cherry blossoms, and were rewarded with a big surprise campaign of Whisper Me A Love Song, or known as Sasakoi over here.
Our first surprise was reported by a friend who saw the trailer being advertised on the Yunika Vision screen in Shinjuku on the Alpen Tower. Sadly, we never caught it again after April 1st during our tight schedule…
The second surprise was at Animate HQ in Ikebukuro with an entire staircase wall level dedicated to Sasakoi. Lots of cute large panels for us to take in.
Participating Gratte Cafes, found at Animate stores across various cities, has included a Sasakoi drink and cookie campaign. You can pick any design for the drink, where they will print them onto the thick cream. They look rather stunning and sharp to our surprise.
A purchase of either allows you to add ¥500 for a coaster of 7 options! Because of luck being a factor for getting these gacha coasters, it took us roughly 10 tries to collect them all! The green tea lattes were the sweetest, with coffee being the least, and the milk tea as in-between. I’m sadly sick of green tea lattes now.
If you don’t want to drink your sugar, feel free to pick one of the cute cookies instead. Since I can’t eat cute faces, I cannot give any commentary on how it tastes.
Melonbooks did have a poster for the latest volume at various stores.
All three chain shops offered add-on goods to the manga volumes. Animate edition offered a cute illustration card for their 9th volume. Melonbooks went all out and offered a unique clear file for each specific volume purchased. Gamers are also offering individualized illustration cards for each volume as well.
Not to be outdone by Ikebukuro, Akihabara gave us the chance encounter of seeing the book and anime advertised on multiple pillars in a prime spot in front of Atre at the Electric town exit.
Our journey still continues to Kyoto where there is a special collab event with Eiden Railways and limited merch goods. The girls are dressed in cute train station hats and outfit as can badges and acrylic stands. The station master apologized that they were all sold out! Being in Kyoto, there is also a yukata edition for the main pair as a tapestry and clear file folders. Eiden even has a small image of the girls in front of the train!
Animate Kyoto also collaborated the event with some yukata acrylics, canvas, and pass holders. There was only the latter two left, but we got to admire the shikishi board at least.
Compared to other recent yuri animes of the last year, this has been an amazing push the higher ups have put into this campaign. We hope you’re excited for this series’ anime adaptation!
Announcing Manga The Visual Guide
I was going to write a review today of something no one but me cared about (/cough/Hana no Asuka-gumi/cough/) but much more interesting news popped up that I want to share.
Today, Dorling Kindersley (DK), announced that Manga The Visual Guide is available for pre-order! This was the massive project I worked on all summer 2023.
I join luminaries of Anime/Manga researcher Frederick L. Schodt, Jonathan Clements, Rachel Thorn, Zack Davisson to present a pictorial history of manga in the 20th and 21st centuries. I wrote the chapter on 2010s.
Did I mention Yuri, BL and queer manga? Yes, of course I did. ^_^ But the series to write about were given to me, so I did not get to choose (IOW, don’t come at me. ^_^) It was a herculean effort on my part, as I was severely ill when they first approached me about this. But it was done and I am pretty happy with what I gave them – and, of course, I learned a lot while writing it. I think the only series I wrote about that I had read or watched previously to beginning was Golden Kamuy.
I want to thank my local library system for providing me with all the manga I read in order to understand these series. I could not have done it without that. Show your library some love – they are supporting graphic media and helping the next generation get into manga.
Thanks to DK for stalking me down alleyways and cudgeling me into doing this. Thanks to Rachel and Zack for being my emotional support authors, you definitely kept me grounded. And thanks to Cefn for his patience with my slightly addled brain.
This beautiful book will also be a useful starting point for people who want to know more about anime and manga, but don’t know where to begin. And when you are done with it, go look up all the other contributors’ work. They are amazing.
So…that’s what I did last summer. It is slated for a November 2024 release. Hope you like it!
Recent Readings of Queered Holmes And Watson
In 1926, John Watson, friend and confidant of Sherlock Holmes, was shot by “Killer” Evans in the the story the Three Garridebs. What Holmes says in the moment is, “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” In subsequent media presentations, this has been portrayed as Holmes using Watson’s given name in a moment of emotional weakness. But surely, long before that, the women who read the adventures of this consulting detective and his bosom friend had done what fandom continues to do….queer the heck out of Holmes and Watson. Stephen Moffat’s series Sherlock rested heavily on that understood relationship, with an ongoing joke that Watson is constantly assumed to be Holmes’ partner. I imagine that a great deal of research has been written about the way Moffat gave himself credit for a progressive relationship that he did not actually portray. Certainly, many fans of the series did.
But, for many diverse reasons I have found myself reading several books recently that are queer re-thinking of Holmes and Watson and since they are all relevant to our interests in one way or another, I thought I’d gather them up in one overview for your entertainment. As always, links here are to Amazon, but in most cases, give your local library a shot first. They’ll have them.
To begin with, I’ll look a few years back to Claire O’Dell’s Sara Holmes series. The first book, A Study in Honor, traces the adventure of Janet Watson, newly return from war with faulty cyborg prosthesis, and Sara Holmes. In this series, Holmes and Watson are two queer black women who find themselves on the wrong side of a government conspiracy and corrupt medical practices.
It’s been a while since I read this one, but the tension between Holmes and Watson is not treated as a joke, nor a handwave, nor is it likely to be resolved. Watson’s wounds from the war go deep. Their blackness and how they are treated by the people who require them to work for them is more relevant than their queerness, but both are relevant. The giant conspiracy is a bit unconvincing, but who cares, really? It’s a scifi/fantasy. Handwave the plot and pay attention to the characters.
If you like your Holmes and Watson a little on the dark side, I’d recommend this book and the sequel,
Next up is a story that takes the idea of Holmes and Watson and uses them as metaphor. In A Case of Madness:(or The Curious Appearance of Holmes in the Nighttime) by Yvette Knopp, Holmes scholar Andrew Thomas has lost literally everything he thought he was and what is left is not making him at all happy.
A lifetime of pretending he is not gay has failed to prove successful and, after a long horrible night in which he saves someone’s life, but is gay bashed for his efforts, he begins to hallucinate Sherlock Holmes. As his life burns down around him, what is growing from the ashes is a “him” he’s spent his whole life avoiding.
This sounds dire, but it’s actually more “gonzo fever-dream” than dire. Andrew’s pretty unlikeable, but that’s mostly because he does not like himself. There’s lot of running around London at night and a ridiculously cheerful ending as Andrew finally sheds his old self.
Holmes (and, to a lesser extent, Watson) are symbolic here, rather than literal, they indicate the level of self-delusion that Andrew is dealing with. They don’t interact with each other at all, which maybe was a wasted opportunity, but as they are not really characters in the story, but just characters in Andrew’s mind, it’s not that relevant.
Which brings me to Nakanomori Kouko Bungeibu no Holmes & Watson (中野森高校文芸部のホームズ&ワトソン). While in Japan last year, this was one of the books I picked up randomly. It was in a Yuri section and had a Holmes & Watson tie-in and, well, you got me there. Was it Yuri, really? Nah, and the ending was the one thing I hoped it would not do., but it wasn’t a terrible read.
Manase Akira’s desire is to be a great detective. She comes to their high school’s literature club room to ask Todo Motoko – whose detective novel is the only one Akira has ever read – to be her assistant. This dumps them into a number of mysteries, from the mysterious extra piece of cake in a cake shop, to the disturbing reason the entire third-year class’s grades have been altered. Motoko comments off-handedly that Akira is very attractive – something not really expressed by the art in this light novel – and one of the lit club’s sempai shows a slightly more intimate relationship with Motoko than the other members. If there is a Yuri relationship, I’d say Hitomi-sempai “like” likes Motoko, but isn’t going there.
What we do get is a decent enough Holmes and Watson dynamic from Akira and Motoko. Akira already knows whodunnit, when she asks Motoko for her theories, but likes to have the other girl bounce theories off her to help her think. Unlike Holmes, Akira appreciates Motoko’s writing and when, because of one of the mysteries, Motoko and Akira stop speaking, it’s a major turning point for their relationship. Of all these stories, it’s probably the least queer, but a solid rep for Holmes and Watson.
And last, the incredible The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older. Once again, we meet two women, Mossa and Pleiti, drawn together by a series of inexplicable happenings along the railroad that connects human habitations in the rings of Jupiter. A man steps off the platform and disappears – was it suicide or something else? This story drags our queered Holmes and Watson into a massive and improbable conspiracy – as all conspiracies usually are.
This one takes law-woman Mossa to a frontier town, and back to the comfortable, oddly Victorian rooms at college, where she once again meets her old college roommate and former lover, researcher Pleiti. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles continues their story as multiple students and teachers have gone missing from the university….but no one seems to have noticed.
Of the many Holmes and Watsons in this list, these last two are the least traumatized, most comfortably queer and, in many ways, the best of the Holmes and Watsons. Mossa’s quirks are not pathologized, or dismissed – they are treated as a fact of her existence. Pleiti’s work as a researcher is considered to be an important part of her life, as being a doctor is in Watson’s. In the first book, they address the history between them – in a way that acknowledges that we change as people. I found this to be the most mature relationship on this list. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a queered Holmes and Watson. ^_^
These are hardly the only queered versions of Holmes and Watson to be found, but I hope you’ll give a few of these a chance and let me know about any good iterations you’ve encountered. ^_^
Mabataki (まばたき)
Mabataki (まばたき) is a collection of short stories by Battan, creator of Run Away With Me, Girl. This is another manga I picked up while in Japan (I think this one was picked up at the Shibuya Animate) because I had not seen anything about it. It was interesting, more than entertaining and both very good and not-good in places. It is also variably Yuri, depending on how much overt romance you require in your Yuri
The first story, arguably the Yuri-est of the bunch, follows a young woman who is called by someone else’s name when she purchases cigarettes from an elderly kiosk vendor. It is instantly obvious that the elderly woman imagines the young woman to be an old love from her high school days. It it poignant, and sad and ultimately not resolved in any meaningful way.
The other stories explore relationships between girls and women in varying uncomfortable ways. A girl who has everything offers a kind of patronage/friendship to girl who has nothing, and is rejected, at least in part because she didn’t understand a damn thing about the other girl.
The story that was the best was also the least entertaining for me. “Hatsunatsu no Soshiki” follows a girl who has just lost her mother. Around her, following her, with her at all times, crowding the space she occupies, are word ballons filled with all the places people have told the girl where her mother is. This is an uncomfortable, but very well done story about how personal grief is.
The final story follows a woman who meets a mermaid, maybe while on a vacation. This was a surprisingly sweet little story and I’m glad it was the final one in the collection.
Honestly, if you like Battan’s art, you’ll probably like this collection. You might even want to suggest it to Kodansha to license. As I read it, I discovered that I don’t particularly like Battan’s art. It was a shock to me, as I rarely have negative reactions to art in manga unless egregious service stands in for plot, and character. For some reason, as I continued reading, I just had the most viscerally negative reaction to this art. I’m not entirely sure why, but let’s just say I am not a fan.
Nonetheless this collection takes on some big emotions: Grief and loss, life and love and does some interesting things with them.
Ratings:
Because I found the art so unpalatable and it’s a collection, we’ll just got straight to an overall score
Overall – 6
I don’t regret reading this book, but I can’t imagine I’ll retain much beyond “Midori no Maka no Mizutama”‘s visual of grief crowding around the main character.
