I am here today, my friends, to talk of insect. Not just any bugs, but beneficial, friendly, and dare I say it? attractive, bugs.

And girls.

Girls and bugs are most of the point of reading Mai no Mushi Gurashi（麻衣の虫ぐらし), so if if you’ve mourned the lack of bug science in Yuri, this is the book for you!

Shimizu Nanako helps her elderly grandfather run his small farm. They keep it going by selling their produce at roadside stands and to local businesses. Her best friend Sakurano Mai, helps her out. Mai, is an entertainer at a restaurant, and is the object of a rather service-y gaze by both reader and Sudou Raika, a naturalist who is working on creating better breeding conditions for butterflies in the nearby forest. 

In the course of volume one we encounter bugs that burrow in bark, that fly, that lay there, that crawl; many kinds of bugs, some of which I only now have a passing familiarity with on account of having read this book. I doubt I will ever remember that a namitentoumushi is a ladybug past the time it takes me to write this…but, on the other hand, the world has a weird way of requiring me to remember pieces of information exactly like that. ^_^

Yuri is in the form of Raika’s passive-aggressive dis/interest in Mai. The rest of the story is more about Mai and Nanako’s friendship. Both of them are thoroughly likable and their friendship is no more and no less than a close friendship. The volume ends with a heartrending chapter in which Nanako’s grandfather dies while watching the two young women harvesting the tomatoes for which the farm is known.

This book marks the very last of the pile of random things I picked up at the Animate Yuribu last November. I had no idea what this series was about, so it was a pleasure to find that it was both educational and entertaining. Having finished that pile, I’m very ready for a visit back to see what other delights those shelves hold, probably-a-vampire Yuri notwithstanding. 

For those of you interested in insect and their potential in a Yuri story should definitely take a look at this so-far single volume with it’s special-insert manga card.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Good, if a tad service-y
Story – 6 Slice of life with insects
Characters – 7 Pretty likable
Service – Amegappa Shoujogun the artist, likes drawing naked women, especially Mai
Yuri – 2 It’s not much but it is there.

Overall – 7

I was glad that my last book of the November crop was unique and not a vampire story. ^_^