Sex work is not legal in Japan, however, “fuuzoku” which is translated as “health delivery,” is not considered prostitution. It’s inevitable that after the massive success of My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, (the Japanese title of which, you may remember, Sabishi-sugi Rezu Fuuzoku ni Ikimashita Report ,) )a pile of books about lesbian “health delivery” have appeared. BariKyari to Shinsou was an exemplar of a fiction that springboarded from the idea and moved into being an overall great story.
Ichijinsha’s Lesbian Fuuzoku Anthology (レズ風俗アンソロジー) is somewhat less good than either of the above titles, but it’s not terrible, either. What we have here is a series of fantasies involving health delivery providers that are surprisingly vanilla.
For instance, in the first story by Homu Subaru, a super shy uptight woman hires health delivery for her first time and is so miraculously good the escort gives her her personal contact information. That’s the typical dream every John or Jane is supposed to have, isn’t it? That they are genuinely the best and the professional will want them to be their special someone.
This collection includes shorts by Comic Yuri Hime faves Ohsawa Yayoi, Kodama Naoko, Nanatsufuji, and Kataoka Ako. Hachisujou Hani offers up an “Edo-period fantasy” story. There are a few new names in the ToC, as well.
The story I felt best about as I read it was – surprise! – reminiscent of an old Mist Magazine series, by Iwami Kayoko, whose art in this made me nostalgic for Wako’s stylish lesbian prostitutes in Kiseki Goten. In this story, an escort is falling the stable’s rankings, so the top ranked woman takes her as her lover. As she is mentored in how to sex and romance other women, she rises in the rankings, until she is number 1 and her lover can retire.
As a collection of 18+ stories, it wasn’t terrible thematically. Everything is consensual, the emphasis is on making customer and professional safe and happy. The sex scenes themselves are not always what I’d consider attractive, but that’s always subject to the most personal of interpretations.
Ratings:
Overall – 7
I had stopped reviewing adult Yuri manga because they had just gotten so gross, but this isn’t bad at all. And, should you like it, there’s a sequel, Lesbian Fuuzoku Anthology Repeater (レズ風俗アンソロジーリピーター).
“As a collection of 18+ stories, it wasn’t terrible thematically. Everything is consensual, the emphasis is on making customer and professional safe and happy. The sex scenes themselves are not always what I’d consider attractive, but that’s always subject to the most personal of interpretations.”
Oh, nice to hear that. I only recently read about one seinen yuri manga that interested me and it turned out that this is the another time the heroine “becomes” a lesbian after forced seduction. And in the end it turned out that according to the author’s logic, the heroine, even being in a lesbian relationship, remains “innocent” because she did not sleep with a man.
I don’t understand why so many yuri or BL authors like to romanticize sexual harassment.
We live in a world where inequality between the sexes is so much a normal part of society that, for some people, this is just how it is.
BL authors sometimes use sexual harassment as a way of dealing with the real-world harassment women deal with, by flipping the script, so that a man is the one being harassed.
For Yuri, I can’t answer that. Probably some creators just think it’s sexy…or think their audience does. Since so many straight people equate behaviors that look like harassment to me with romance, maybe they aren’t thinking its harassing at all. I meant that honestly…so much of what passes for romance in media is a guy harassing a woman until she gives in. It’s not appealing at all to me. But, clearly, I am not the audience for that stuff. ^_^
Well, for me, such a development of relationships seems simply forsed and not sincere, especially if in the future the author portrays this as a psychological dependence of MC on a dominant partner.
Whether it appears forced or not to us, it might serve some purpose to someone else. This is why I counsel that attempting to “understand” someone’s intent is not generally meaningful. It’s far more important to understand our own reactions to any given piece of art and what it says about ourselves. I am explicit here about my biases so reader understand *why* I feel what I feel about something. I hope they will have those conversations with themselves, as well.