Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Strawberry Fields Once Again, Volume 2

April 23rd, 2021

As the pages of Kazura Kinosaki’s Strawberry Fields Once Again, Volume 2 opens, I am primed to find spanners in the works and, indeed, that is what happens, in several ways at once.

To begin where we left off, Akira has kissed Pure and in time-honored fiction fashion, Pure has passed out/overheated. Having kissed Pure, Akira pulls away, inexplicably telling herself that the woman who professes her love like 5 times a day, would have been put off by a kiss. (This is how you know Akira really is a lesbian. ^_^;) So that’s one spanner in the works.

Then we find that Pure has pushed Akira to go visit her father who, it turns out is alive and well and has a new family. Which she does and and has a lot of complicated feelings about it, quite naturally. Akira’s distancing from the world is making more sense now. Spanner number two. When Ruri, her brother confronts Pure with a question that seems out of the blue, then we might be forgiven for wondering if we’ve missed something critical because that seems a really big spanner. In a sense yes, we have, but it hasn’t happened yet, so we can be forgiven for forgetting that this is not just a school life Yuri drama. It will however have to remain a mystery as to what it is, until Volume 3. Unless you read my review of the Japanese volume, or remember the advice from my review of Volume 1. Then you know what it is and why the spanners are flying from every direction.

The art gets both tighter and more detailed and sketchier and less detailed in places. Akira’s face undergoes a massive change from the affectless face of Volume 1, as she runs through a gamut of expressions right until the end of this volume, where the biggest spanner of them all throws everything we think about this story into question.

When I originally read Volume 1 in Japanese I had little idea where the story was going, so put off reading Volume 2 for a while. By the time I got through Volume 2, I knew I had to read Volume 3, but was a little intimidated by it, for reasons that will become clear. Nonetheless as I finished the series, it was pretty well put together, with the kind of non-linear storytelling that keep me engaged.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Character – 7
Service – 2
Yuri – 6

Overall – 7

Thank you very much to Yen Press for the review copy, I really appreciate it and am looking forward to Volume 3 – which will be released in June of this year- very much. Thanks to everyone at Yen for bringing this story to an English reading audience.

Leave a Reply