Archive for May, 2021


Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – May 8, 2021

May 8th, 2021

Yuri Events

Toronto Comics Arts Festival, on Wednesday, May 12 at 7 PM Eastern NA Time will host Deb Aoki talking with creator Kabi Nagata. This is a don’t-miss panel for fans of her work.Nagata-sensei’s newest book, My Alcoholic Escape from Reality is out now digitally, and will hit shelves this week in print.

Check out the TCAF Youtube channel for more great panels!

I’ll be participating in the online convention Casacon this June. Since it’s a new audience, I’ll probably be doing my “Secret” History of Yaoi and Yuri and maybe a couple of other panels. ^_^

 

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Yuri Manga

Since we’ll all be watching the above interview with Kabi Nagata, grab a copy of her

Kodansha’s release of Chasing After Aoi Koshiba, Volume 1 is on shelves near you!

School Zone Girls by Ningiyau comes out this week from Seven Seas. Also from Seven Seas is the adult anthology Syrup, Volume 3, focusing on first times for couples. One more from Seven Seas, the fifth Adachi and Shimamura light novel, is headed your way this June.

Galette No.18 (ガレット) is available to backers by pre-order now. Check it out on their Fantia crowdfunding site.

Comic Cune magazine has begun serializing a new Yuri manga by Izumi Minami, Isekai Joshi Kangoku (異世界女子監獄), about a women’s prison in another world. My “lesbian pulpometer” would go through roof, except, no, it’s Comic Cune and super moe. ^_^ You can read it in Japanese on Comic Walker.

 

Anime News

Crunchyroll News’ Humberto Saabedra has the details on the dub of Netflix’s release of both Sailor Moon Eternal movies. Check out the dub trailer on Youtube and welcome back the Viz dub cast. ^_^

Sentai Filmworks has announced the license of 6-episode Princess Principal: Crown Handler. ANN’s Alex Mateo has the news.

Paul Chapman has the whole story on how the original masters for Project A-ko were lost and found on Crunchyroll News. Discotek’s remaster preview clip is definitely a marvel of color and action.

 

Yuri Audio Drama

Via Yurimother, Yuri VN creative studio SukeraSparo is releasing a Yuri audio drama,  Meidoindoriimu ~ Hime-sama to Meido no Amaama Seikatsu, about, well, the life of a princess’ maid. This marks the debut of the SukeraSono imprint for audio works.

 

Live-Action Stage News

Hojou Tsukasa’s classic seinen manga City Hunter is being given the Takarazuka treatment. Rafael Antonio Pineda has the details on ANN. It took me about 30 seconds to write a whole new plot for the drag king and her girl on the poster. ^_^

Cutey Honey is getting another live-action stage play. Komatsu-san over at CR news has the details and some great visuals.

 

Other News

For those of you watching Yasuke on Netflix, Japanese food and culture writer, author of the Just Bento Cookbook, Makiko Itoh, has written up an essay on the historical “black samurai” Yasuke. Makiko’s a very interesting writer about Japanese life and culture – and food! – check out her FB group, give her a like and a follow and support her Patreon. ^_^

 

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Hitogoto Desukara, Volume 3 (ヒトゴトですから!)

May 6th, 2021

The life of an employee in Human Resources is a never-ending push for making things better, at least according to Yuni’s Hitogoto Desukara, Volume 3 (ヒトゴトですか)ら!

This whole series has presented a pretty idealized version of HR, to be fair, and the main handwave we must accept to make this series work is that HR is there for the betterment of the employees’ experience. Once you accept that, business becomes a fun, challenging set of individual and group situations that HR is called upon in order to improve. In this volume, HR addresses issues like a woman who is a working mother and the team called upon to do a major business description project that will vastly improve employee experience!

I’ve worked in the corporate world my entire adult life – I am looking around the room here with a dry expression. 

On a more personal level, both Komori and and Yamanobe are called upon to take a test for leadership roles and Yamanobe directly is asked by her manager if she is interested in a manager position. Certainly, from what we’ve seen she’s more than capable, but not only does she say no, she seems to be in some crisis about it. Rumors fly – is Yamanobe taking a new job? Is she transferring? No, it turns out that cool, competent Yamanobe has commonplace imposter syndrome, oh no!

Interestingly, in the final pages, Komori confesses to a colleague that’s she got a date with a sex friend. Yamanobe is pretty taken aback that she was so blunt. But having taken control of their lives and determined to make an impact, we finish the series as we began it, Komori and Yamanobe with attractive female partners on their arm, at the same love hotel at the same time. Bwah-wa-waaaa~~.

I love Yuni’s art and characters. The business speak of the company and the handwave that HR is supposed to be a resource to support the employees, ended up giving the story more of a comedic feel than I am sure it was meant to. ^_^ You’ll forgive me if I can’t take a new business description as being a life-changing improvement for an on overworked mother. But I do actually like the enthusiasm the characters have for their jobs, and the random bits of business jargon that are so preciously explained. ^_^

Ultimately, its Komori and Yamanobe who keep bringing me back to this story.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 9
Story – 7
Service – 1 Not…really, a brief non-explicit bed scene for Komori
Yuri – 8 Two definitely queer women, one who is getting a little outer by the end.

Overall – 8

This series is officially licensed in English by Manga Planet and is available in print on Amazon JP, CD Japan and and digital on Bookwalker, where it appears to be on sale for half price right now. If you’ve worked in a big company, Hitogoto Desukara! will give you a new, Yurier, perspective on office life. ^_^





Bloom Into You Artbook, Astrolabe (アストロラーベ), Guest Review by tikkitavi

May 5th, 2021

Hello and welcome to another wonderful Guest Review Wednesday! Today we have a new Guest Reviewer today! tikkitavi is one of the friendly gang you’ll meet on the Okazu Discord, and he kindly offered to walk us through Nakatani Nio’s Yagate Kimi Ni Naru artbook. Please welcome tikkitavi and give him a warm welcome. The floor is yours, tikkitavi!

I like to say that I’ve been interested in Yuri since the days of Xena:Warrior Princess, but it took Bloom into You to spark my current regard for Yuri. I love the series on several levels, so when I discovered that Nakatani-sensei had an artbook named Astrolabe (アストロラーベ) available, naturally I had to add it to my collection.

In terms of content, this is a pretty complete snapshot of Bloom into You color and monochrome illustrations before 2020. The artbook was published in early 2020; given production lead times, it’s not surprising that it lacks images from later works such as the third Saeki Sayaka novel. I felt the lack most in that there isn’t a single image of Yuu, Touko, or Sayaka after high school in the artbook.

 

However, it includes promotional artwork, art for goods, SNS stickers, earlier Yuriten images, and the like, in addition to the expected book and video packaging art. (The SNS stickers and web art are particularly cute.) Most of the art features Touko and Yuu, plus a smattering involving Sayaka; for those interested in other characters, they appear quite rarely.

Beyond Bloom into You, it includes a couple of collaboration pieces that add characters from other series. There are also a handful of illustrations created by Nakatani-sensei for works such as a novel by Iruma-sensei (writer of the Saeki Sayaka novels) and art for the Ѐclair series.

There are only two pieces original to the artbook; the cover, and an extra end spread. A five-page chapter detailing the production of the cover art is a nice bonus, especially for artists and those interested in the steps involved in creating digital art. A photo of Nakatani-sensei’s work area augments this. Beyond this, Nakatani-sensei wrote captions for all the major works and a short afterword. I admit, I would have liked to see more new content, perhaps a short manga or the like.

 

Fans of the series, who understand the character’s relationships, will see the Yuri on almost every page; the weighted looks and intimate moments are a joy. Nakatani-sensei’s muted palette and clean imagery works well here. For those seeking anything more salacious than holding hands, they will need to look elsewhere.

Physically, the volume is typical for Japanese anime and manga artbooks. 128 pages, softcover, perfect bound, printed on a smooth heavy weight paper; a plastic slipcase pushes it slightly above average for the type. One could still wish for hardbound with a lay-flat binding, though that would be pretty uncommon (and expensive); but it would have helped with the two-page spreads quite a bit.

Ratings:

Production – 8
Content – 8
Yuri – 9
Service – 1 (a couple images of Yuu and Touko in swimsuits)

Overall – 8

Generally, I felt this was a quite nice but not exceptional artbook, a satisfactory addition to the library of anyone who appreciates
Nakatani-sensei’s work.

 

Erica here: Thank you very much! It’s good to know what the contents include! Artbooks are always a great mystery unless we get a chance to see inside. We appreciate you giving us this guided tour. ^_^ Astrolabe is available in print on Amazon JP, CD Japan, and as a e-book, on JP Kindle or Bookwalker!





Rain and the Other Side of You

May 3rd, 2021

Back in 2019  the folks at Galette Works gave us the problematic Ame to Kimi no Mukou (雨と君の向こう) written by Sakuraka Yukino with art by Momono Moto. I kind of wished they hadn’t. ^_^;

How surprised then, was I to find that Lilyka had picked it up and translated this volume it as Rain and the Other Side of You. When Lilyka ran it’s recent Sakura season sale, I figured that was as good a time to pick it up as any and so here we are looking at a problematic manga for a second time. It hasn’t aged well at all.

Mudarame Aki is a dead-eyed middle-schooler whose aggressive sexual behavior toward her teacher ought to have been the occasion for a house call from Youth Services, Teacher Kanou Yuka is presented as a woman who has no plan for her life, has been unsuccessful with men. When Mudarame-san throws herself at Yuka, she finds herself incapable of resisting.

In my review of the volume in Japanese, I wrote:

Aki[‘s] dead eyes and romantic overtures to her teacher scream “sexually abused” to this reader.

Yuka and Aki’s relationship is not a healthy one, not from the very beginning. Aki is manipulative and uses things like Yuka’s virginity as a weapon against her, which is just gross. Yuka tries going out with a guy and just finds herself going back to seek Aki’s company. When she and we see that our guess that Aki has been abused is correct, it still doesn’t make anything that’s happened okay.

If anything, it was worse on re-read, because it was in English and I couldn’t pretend I misunderstood Yuka’s justifications for not running for a phone and calling Youth Services.

What is good is Momono’s art, which captures Aki’s existential misery so well that it makes it thoroughly impossible to feel anything but pity for her and contempt for the adult who is not strong enough to help her. This is belied by an epilogue in which we see them some years later, looking happily domestic, but the mental gynmastics of this are too much to contemplate.

Okay, let’s set the dumpster fire of the story aside. Momono’s art is one of two reasons I read this book in the first place. She absolutely favors mopey, sad, traumatized characters as we may recall from her books Liberty, Volume 1 (リバティ), and Kimi Koi Limit. But the other reason is also the reason that this book being picked up by Lilyka is a good thing – this was the first of the books from Galette WORKS, the folks behind quarterly crowd-funded Yurimagazine, Galette (ガレット). If Lilyka can get some of those, I will be very pleased for us.

If you do pick this book up, let me warn you that the lettering is a little unsophisticated and the editing a bit shoddy. I’ve written to them to ask that the typos be fixed so if you do pick it up and they haven’t, let them know you think this is important, as well.

Ratings (same as the JP volume):

Art – 8
Story – 3
Characters – 5 No one would get a lunch invitation. Well, maybe the guy who goes out with Yuka, he seemed okay.
Yuri – 8
Service – The whole concept of an adult being attracted to a sexually abused child is a level of creepy I am unwilling to accept as anything other than criminal.

Overall – 5

It was not to my taste at all, where Liberty totally is. I hope you’ll all get to see that one day!

 





Comic Yuri Hime May 2021 (コミック百合姫2021年5月号)

May 2nd, 2021

Comic Yuri Hime May 2021 (コミック百合姫2021年5月号)’s cover story lets us enjoy the sensation of time travel and sharing crepes. Sincerely, this is a lovely story and I want to scream when I read it because it’s in 6 point type, for pity’s sake!

This issue was exceptionally good (for me ^_^) as it has a one-shot by Ohsawa Yayoi (yay!), “Sono hi, Night Date nanode” about an astronomy enthusiast who changes a web designer’s life. Absolutely charming on multiple levels. More like this please!

This chapter of “Watashi no Oshi ha Akuyaku Reijou” gives a teeny glimpse of Relaire, who, okay, yes, water slimes can be cute. ^_^

Usui Shio gets to really plumb the depths of adult emotions in both “Kaketa Tsuki to Donuts” and “Onna Tomodachi to Kekkonshitemita.” I really need to talk about the latter one day, because I think it’s doing itself a disservice if it heads towards romance. I think there is and ought to be a place for platonic intimacy-based family structure in this world.

But the story I want to focus on today is “Futari Escape” by Taguchi Shouichi. It’s been pretty goofy so far and not really “Yuri” but, like “Onna Tomodachi to Kekkonshitemita” works well as a story about two adult women who are a family without romance or physical intimacy. However, this chapter was just a lot of fun as “sempai” decides to buy a child’s food-preparation toy, in this case a hamburger maker. It’s so fun and nostalgic for them both, they end up buying a whole range of food prep toys, including a few that seem awfully unlikely. ^_^

When I was a child of course we also had these kind of toys, but they were never for real food, only sweets. I had an Easy Bake Oven, as most girls of my generation had. My sister was give a tootsie roll maker that I’m pretty sure I was the only one who used. I’ve had a fondness for flavored tootsie rolls since. (Lemon was the best, my sister preferred cherry.) Of course some folks had shaved ice or cotton candy machines (I bought a kitchen version of the latter as an adult, in fact. ^_^) So while we didn’t have kiddy kebob makers or takoyaki or jagariko makers, I can totally see the appeal. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 8

As always, this magazine had more series I read and like than mentioned here, and others I do not. And, as usual, “Semelparous” is still utterly, insultingly ridiculous.

The June issue is on shelves now! I look forward to “meeting” Relaire.