Miwa, like many young women, has come to college and hopes to fall in love. Also like many young women, she’s a bit unsure how to go about that. When she meets Saeko, the two of them start hanging out. They enjoy each other’s company. Miwa is introduced to Saeko’s circle – a group of folks working on becoming a band.  Saeko and Miwa are hanging out so much, that Saeko finally suggests that they just…date. And so they do.

But it’s not all smooth sailing. They don’t quite seem to be matching up; neither their physical needs, nor their communication styles are in sync. They both have some baggage too, before they can make this work.  In How Do We Relationship, Volume 1, Miwa and Saeko take their first steps along a path for which they cannot see the destination.

Tamifull’s art has a great feel of being grounded in reality – and even more appealingly, so does the writing. Both Miwa and Saeko are someone we might know,  folks we might have hung out with at school…or have been ourselves. ^_^ I remember those days in college when my relationships with other people were tenuous enough that I didn’t know who to rely on.

This story, while it is a romance, it is really a story about communication. Will Saeko and Miwa be able to work things out and communicate? I don’t want to jump the gun, but with five volumes already in Japanese and a 6th on the way, we can at the very least guess that they might. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 6
Characters – 7
Yuri – 9 / LGBTQ – 5
Service – 4

Overall – 8

If you like stories of people figuring out stuff beyond just “do I like her?” and how to navigate within a more complex society than high school, How Do We Relationship, might just be the narrative you’re looking for. I will want you, however, it will be a bumpy ride. ^_^

In Volume 1, we meet Mari a girl at a school for witches who apparently has no magic. Assigned to help her in her studies is top student Alice who has a great deal of magic, and who has been warned to never fall in love. As I say in my review, ” Mari and Alice discover that they can transcend not only their personal limitations, but the strictures placed upon witches. Mari becomes a key and a lock, which Alice unlocks. In doing so, she finds herself changed.”

In A Witch’s Love At The End of The World, Volume 2, Kujira’s tale of magic and loss and love takes a shocking turn, as Mari and Alice find themselves wandering Mari’s old neighborhood…only to discover that all traces of her family have been disappeared completely. The situation is not at all cleared up when Madam Dolly finds them and sends them back to the school. Alice is feeling feeling she has been explicitly warned to stay away from and Mari, who doesn’t really care about being a witch at all, just wants to know what the heck is going on.

This book reminds me a great deal of a story from my childhood that I loved. The multiple perspectives of same events and characters trying to understand those perspectives. It’s not at all the same story, but it has a similar feel. As a result, I find myself probably more engaged with Mari’s quest to find the truth and make a path for her and Alice through this than maybe I might otherwise might have. In any case, I still enjoy the art – which has become much more filled in now that Mari and Alice are in the “real” world –  and the characters. I hope the story will hold up to through the end.

Yen’s edition is nicely put together, featuring the translation of Eleanor Summers and lettering stylings by Sara Linsley (who, relevantly, just had a great little Twitter thread about lettering over art.)

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – The jump comes from an unlikely quarter, but…yes
Service – Still not really

Overall – 8

Volume 3 will be out in May, and I’m hoping for the ending I want, not the ending it’ll probably get. ^_^

Thanks so much to Yen Press for the review copy and for bringing out this interesting story.

Here we are at the end of Akashi’s workplace-romance that became a completely different story. In Still Sick, Volume 3, as I said in my review of the Japanese edition, there is a lot of story to tell and, overall, this volume is up to the task.

Maekawa is still locked in a struggle with herself about drawing manga. But being locked in a struggle is what Akane does best, as she’s simultaneously locked in two other struggles. Also vying for her attention is her increasingly serious feelings for Shimizu Makoto ,and her refusal/inability to deal with her depression…a depression that has some deep roots.

Makoto, in the meantime, has decided to be everything she can be for Akane. She’s supportive of the other woman’s choices, and forces her to confront some of those roots. And, while Makoto forces Akane to grow on in her personal life, her editor pushes her to do the same professionally. When the dam breaks for her, Akane, she is finally able to get past her blocks. Makoto takes a leap into the unknown too. Ultimately they walk together into a much less foreseeable future than either of them could have predicted.

As a story, this was also a stronger one than we could have predicted. There was a lot of room for Akane’s passive-aggressive nature to just continue to be played for “laughs,” but I believe that would have done a disservice to characters and readers. Instead, Akashi ties the series up pretty tightly and allows us to close the book knowing neither we nor Akane and Makoto were jerked around by lazy writing. As I said with the JP edition, to get everything tidy, the art suffers on some places, but I will always take a well-told tale with slightly sketchy art over detailed art, with an underdeveloped story.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Characters – 9
Story – 9
Yuri – 9, LGBTQ – 7
Service – 3 some noodling around, underwear, bed

Overall – 9

Tokyopop did a decent job on the technicals with a solid translation by Katie Kimura, editing by Lena Atanassova and some very nice letting and retouch by Vibraant Publishing Studio. I took a closer look at the cover design and, honestly, without the title and author in black across front of the the cover, Sol DeLeo & Soodam Lee’s cover design is honestly more open and easy to read than the original. Nice work, folks!

Tokyopop has not announced any other Yuri Yuri manga, but they are still bringing out manga-inspired comics, so keep an out for more from them. ^_^

Hanako is a young woman who has traveled from Japan to meet her favorite author. Volume 1 follows Hanako as she meets the beautiful, yet tragic Lady Alice and enters into her service. We watch their relationship deepen and their secrets come to light in Volume 2. Here we are, then, in the final volume and its hard to imagine that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And yet.

One of the burdens of writing historical fiction is, quite obviously, history. As Dr. Pepperco writes a story explicitly set in a time and place where the society would, could and did place women in mental institutions for the crime of independent thinking or non-conforming behavior, it takes commitment to write a better end. Volume 3 of Goodbye, My Rose Garden has that commitment. Therefore, as we watch over them benevolently, we see Alice and Hanako meet women of like mind, find solace in each other and create both the tunnel and the light for one another.

I’ve been talking a lot recently about media that imagines a better way forward. I also feel there is room for stories that supplies us a better way to look backward. Not every story needs an unhappy ending….but more to the point, not every real story had an unhappy ending. Some 130 years previous to the setting of this book, and some 300 miles to the northwest in Wales, about 6 hours by car now, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler lived together and built a joyful life for themselves. (I find all arguments that they didn’t have a sexual relationship because they didn’t leave proof to be absolutely idiotic. Who does that? They called each other wife, let’s not be dumbasses.) Let us look to the Ladies of Llangollen then, for Alice and Hanako’s new life, in which they choose to live somewhere quietly together, supporting themselves as writers and raising a lovely rose garden.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 3
Yuri – 8

Overall – 8

I appreciated some of the visual touches in this book, but once again, far more important were the literary references. Victor Franks may not have been real, but the other writers whose works are mentioned, are. While it’s not in Hastings, I recommend to you The Feminist Bookshop in Brighton, another UK beach town with a long, queer history, where you can find classics like Kate Chopin’s writing and newer works, maybe a biography of Ann Lister, as well as a really terrific comics section, with a fair bit of lesbian representation…and even a Yuri manga or two! So, when this pandemic is over, maybe you and your girl can just play at being Hanako and and Alice for a day in a nice little queer-friendly bookstore in a English beachside town. ^_^

My sincere thanks to Seven Seas for the review copy! It’s always a pleasure to see how the Seven Seas team handles work like this, which has the interesting challenge of both time period and English ideas being translated from Japanese back into English. Nice work by translator Amber Tamosaitis, adapter Cae Hawksmoor and letterer Kaitlyn Wiley and the whole Seven Seas crew!