Archive for the English Manga Category


I Wanna Be Your Girl, Volume 1

September 11th, 2025

by Eleanor Walker, Okazu Staff Writer

It’s always nice to see a new publisher enter the manga space, especially one whose first title is explicitly LGBT+. I Wanna Be Your Girl ,Volume 1 tells the story of two childhood friends, Hime and Akira. But when Akira comes out as trans before starting high school, headstrong and fiery Hime makes it her life’s mission to protect her best friend from the world. Only the world turns out to be a little more complicated and less black and white than Hime realises.

It’s so nice to read a manga where the teenage characters actually feel like real teenagers, but this one is just a little more personal to me than most. When I was in high school, I had a crush on someone who I thought was a boy, but she told me she was actually a girl. My reaction at that point was “huh, that’s a bit weird but ok” and still kept kissing her. Maybe I should have realised earlier on that I wasn’t straight… But having experienced something similar myself, I can believe Hime when she acts the way she does to try and protect Akira. She’s clearly madly in love with her and will do anything for her, and in a show of entirely well meaning solidarity, shows up to school in the boys’ uniform Akira’s parents bought for her. This however causes a new set of problems (Disclaimer: I am not trans but I am married to a trans woman and have many trans friends) Akira, like most trans people, just wants to get on with her life and not have people make a big deal about the fact she’s trans, and Hime is unintentionally shining a spotlight on her. The classroom erupts into chaos and their rather strict teacher yells at everyone to calm down and be quiet.

It seems though, that there is more to the teacher than first meets the eye. He sits Hime down for a talk one day, and it’s strongly suggested that he’s gone through something similar regarding identity in the past, but by the end of the volume Hime and Akira have even managed to make some friends in their class, and they struggle over which after school club to join together. Just normal teenager things.

I cannot recommend this series enough for queer/questioning/curious teenagers and those around them. I wish something like this had existed when I was this age.

Ratings: 

Story – 7
Art – 6. It’s nothing groundbreaking but it does the job.
Characters – 8
Service – n/a
LGBTQ — 10

Overall – 8 but probably 9 if you’re a confused teenager looking for something to relate to.

 





Tough Love At The Office: The Complete Yuri Collection

August 4th, 2025

A woman with ripped blouse and bloodies face and body, scowls at a pair of woman's legs in white heels and a pink skirt.CW: Extreme personal violence, rape, emotional and psychological abuse in a workplace setting.

Sal Jiang’s Black & White, the  3-volume series of violent and psychopathic competition at highly competitive Japanese financial firm is now available in English as Tough Love at the Office: The Complete Yuri Collection and it asks us to ask ourselves what is really important to us….but not until we grin through 400+ pages of two women who are trying to eat each other for lunch, in all the meanings of that phrase. 

Kuroda Kayo comes in to her new job brimming with confidence and acclaim and immediately runs into Shirakwa Junko, who has her eyes set on power. The two of them instantly dislike one another, but also cannot stop having violent, angry sex that is clearly meant as rape to destroy the others’ will. Both are equally matched in smarts, skills, popularity and desire to destroy the other. 

I loved the first volume of this in Japanese and I still think it is the strongest part of the story. To quote myself from my review of the JP Volume 1, “Jiang’s art is terrific – clean and stylish, cute and approachable, and nasty af, in turns as the narrative requires. The characters are terrible people, but they sometimes do good or kind things, which gives them nuance. Neither of them is a sadist to the pleasant office drones around them. They are, however, two dominant humans fighting for dominance in every way possible. Yeah, baby. I’ll take as much of this as I can get.”

When Kuroda and Shirakawa are teamed up by a scheming senior executive, he gets exactly what he hopes for – an unethical power-hungry machine to take down his enemies. But then they are turned on one another again. When Kuroda makes a misstep on an overseas trip, she causes a chain reaction that will ultimately lead to the end of the series…

…where we are asked to consider what is truly important to us. The answer to that question for both Kuroda and Shirakawa may surprise you. 

This is not a Baihe-style “in love with my cold, tough boss” story. This is a potentially/eventually disturbing exploration of deepest, darkest expressions of five of the seven deadly sins. But what this story also is is pitting two evenly matched competitors against each other in a evenly balanced match. And for that reason, I can enjoy the heck out of it (although I admit, I would have ended it differently. ^_^) 

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Service – 7 Not a lot of nudity, but a lot of sex and violence
Yuri – 7 See above

Overall – 10

 

 

Alexa Frank’s translation and Asha Bardon’s adaptation does everything it can with the blurry “business” stuff . The Seven Seas team does a great job here as usual. 





Rainbows After Storms, Volume 4

August 1st, 2025

Two girls in Japanese sailor-style school uniforms of white blouses with blue collard, blue skirts, red ties, sit close on a bench, one sleeps, while the other gestures us to be quiet.In Rainbows After Storms, Volume 4, Chidori and Nanoha are still dating…and still keeping it from everyone. ^_^

Summer has arrived and there is a LOT going on for these two – sleepovers and a day at the beach bring our to lovebirds closer, even as they are trying to keep their relationship hidden. On sleepover night, it seems obvious that their friends are trolling them, about it, but not so obviously that they notice. 

Then the school festival arrives and with it, that troubling piece of Chidori’s history allude to in the last volume. Because, as we see, Chidori wasn’t her first love. The story is a familiar one in Japanese media, Chidori’s sempai initiated an affectionate that she then withdrew when Chidori returned the emotion. We’ve seen this story before, most notably in Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka. Here, when Igarashi snidely asks Chidori if she and Nanoha are really an item, Nanoha throws the truth in sempai’s face, in what they will later remember was their first coming out. In my review of Volume 4 in Japanese, I name Igarashi a “fairly stereotypical Yuri villain” who “realizes that she might well have made a terrible mistake with her life.”

Chidori had already been admonished by Nanoha to open up to her and rely on her a bit more.  At this point, Chidori has nothing left to hide. On the night of the fireworks festival, they kiss.

We’re only a third through this series, so there’s a lot more of Nanoha and Chidori yet to come, but be warned…they will still imagine that they are hiding their increasingly obvious feelings for one another.  ^_^

I did want to mention that one of the folks over on the Okazu Discord noted that every chapter tells us this same thing, but the words themselves are always a slightly different. “The two of us are dating…but its a secret…from everyone.” “Chidori…and Nanoha… They’re keeping it a secret from everyone… but they’re dating.” Each chapter begins ever-so-slightly differently. It’s an interesting touch and one that I admit I never noticed. So thanks to akatsukinoluna, for noting that. 

Viz Media has done nice work with this volume. David Evelyn’s translation feels true to the tone of the original and to the characters. The lettering by Annalise “Ace” Christman is outstanding. I always will like it when full touch-up is used, since it allows us the time to just “read” the story.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 6
Service – 4 Bathing suits and showers. So…ugh

Overall – 6

As I said of the Japanese volume, “For a series which, until this moment, had climaxed with hand-holding, this was a big volume.”





SHWD: The Complete Yuri Collection

July 21st, 2025

by Matt Marcus, Staff WriterTwo women line on the ground smiling at each other. They are both wearing SWAT-like outfits that are covered in black gore. One woman has red hair, a fit build, and a mechanical arm. The other has short black hair and a broad build

CWs: death, gore, child murder, attempted suicide

If these reviews had bylines, this one’s would be “the perils of world building”.

In SHWD: The Complete Yuri Collection, major cities are plagued by the Dynamis, a bio weapon made during the previous world war. Those exposed become immediately violent and attack all of those near them. Airi Koga, a bulky, muscular 22-year-old woman is the newest recruit at the Special Hazardous Waste Department, a private company that specializes in the neutralization of Dynamis.

Koga gets paired up with the Tokyo division’s ace Shino Sawada, a steely woman who seems purpose-built to fight the Dynamis. Koga is immediately smitten with her new boss, and spends the duration of the story wagging her tail at any scrap of approval from Sawada.

In general, I like the dynamic between the leads but I didn’t find it strong enough to bear the weight of the whole series. The problem ends up being that neither character changes very much over the 16 chapters. Koga pushes through every red flag and warning given to her about Sawada, but she is too ensorcelled to acknowledge them. The emotional climax of their story is simply Koga asserting that her puppy-love for Sawada is real in defiance of a big reveal that should otherwise cast extreme doubt on Sawada’s character. It also doesn’t help that this climax lands in the middle of a messy exposition dump that feels like set up for a longer series that we will never see (more on that later). Nevertheless, if you love Yuri where the leads show their affection through their fists, you’ll likely be plenty pleased with their arc.

There is also a secondary pairing from the Fukuoka branch: Leone “Leo” Cass and Nonaka. The former is a hunky, affectionate operative from the US; the latter a short-tempered ex-yakuza. I felt this pairing had the strongest thematic resonance: Leo lost her 8-year-old daughter and has become viscerally nauseous at the sight of children, while Nonaka lost family members and school friends to an attack that left her body unable to mature, forever stuck in the form of a child.

Leo is by far my favorite character in the series: she adds both levity and pathos, both with her playful-but-caring nature and her vulnerability. Despite appearing in control at all times, she has an emotional weak point that, when exposed, sends her immediately into deep despair. It really highlights how the Dynamis’ mental pollution leaves even the strongest operatives balancing their sanity on a knife’s edge. Nonaka, unfortunately, is as half-baked in her characterization as she is in her physical appearance. Despite her, dare I say, shitty demeanor towards Leo, there is “dere” under that “tsun”, but we are never told whence that affection came which leaves her feeling a bit hollow. That said, the way that Nonaka offers herself as Leo’s safe space to recover from mental pollution feels surprisingly sweet. However, it comes with the obvious caveat that while Nonaka is mentally mature, the optics of her and Leo together has some notable ick factor.

One of the draws of a sci-fi setting is the ability to explore themes with extreme precision. SHWD has a clear setup to explore how people process and react to grief. Every named operative was motivated to join the company because of someone they lost to the effects of the Dynamis—and we are shown enough of those gruesome moments to give bite to the characters’ feelings. The problem is that the story doesn’t follow through with this angle, and instead shoehorns in a conspiracy plot in the final stretch that ends up undermining those motivations. As it turns out, SHWD is secretly the causers of the Dynamis outbreak (due to an unnamed disgruntled evil scientist, natch). Leo drops one line about staying with SHWD simply to minimize harm, but it. It’s the equivalent of someone joining an addiction center run by Perdue Pharma after a loved one died of an opioid overdose.

Sawada stands ominously in front of closed blinds in her office, telling Koga in the foreground "This is the world's plot."

When she ’bout to tell you the world’s plot.

What also doesn’t help the final narrative twist is the way it is written. The pages where Sawada explains the Dynamis’ true history is, to be frank, very incoherent. The grammar and sentence structure doesn’t flow at all, or at best does if you squint really hard. One section reads:

“As world wars became more frequent, the weapons needed to end them became increasingly more radical.

In other words, soldiers lost their fighting spirit.

A weapon that affects the spirit of enemy soldiers is difficult to reproduce.”

I think the meaning here is supposed to be something along the lines of: “Constant world wars with escalating weaponry began to seriously erode the morale of the military rank-and-file. With their existences on the line, many governments developed methods to combat the emotional tolls of war, but their effects were short-lived.” What’s on the page feels like a very rough-cut translation that took me multiple reads to parse.

I don’t want to make any firm claims, but given that Seven Seas decided to forgo separate volume releases after the first one and instead pivoted to an omnibus format coupled with the fact that this wasn’t a problem anywhere prior to the Volume 3 sections makes me wonder if shortcuts were used for the later chapters. It could also be plausible that it’s just as confusing in the original Japanese. Either way, you can tell that sono.N was wrestling with fitting in “the world’s plot” in the limited space of the back of this series. It’s as if the world-building was too good for the space that was given, leaving me wanting the themes and character motivations to be more consistent and clear than they are.

I would say that I do like sono.N’s art. The Dynamis are formless but very creepy, the character designs are fun (props again to body diversity), and the action is well-conveyed. Occasionally, though, characters do look off model in a way that messes with their scale relative to each other: case in point, Koga looks a lot less beefy on the cover compared to inside the book. It’s a minor gripe, though.

If you are looking for a short Yuri sci-fi story with badass women in it, and you can stomach some bad things happening (mostly to children), this meaty omnibus is an easy book to recommend. I just know that a lot of meat was left on the bone. 

Art – 8 Plenty creepy when needed
Story – 6 A lot of potential that was left unfulfilled and a bit grim at times
Characters – 7 Koga and Leo are plenty loveable, the rest…eh
Service – 4 Mostly if you like muscular women (plus one bath scene)
Yuri – 8 / LGBTQ – 8 The imprint is called “Girls’ Love” for a reason

Overall – 7 A snack that could have been a four course meal

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.





Assorted Entanglements, Volume 7

June 30th, 2025

The cover of Assorted Entanglements volume 7. Shizuku and Saori lie in bed together in their school uniforms, both looking at their phones. Shizuku has her arm around Saori's shoulders and is looking over at her. You can see their matching gorilla phone charms hanging from their phone cases.

by Matt Marcus, Staff Writer

I ran into an ex once at the public batting cages in Arlington, VA. Well, she wasn’t really an ex, more like the other half of a pseudo-situationship. I spied her out of the corner of my eye as my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I looked for an open spot. If I were punching up this story, I would say we locked eyes through the wire fence. In a moment frozen in time, I’d be shot through with the pain of regret of decisions not made sooner, words left unsaid. My date would notice I had become quiet and distracted; I would shrug off any questions about it despite my soured mood, kicking off a downward spiral that ruins our date. But nothing so dramatic happened; we simply found an open cage, hit some dingers, and had a lovely rest of our evening.

In the previous volume of Assorted Entanglements, Shizuku was rattled by seeing a woman we haven’t seen before while walking Saori back to her house. Saori noticed, but couldn’t bring herself to ask. Turns out that the garishly-dressed woman is Shizuku’s ex.

A notable amount of Assorted Entanglements Volume 7 is dedicated to Shizuku’s past with this woman, Miki, and what Saori decides to do in response. This is the most seriously dramatic tone that Mikanuji-sensei has gone for in this series and I think that it pays off. We thankfully get no more detail about the abuse she suffered from her parents (and the violent reaction that landed her in juvvie), but her story with Miki, a hairstylist who took Shizuku in after she ran away from her foster parents, is tantamount to grooming. We don’t know much about how Shizuku extricated herself from that relationship or how she feels about it now (though she still wears her hair with the cornrows that is Miki’s personal style), but the effect of the encounter in the present makes her retread into her prickly Bad Girl shell.

Thankfully, what could prove to be a setback in “progress” turns into the opportunity for Saori to finally admit her honest feelings–that despite all her bluster and dismissal, she does indeed love Shizuku. Shizuku tacitly accepts this, and another ship sails. To be honest, I’m still iffy on the recurring theme that these so-called delinquents (read: abused young women) who have severe self-worth issues need to be whipped into shape by the normie girls/women who happen to love them. If I am being charitable, I’d highlight that the point being made is that they (Shizuku and Minami) are indeed worthy of the love they receive, which is good and true. I just wish they weren’t punished by their lovers for struggling with accepting affection.

Let’s not forget that this is still an ensemble story. Iori and Minami are up to their normal hijinks (this time they go to an onsen!). We get one short chapter of Sugimoto at her part-time job glowing about her aquarium date and not taking heed of her boss’ advice not to get her hopes up. Unfortunately, Heke-sensei and Shinohara-san finally succumbed to Mikanuji-sensei’s love of “slapstick” violence for one gag, but otherwise their chapters continue to be a sweet love story of a failgirl nerd and her blunt-but-secretly-tender lover/boss. It’s all solidly entertaining stuff.

If you have been waiting, nay, shouting at the pages for Shizuku and Saori to finally just get over themselves and have it out, then you will be pleased as punch here. With 3 out of 4 couples established, that leaves one last problematic pair to wrap up.

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Service – 1
Yuri – 8 / LGBTQ – 8

Overall – 8 Somehow made me “happy” for the worst couple here

The story of these mismatched women continues in Volume 8, coming our way in August.

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.