Yamada is experiencing college life and it’s keeping her super busy. Kase-san is, as well. It’s a struggle for them to find time to be together and when they are, a lot of of their old habits keep them apart. And, neither of them have ever really decided what their relationship means to them as an individual. In Kase-san and Yamada, the sixth book of the Kase-san series, all of this will land on their heads, all at once.

Yamada makes a new friend, Hana, who is shockingly similar to herself in personality, which sets up a crisis with Kase-san, whom we have seen previously is prone to jealousy. Yamada also undergoes a crisis of jealousy, which is unusual enough for her that’s she’s not really sure what she’s feeling.

But what really stands out for me is that both Yamada and Kase-san are new enough to dating – and not around other queer couples – that they are both very closeted and don’t actually realize it.

On Twitter, I was chatting with some folks about this. When my wife and I moved out together, we were in a similar position for years – alone among peers and coworkers and schoolmates for whom being gay was not at all everyday, Coming out was not just a big thing for one’s own life, an admission of self, but a huge fucking load of baggage that could open people up to harassment, losing jobs, losing family or worse. That was a long time ago and seems to young people I know now a bit remote and abstract, but as the discussion went on we heard from folks in China and Japan who affirmed that being out was still quite fraught and who to be out to and how far to be out are everyday concerns.

I recently finished reading a YA lesbian romance that was very out in and of itself. Tell Me How You Really Feel, by Aminah Mae Safi has two women on the cover in a romantically intimate moment, with a pullquote that reads “The queer hate-to-love story you need in your life” on the cover. In the story, both protagonists are themselves out to friends, schoolmates and family, a priori and I think we’re still hoping that Kase-san and Yamada will one day be able to be comfortable being the people they are. We want to see them as happy, out young lesbians. But, they aren’t. And they won’t be because its not normalized in their society (and, more specifically, the society Takashima-sensei inhabits.) Instead, their discomfort is played for comedy. And how we feel about that says more about ourselves than the characters since they are merely ciphers for our own needs.

But when we take ourselves out of the equation. Yamada and Kase-san make some important progress in this issue. They increase the intimacy between them as adults and individuals, something that they could not have done in their hometown where other people’s expectations would create even more inflexible boundaries around them.

So, it may be true that they are not “out” as we understand that, but they make important steps towards being people who could support each other if they choose to come out in their future.

As we have come to expect from Seven Seas, the book’s technicals are lovely, with a really nice raised lettering cover and thick page count, so it feels like a substantial contribution to this series.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Characters – 8
Story – 7
Service – Does Kase-san in a suit count? Yes. 7
Yuri – 9 The real world is making itself more known.

Overall – 9

I’m still hoping for a scene in which they go to a Pride parade and a famous lesbian couple of a violinist and race car driver are the marshals. Just sayin’.