Yuri Manga: Aoi Hana, Sweet Blue Flowers Volume 1 (青い花)

March 31st, 2006

Aoi Hana, or Sweet Blue Flowers as it is translated on the cover, by Shimura Takako, is both cute and sweet – and I liked it quite a bit. Which is pretty surprising, as it is both genuinely cute and sweet.

In essence, this manga is the story of four schoolgirls: Fumi, Akira, Yasuko and Kyouko and their various loves and friendships. It is not loli uber-cute or gaggingly sweet, nor is it highly melodramatic. It’s actually more vaguely realistic, with an emphasis on the usual conventions and tropes of schoolgirl yuri – crushes on best friends, sempai, etc. The tone is quiet, the relationships realistic-ish.

Fumi comes back to the town she grew up in, for the first time since grammar school. She meets, without realizing it, her childhood friend Akira – a pleasantly energetic and cheerful girl. When they were much younger, Akira had been Fumi’s protector, keeping her out of harm of bullies and saving her from the unpleasant emotional consequences of common pre-school blunders like bathroom accidents. Fumi is now a tall, attractive young woman, but still shy and retired. Without realizing who each other is, they meet on a train when Akira saves Fumi from a pervert. (Although why Japanese women don’t simply break train pervert’s fingers at the bottom joint, I’ll never really understand…it’d be easy to ID the guy with the broken finger. But I once again digress.) Fumi and Akira are reunited as friends when their mothers get together and the light dawns upon them. This time around, they are going to separate girls’ schools.

Fumi learns that her cousin is getting married, but seems appalled rather than pleased…. We learn later that they were having a physical relationship and Fumi had no idea she was engaged.

Kyouko is Akira’s classmate at school. It’s club time and the two decide to join acting club together. Kyouko has a secret – she is in love with an upperclassman at Fumi’s school. Fumi, unbeknownst to anyone is also developing a massive crush on this upperclassman, Yasuko. Fumi joins the club Yasuko is in – not really caring that it’s theater, just to be near the older girl. When Fumi’s school theater club decides to visit Akira’s school – to take in the wonderful rarified air of this oh-so-glamorous place – Fumi happens to wander down a hall where Kyouko confesses her feelings to Yasuko….and is rejected.

Koyuko runs off, but as Yasuko leaves she sees Fumi crouching down trying to be invisible. Yasuko asks Fumi to go with her outside – and hits on her with subtlelty and charm. Fumi’s a goner. Yasuko asks her out and she agrees.

In the meantime Kyouko’s brother asks for help trying to set up an “aicon” – an arranged group date-thing. Akira wants to go, but her brother screws it up, causing mild emotional damage. Luckily Akira has pretty high hit points, so she survives.

In the meantime, Yasuko takes Fumi out on a date. Their relationship might actually have to win for one of the most real and normal I’ve seen in anime and manga. They do everything in the right order. Hold hands, kiss, etc. Not all at once and not after a gap of a gazillion years. Fumi is completely totally gaga over Yasuko and so far, at least, Yasuko hasn’t been a scuzzball. In fact, she’s been very sweet and romantic, which is good, ’cause Fumi’s fairly fragile. They share their first kiss in the library stacks – I approve. :-)

The *drama* of the latter part of the book is hardly even that. Yasuko asks Fumi if she can walk to school with her, but Fumi has already given that promise to Akira. An awkward meeting between the three makes Fumi feel that she has to tell Yasuko, quite overly-seriously, that she can’t walk with her. Yasuko laughs and wonders when she got involved in a grammar school conversation, but she’s fine with the whole thing. Fumi isn’t *quite* done, yet, and tells Akira about her relationship with Yasuko. Yasuko’s mightly impressed that Fumi came out to Akira, but still thinks the drama was a bit silly.

Akira isn’t upset, but she’s not really sure *what* to think. She asks Kyouko what she’d say, hypothetically speaking, if Akira told her that she was in love with a girl. Kyouko is still smarting from Yasuko’s rejection, but she smiles and responds with the same question. Akira thinks about it and decides she couldn’t care less who her friends are in love with, as long as they are happy.

Kyouko runs into Fumi and asks her if she’s in love with Yasuko. Fumi, blushing and stuttering admits she is. Kyouko tells her that Yasuko’s wonderful – and Akira’s a really nice girl, then wanders off mysteriously.

That night Yasuko calls Fumi. They share the usual sweet nothings, telling each other that they love one another (it was very “aww” inspiring). Before she gets off the phone Yasuko asks about Fumi’s first love. Fumi thinks briefly of the cousin she was playing around with at the beginning of the book, but realizes that her first true love was back in grammar school, when she fell in love with Akira.

To Be Continued, the end of Volume 1 says.

Really, this was just a very pleasant yuri manga. No fanservice, no fetish (except for the schoolgirl thing, but the uniforms are really dull and uninterestng and not at all unreasonably fetishy.) It’s just a nice, semi-realistic tale of first loves and friendship among girls. I imagine it will remain almost completely unknown as a result.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 8
Story – 7
Yuri – 8
Service – 1

Overall – 8

If you are looking for something that isn’t lowest common denominator Yuri – you’ve found it with Aoi Hana. I’m definitely looking forward to the next volume.

Posted in Aoi Hana/ Sweet Blue Flowers, LGBTQ, Shimura Takako, Yuri Manga | 10 Comments »


Kamikaze Girls Manga

March 30th, 2006

Remember – the order to encounter any story with the maximum amount of enjoyment is: 1) visual media; 2) manga; 3) novel. Why this order? Because with every succeeding version, you get more detail, more richness of story and character and more of the original author’s intent. Go the other way, and you get annoyed at the loss of depth, character development and scenes that had to be cut for time and convenience.

Which brings us to the Kamikaze Girls manga. (Don’t be fooled by the god-awful indexing at Amazon, which lists this as the novel. It is not the novel. The novel does not have people on the cover.)

The movie, as you may remember from my glowing review, was brilliant. Surreal and funny and reasonably well-paced, the movie was a visual and mental treat. I have since encountered two other movies by the same team, one I mentioned in my Sakuracon report, Survival Style 5 one a drug-induced hallucination, Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san, and there are some things that are common to all. But by far and away, Kamikaze Girls was the best of the bunch.

So, of course, I wanted to read the manga.

It was – different. For reasons known only to the manga artist, she made Ichiko, our crude, but honest, Yanki (gang girl) very boyish and added a gag about her being mistaken for a boy. Momoko is made to look even younger than she does in the movie, but overall the relationship between them is much the same – that is, they are almost destined to be friends, despite their lack of common ground. There is a word in Japanese, ironically used by Shinokita Reiko (Kita) in YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki to describe her similar relationship with Yajima Junko (Yaji) – I can’t find it at the moment, but it means people who can’t, somehow, get rid of one another. ^_^

What was stranger to me than turning Ichiko into a bishounen-looking girl, was that the entire movie/novel, was only half the manga. The second half was a wholly new story made up by the manga artist detailing the trials and tribulations of Ichiko’s possible love for the twin brother of the guy she falls for in the first half. (In the movie, he is made into a parody of a gang type, in the novel, he’s just a cool guy.) The twin, whose name is silly, wants to be a ballet dancer. Ichiko ends up donning goth loli clothes once more to inspire him as he tries out for his dream role. It really isn’t a bad story, and is largely in keeping with the utter silliness of the movie, only it’s drawn and written as a straight shoujo manga complete with melodramatic angst. I’m not sure if it worked or not. If you read the novel first, it doesn’t. Remember, keep the order and keep your sanity. :-)

More importantly to us Yuri fans, the first half of the manga ends much as the movie does, with Momoko riding off on the back of Ichiko’s bike. As in the novel, Momoko lays her head on Ichiko’s back, “like a lover” and thinks that she does, indeed love Ichiko. (The second half of the manga sort of makes that moot, but screw it – that’s what we have good imaginations for. ^_^)

So, like the movie, this is a story of shinyuu, of friendship not of desire. As another retelling of a quirky and unique story – the manga comes in as interesting, but not captivating.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 7
Story – 6
Yuri – 1
Service- 1

Overall – 6

If you’ve read the novel – don’t bother with the manga. If you haven’t, then try it. The movie is better and the novel the best, but the manga isn’t bad.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »


In My Opinion…

March 29th, 2006

This is not really today’s post.

I’m not sure there *will* be a post today, as I’m back at work with a bad something-or-other – you know, the kind of cold they always get in anime, where they have fevers and hallucinations and you wonder, “Who on earth gets a cold like that?” Well, that’s what I have today. And boy you should have seen me in my morning training session…it was special, I can tell you.)

In any case, I wanted to once again say “you’re welcome” to all the many, many people who wrote in to thank me for the notes on the Maria-sama ga Miteru novels. I cannot tell you how good it makes me feel to know that you all enjoy reading them. They will be coming a bit slower from now on, as I have to summarize the whole book, rather than just note differences between novel and anime. But they will keep coming, I promise. :-)

Also, I thought it might be fun to do a Q&A entry one day soon, so I am offering up this idea to you:

Send me a question – any question, about anything, whether anime, manga, life, whatever, yuri-related or not – and I will give you my honest (at least at that moment) opinion on it. Want to know what I REALLY think of Kannazuki no Miko, or gay marriage or The Planets (Gustave Holst’s or Dava Sobel’s, your choice) or anything else? Send in questions to the comments section of this entry, or email me at [email protected], and I will, in a future post, give you my honest, sincere and completely biased opinions.

Why do I think you care about my opinions? Well, I have several reasons. In every panel or lecture I ever do, a largish bulk of the questions start with “What do you think about…?” I’ve been asked my opinion of gay life, Dragonball Z, the manga industry in Japan and America, the definition of a multitude of Japanese words and concepts, and my understanding of just about every possible anime or manga that ever might be considered to have even some yuri content. Not to mention various formats for writing, creating characters, how to handle negative email, open admiration from fans, and derision.

And lastly, you’re reading this web log, which makes me believe that you care about my opinion – even if it is only to scoff at it.

In other words, for good or bad, people seem to care about my opinion.

So, feel free to send me a question and sometime in the next week or so, I’ll answer it here. All questions welcome, although I may combine questions for neatness or ignore incredibly rude and stupid ones. Or maybe not. :-) I guess we’ll see, won’t we? lol

Posted in Now This Is Only My Opinion | 9 Comments »


Sakuracon 2006 Event Report

March 28th, 2006

The picture to the left here, graced the badges and program book at Sakuracon. We all commented that they must be a yuri couple as they are next to each other and touching. LOL (Little inside joke there from the Yuricon Mailing List.)

I’m going to be blunt here – Seattle is an odd city. The people, especially the panhandlers, were very creepy and had no sense of a sufficient personal space so as not to arouse the wrath of east coast visitors. I figure that in New York the homeless and/or crazy are so busy trying to survive that they don’t really have time or energy to get into my face. In Seattle, clearly they have plenty of time and energy…and get into my face, they did.

The city itself is pleasant enough. Through no one’s fault, the museum I wanted most to visit was closed, so that was a bit of a bummer. But we did manage to do lots of touristy stuff, which is always goofy fun.

“We” in this case included an unusual appearance by my wife. She almost never does cons with me. She and I were joined by Donna, Serge and Bruce; Yuricon staffers/supporters/minions/etc and people I am pleased to count among my dear friends.

We arrived on Wednesday, and met up with Donna and Serge. After dinner, we went on an adventure to Archie McPhee’s, where, as I mentioned, I bought bandages that look like bacon strips, got a friend a hula girl duster, some other friends pirate and rubber ducky goods, and myself some Tiki packing tape. Also, I picked up some heinous things to put in the yuri grab bags we’re going to be making for Anime Next.

Thursday AM, the wife and I set out to see the Seattle Space Needle. I, used to massive tourist lines, was shocked to find that we were able to go right up. We could see our hotel, and took in some nice views of the surrounding mountains and water. It had started sunny; by the time we got to the Space Needle it was cloudy over the city, but the mountains were still sunny. It looked quite cool. We have nice hills around here, but no real mountains and I’m always happy to spend an longish while looking out at really huge hunks of earth that stand out so massively from the rest of the scenery.

Next up was the Science Fiction Museum. It looked really ugly from outside – sort of a conglomeration of blue and metallic lumps. Inside, it was so impossibly geeky that I absolutely loved it. It’s essentially a warehouse house for Paul Allen’s private collection of sci-fi crap. As he has more money than god, it means that it’s a really super-sophisticated, well put-together warehouse for his sci-fi crap.

Note the utterly, totally dork-a-riffic levels of membership:

And the signs on the bathroom doors. Could they be *any* more nerdish?

Needless to say, we had a great time there. :-)

We decided that as we were all togther by Thursday evening, we’d wander over to the conference center and get our badges. The first person we asked had the right answer, but for the wrong reasons. The second person we asked seemed to have the exclusive job of sending everyone over to the most overworked person in the room, which would have been fine, except the right person was in that room too. Once again – you get what you pay for with volunteers. :-) But, be that as it may, we did get in touch with our host, Sean Larson, Programming Director of Sakuracon, who had invited us out in the first place. He got us our badges and had to bail, which we totally understood. We headed over to the Marketplace, took a look at our table, introduced ourselves to our neighbors and left to do some dinner.

Let me digress here for a second. I want to mention that, at every con/event I have a table at, I do my best to befriend my immediate neighbors. I find that it makes the whole event a better thing when you and the businesses that surround you all get along. In this case, we had “Toys for Freaks and Geeks” on the right, CL Enterprises (I think that was their name) on the left and YesJapan.com in front of us. All were perfectly wonderful to be near. YesJapan is a “language” website, which sort of sells the idea that geeky guys can have cute Japanese girls as friends to practice language skills with. They played videos all weekend of basically, the guys who work there shooting the breeze with Japanese women, talking about useless and insanse things – interspersed with hard Japanese rock bands videos. They were hysterically funny, but somehow really awful too. :-)

Friday started with a nice, relaxed morning. Pattie and Donna headed out to Chinatown and Bruce, Serge and I went right to the Marketplace to set up. We were doing a rock-bottom sale on yuri manga from ALC, so sales were brisk and we had a fast day. The joke was that while all vendors are there to sell and are, therefore, only your friends as long as you give them money, we were the only ones who were open about it. When people bought a book, we’d say stuff like, “Buy a book and we’ll be your friend five dollars worth!” LOL Serge got caught in a prolonged conversation that was going nowhere with someone who had bought a book. When the guy went away, he turned to me and said, “That was ten dollars worth of friendship for five dollars.” It kept us laughing all weekend.

A few friends stopped by – Jen, and her friend Jahana and Devon and unexpectedly Derek and Diana – as well as a bunch of folks from the ML, which was a genuine pleasure. Especially Sara, who was very energetic and bouncy and made us laugh – and she brought lots of people by, which was great. So, thanks Sara! And the young lady who is cosplaying Chloe here, who was very cute. Thanks to her too. ;-)

Friday night we went out to Chinatown to Uwajimaya, a pan-asian market and mall, with a very large Kinokuniya bookstore. I wasn’t feeling great, so managed to not spend anything. The wife and I went back to our room to crash.

Saturday was, for me, more of the same – the con in a dealer’s room looks the same for most of the day. LOL The crowd changes as the new waves of people come in, that’s about it. There wasn’t any anime I needed/wanted to see, and games and the like aren’t my cup of tea. We did have a friend, Hillary, drop by and later went to dinner with her, in the teeny space we had between marketplace and Yuri Panel.

The Yuri Panel was quite nice – about 50-60 people showed. The questions were pretty decent and everyone was very earnest. Serge and Bruce were GREAT on the panel and had a lot of good things to say. Interestingly, Serge was more up on anime, and Bruce on manga, so that worked out really well. We went back to the hotel and watched a brilliantly bizarre live-action movie called Survival Style 5. It’s by the same director who did Kamikaze Girls and boy can you tell. It had alot of the same actors and tropes, but was really funny and weird in a whole new way. I think we all liked the storyline of the guy who kept killing this girl, but she kept coming back, and eventually they kind of fall in love, best. I recommend it for a healthy dose of surreal humor.

Sunday we made an appearance briefly at the table, then bailed to do some more sight-seeing. This time it was the Asian Art Museum, followed by a quick turn aroud Pike St. Market, so I could get my hairdresser the salmon I promised her. lol

The last night we were there was the wife’s birthday, so we went out to celebrate, following that up with a Korean kung-fu (no joke – it was really a kung-fu movie, just filmed in Korea. Trust me, I know the difference) comedy. It was pretty funny, so it was a good end to a good trip. :-)

I can’t thank Donna, Serge, Bruce and Pattie enough for coming out with me. It would not have been nearly as fun as it was without them. Thanks, guys. :-)

Our next event will be Anime Next, June 16-18, 2006 in Secaucus, NJ. I’ll be doing the yuri panel and a fanfic writer’s workshop. I’ll let you know when they are scheduled.

See you there!

Posted in Events | 3 Comments »


Sakuracon Yuri Panel Update

March 24th, 2006

If you’re at Sakuracon in Seattle, WA this weekend, don’t miss the yuri and shoujo-ai panel at 8PM – 10PM, in Room 604 on Saturday, March 25. (Not that both time and place have changed from my original announcement…)

See you there!

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »