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!
Yuri Manga
