As the pages of Kazura Kinosaki’s Strawberry Fields Once Again, Volume 2 opens, I am primed to find spanners in the works and, indeed, that is what happens, in several ways at once.

To begin where we left off, Akira has kissed Pure and in time-honored fiction fashion, Pure has passed out/overheated. Having kissed Pure, Akira pulls away, inexplicably telling herself that the woman who professes her love like 5 times a day, would have been put off by a kiss. (This is how you know Akira really is a lesbian. ^_^;) So that’s one spanner in the works.

Then we find that Pure has pushed Akira to go visit her father who, it turns out is alive and well and has a new family. Which she does and and has a lot of complicated feelings about it, quite naturally. Akira’s distancing from the world is making more sense now. Spanner number two. When Ruri, her brother confronts Pure with a question that seems out of the blue, then we might be forgiven for wondering if we’ve missed something critical because that seems a really big spanner. In a sense yes, we have, but it hasn’t happened yet, so we can be forgiven for forgetting that this is not just a school life Yuri drama. It will however have to remain a mystery as to what it is, until Volume 3. Unless you read my review of the Japanese volume, or remember the advice from my review of Volume 1. Then you know what it is and why the spanners are flying from every direction.

The art gets both tighter and more detailed and sketchier and less detailed in places. Akira’s face undergoes a massive change from the affectless face of Volume 1, as she runs through a gamut of expressions right until the end of this volume, where the biggest spanner of them all throws everything we think about this story into question.

When I originally read Volume 1 in Japanese I had little idea where the story was going, so put off reading Volume 2 for a while. By the time I got through Volume 2, I knew I had to read Volume 3, but was a little intimidated by it, for reasons that will become clear. Nonetheless as I finished the series, it was pretty well put together, with the kind of non-linear storytelling that keep me engaged.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Character – 7
Service – 2
Yuri – 6

Overall – 7

Thank you very much to Yen Press for the review copy, I really appreciate it and am looking forward to Volume 3 – which will be released in June of this year- very much. Thanks to everyone at Yen for bringing this story to an English reading audience.

Hayama Asuka and Terano Saki are teachers who have found love together. The students, administration and their colleagues think they are ridiculously adorable about it. They can’t help but tease them, but the pure cuteness of their responses is excruciating. So of course they keep teasing. In Volume 3 of Our Teachers Are Dating! by Pikachi Ohi, it’s one adorable moment after another in this series, interspersed by moments of tender intimacy. 

In between being squeed at by students and their friends on the faculty complaining how teeth-rottingly cute they are, Hayama-sensei and Terano-sensei find themselves at a couple of relationship crossroads. Firstly and, possibly most important, in what passed for their real world, Hayama-sensei meets another adult woman in a relationship with another woman. I cannot overstate the power of having someone to speak with as a peer – so this chapter was important to me. Yes, they have been accepted by the people around them, but having someone in a similar boat is really powerful.

And they celebrate their one year anniversary together, which ends up with them deciding to move in together. Of course they have a bunch of adventures together which all sound silly when you type them out, and all end up with them sleeping together, so we’ll skip those, but let us wave to those Yuri ghosts as they float by.

This is a delightfully fluffy story that simply and openly celebrates adult love between two women. Because Asuka and Saki love each other so much, we get to just…enjoy their joy in one another. The world is a complex place. There is room for dark tales and tales of childhood romance and action and magic and there is room for something ridiculously adorable and fluffy. This is exactly the ridiculously adorable and fluffy Yuri manga we need.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 10
Story – 9
Service – 5 There is nudity and sex. They are in the bath on the cover, so…
Yuri – 10

Overall – 10

Our Teachers Are Dating, Volume 3 is available in print and digital now from Seven Seas. No date as of yet for Volume 4 in English, but I’d guess at an autumn release, as Volume 4 just hit Japanese bookstores.