Archive for the Yuri Manga Category


Yuri Manga: Hinagiku Junshin Jogakuen, Volume 1

October 30th, 2009

Hinagiku Junshin Jogakuen, Volume 1 is the story of Ami, a smart, beautiful, elegant, rich girl who collides in the hall with sweatpants-wearing, geeky-looking Yui and falls madly in love. It comes as a great shock, therefore, to find that Yui has been in her class all the time.

Yui is smart, she is definitely a geek, and she works very hard at a part-time job, but that none of that explains the incessant slamming into people. Nor does it explain why other people slam into Ami, too. Nor does it explain why, after Yui and Ami become friends, and Yui affects Ami’s life by introducing her to rice balls and to the world of part-time jobs so she makes her own friends and money, why the manga suddenly explodes into a few final chapters about things like bathing suits, cosplay and aliens. I kept waiting for Dondi and shady underworld figures to show up just to complete the “wtf” factor.

The basic plot of the first 4/5 of this volume go like this: Yui slams into Ami, with an onigiri in her mouth. Yui *loves* onigiri. Ami spends a LOT of time in this volume obsessing about rice balls – wondering what they are, trying them for the first time, trying to make them, having her cook make them, all in an attempt to get closer to Yui. Of course, if Ami just *asked* if she and Yui could be friends, it’s obvious that Yui would be glad to comply.

When Ami takes over for Yui at her part-time job selling fried things at a convenience store in what were really the best chapters, a whole new world of relating to people opens up for Ami. She never really gets her wish to get closer to Yui the way she’d like, but she gets something more important – self-reliance.

This volume of manga is silly and repetitive. It’s a sit-com in which the “sit” is Yui slamming into Ami. But despite that, it has some genuine charm. And just about the time you think it’s time for the story to progress a bit – Aliens. Cosplay. Bathing Suits. The usual.

Ratings:

Art – 7 4-koma cute, you know the type
Story – 5 I’m being generous. There actually isn’t any story
Characters – 7 There is some character development, instead of a story
Yuri – 4
Service – None, until the final chapters, then 5

Overall – 6

I wish the author had had the opportunity or balls to move the story forward. I would have liked to see Yui clue in a tad. But, should you be willing to wait it out, there is a Volume 2 out and who knows, onigiri might lead to love after all.





Yuri Manga: Transistor Tea Set, Volume 1

October 19th, 2009

In Transistor Tea Set ~ Denkigai Jizu, Suzu is a mecha otaku who lives and works in the dark depths of the Electic Town area of Akihabara. Her close friend, a younger girl named Sairi, has a raging crush on her, and helps Suzu cope with daily tasks like waking up and eating.

Suzu is not wholly unaware of Sairi’s feelings, occasionally asking Sairi if she likes her. Sairi is a typical tsundere, so it’s no surprise that her reaction is to scream “Idiot!” and run off.

Sadly for Sairi, Suzu still carries a torch for an old childhood friend, Midori, who had to leave Akihabara to go overseas. They promised to meet again, but that was many years ago. So, when Suzu gets a mysterious phone call and runs home to find that the front part of her shop has been turned into a maid cafe, it’s three steps beyond “a shock.” Complicating matters, is Midori, returned at long last, acting as the cafe’s maid. Midori sucks at cooking, cleaning, making tea and pretty much everything and anything maids might be expected to do. What she wants to do is to be close to Suzu, who probably wants the same thing, but is reacting with typical “comedic” rejection.

The chapters are filled with a lot of self-referential otaku humor, along with some very silly throwaway setups. In one chapter, Midori asks Suzu to build a robo-Maid. She does, but it loses its head (literally) and escapes into the town to create a swath of horror among late-night Akihabara dwellers. I expect the headless robo-Maid to return in some later chapter. You can’t just walk away from something like that. ^_^

The final chapter of the book follows a ghost/love story that has a happy ending and only tangentially involves Suzu and co.

Yuri is the totally one-sided crush Sairi has for not-unaware, but not probably interested, Suzu, and the mutual, but uneven, feelings Midori and Suzu have for one another. It’s not likely to go anywhere, which is kind of a shame, I think I’d like Suzu more if she opened up to Midori, but it’s also not the point of the story.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Characters – 7
Story – 6
Yuri – 5
Service – 6

Overall – 6

The point of the story is that Suzu is a schoolgirl uniform-wearing robotics fetishist and Midori dresses like a maid. The end. ^_^





Yuri Manga; Hanjuku Joshi, Volume 2

October 14th, 2009

Ladies and Gentlemen – we have a winner.

I never doubted for a second that Morishima Akiko-sensei would be the one. I had faith in her, in her ability to gently nudge the boundaries of “Yuri” until they started to blur the lines into “lesbian.” I’ve commented that several of her stories have started to shift in that direction. Notably, her story about the two office workers with a crush on the grease truck chef, and the unprecedented use of the phrase “Kocchi no ke.”

In Hanjuku Joshi, Volume 2 (半熟女子), Morishima has actually written a story that covers that last little piece – the gap between lesbian content and lesbian identity. Let me be very clear here – I do not meant that the characters identify as “lesbians.” I do mean that they acknowledge the challenge that loving another woman brings, and they struggle with the idea of loving that other woman in public. THIS is what I mean when I give Morishima the “Golden Lily” prize.

It’s not like Hanjuku Joshi is the first book ever to cover this area. It’s the first “mainstream Yuri” (if you will allow that) to do so in many years.

Because other reviewers will focus on the sex, let me sum that up in a line: there is sex in Hanjuku Joshi. It’s not actually the point of the story. It’s the icing on the cake.

The point of the story is acceptance – of one’s self, of one’s love, of one’s desire to live a normal, happy life with the person one loves…who just happens to also be female. And the point of the story is that it takes a LOT to get to the point where you can accept that, much less be fearless about expressing it in public. *That* is the point of this book. If you didn’t notice, because you were obsessing about the fuzzy handcuffs, that’s okay. The other point is that Morishima has integrated the main point seamlessly into a smut-filled story, for people just like you. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Yuri – 9
Service – 7

Overall – 9

Hanjuku Joshi turned out to be a pretty interesting series. I prefer Mari x Ran to Chitose x Yae, but some really critical conversations happen in this book and those were definitely worth the price of admission.





Watashi no Taisetsuna Tomodachi Manga, Volume 1

October 13th, 2009

You all know the phrase “my important friend,” right? It’s an indicator that the relationship is more than friends, even if it’s less than lovers.

So when I heard about Watashi no Taisetsuna Tomodachi (わたしの大切なともだち), by Hakamada Mera, I thought, *at last!* we’re finally going to get something with some meat. Well..yes, and no. More than anything, we get an entirely new riff on the same-old, tired “best friend” plot.

Ebisawa Shouko (Ebi-chan) has failed to get into the art college of her choice. On her way home, she consoles herself by buying some doujinshi. She runs into an old friend, Tachibana, who’s hanging with cool-girl friends from high school. When Ebi-chan’s otaku hobby is revealed, Tachibana lies and says they barely know each other. In tears, Ebi-chan sits alone in a local park, as a shining light passes across the sky. We see that – whatever it was – has hit Tachibana on the head and knocked her unconscious.

Ebi-chan decides to go to a trade school for design while waiting to retake the exam. She is utterly freaked out when one of her classmates turns out to be none other than Tachibana…who has completely lost her memory. So much so, that she keeps a dictionary around to look up words she doesn’t remember.

Ebi-chan lies and says that they were best friends – which is a lie, but also not, as they were very close in elementary and middle school. It’s just that as an otaku, she didn’t run anywhwere near Tachibana’s cool-girl circle in high school.

Now that she’s said they were best friends, Ebi-chan feels responsible for Tachibana. But Tachibana’s not invalid, just has no memory. If anything, her physical skills are unbelievable and it is she who saves Ebi-chan when they are on their class orienteering trip. (The idea that the design school does an orienteering trip hurts my head, I don’t know about you. ^_^)

When Tachibana collapses from overexertion, Ebi-chan has an epiphany. Up until now, she’s been trying to help Tachibana get her memories back. But – what if she hates Ebi-chan for lying about their relationship? Now Ebi-chan is full of doubt, but Tachibana’s new food-obssessed personality is really too cute to resist and she decides to just live in denial about everything.

I don’t even know what to say about this book. It was odd, and kind of cute, but also kind of annoying, but not so much.

It’s obvious that Ebi-chan feels that she wants Tachibana to be her “important friend,” but what Tachibana feels is utterly obscure, except where it related to food. She really, really, really likes food. Whatever one may think of the story, it absolutely, positively is a totally different riff on the mopey best friend story.

Ratings:

Art – 6 It’s Hakamada Mera, darlings.
Characters – 7
Story – 7
Yuri – 1
Service – 0

Overall – 7

The characters are a lot older than the typical Hakamada manga, too, but pretty much look the same, just taller.





Yuri Manga: Tsubomi, Volume 3

October 8th, 2009

Yet again, I find myself almost completely forgetting every story mere days after reading the third volume of Tsubomi.

Really, it’s not that they are particularly bad or anything – they just have almost no substance. And the continuing saga of two older (barely pubescent) sisters who lust after each other’s younger sisters is so…ugh…that the fact that it starts and ends every volume does not help at all. In my desire to wipe these stories out of my mind, I seem to lose grasp of the rest of the content, as well.

Tsubomi is settling into an even fetishier space than Yuri Hime S. With a high percentage of May-December stories (she says euphemistically) and a lot of simply nothing stories I strongly feel that a number of talented artists are having their time completely wasted on stories that do nothing to showcase their skills.

Morinaga Milk’s story is wallowing in a space where nothing at all is happening, and Kurogame Kenn’s story pretty much looks like everything else he’s done. No one is pushing to do anything other than retread the same old tired tropes. I don’t know if this is a good thing for the artists – it’s pay after all – but as a reader it’s really annoying me.

The two stories I have the most hope for are Horii Kyosuke’s (of Junk-Lab/Raku-gun, an artist I really like) “Pedal ni Nosete” and the ongoing saga of Hotei and Ebisu in which nothing happens, but at least it’s not happening to adults.

Ratings:

Overall – 6

I’m edging closer to giving up on this magazine…unless at least one story has some sticking power.