Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – February 15, 2020

February 15th, 2020

Yuri Light Novel

The first of the Sayaka Light Novels from Seven Seas has arrived. ^_^ Bloom Into You : Regarding Saeki Sayaka Volume 1 is exactly as good as I remember it to be. For a really insightful exploration of a character who really resonates (with me, for oh-so-many reasons,) this is a truly excellent English edition and well worth your time and money! Review to follow this week.

Yuri Manga

Big news! Seven Seas has added two manga from Akiko Morishima to their catalog! Along with Rakuen no Jouken, which is now named Conditions of Paradise: Our First Time, they have added the short story collection Ruri-iro no Yume, which will be released as Conditions of Paradise: Azure Dream! I’m very excited for you all to have her work in English…and hope we’ll get the Joshikka series next. For an overview of her works, Ariel ‘Solowi’ Nakandakare has a great article up on AnimeFeminist, Beyond the Bear Storm: Morishima Akiko, yuri mangaka.

We’ve got a pile of new stuff up on the Yuricon Store:

Goodbye, My Rose Garden, Volume 1, which fittingly will see a spring release from Seven Seas, is Dr. Pepperco’s Victorian fantasy about an English girl and her Japanese maid.

Global Bookwalker has all of Akiyama Haru’s Octave, (オクターヴ) available in Japanese digitally. I’m just glad to see this available outside Japan again. It was really quite excellent.

MURCIÉLAGO, Volume 16 (ムルシエラゴ ) hit shelves in Japan last month. I’m so behind~~~.

I’m ever further behind on MURCIÉLAGO BYPRODUCT Arania, Volume 2 (ムルシエラゴ- BYPRODUCT -アラーニァ). More Reiko please. ^_^

Ari North’s beautiful ALWAYS HUMAN is indeed modified from Webtoon format for a print run and is available in hardcover and soft. Amaryllis wants you to know that Little Bee, the publisher always does a pre-order special, so there will be extras, if you buy it and submit proof of pre-order! I’m going to get this in hardcover because it’s so beautiful.

Nicki “YuriMother” Bauman, wrote up a terrific analysis of the Yuri audience  in answer to the often-stated, and rarely true assumption that Yuri is “for men” in Yuri is for Everyone: An analysis of yuri demographics and readership over on Anime Feminist.

 

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Yuri Doujinshi

Lilyka is running a time-sale on translated Yuri doujinshi. Grab the coupon code on their Twitter feed and head over to their store.

Briana Lawrence is the creator of a magical girl comic she describes as “a queer as hell book featuring a team of black queer girls.” Check out Magnifiquenoir!

 

Yuri(?) Anime

The Tamayomi baseball anime trailer is out and Alex Mateo over on ANN has the details. It’s going to be Yuri-ish, as it’s a MangaTime Kirara baby. Some of you will caution me pointlessly to not consider it Yuri, others of you will gush about how awesome it is. Few to none of you understand will why this is still not the sports Yuri series I seek. ^_^

 

Yuri Game

Brianna Lei’s Butterfly Soup, a Visual Novel about Asian queer girls and baseball has been added to the Store! (And is probably more interesting than Tamayomi, tbh.

Studio Élan has revealed what looks to be an absolutely breathtakingly beautiful new “solarpunk lesbian” Visual Novel, Summer at the Edge of the Universe. From the Press release, this voiced VN “features three routes, each centered around one of Summer’s friends. Every route contains both romantic and platonic endings. More fantasy than sci-fi, Summer aims to be a positive and uplifting experience, with one of the core tenets for the game being ‘good vibes only.'” The game will be coming to PC, Nintendo Switch, and Playstation 4 and is expected to be released in 2021. 

 

Yuri Goods

I know, I know, it’s $300, but I added the Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune wicca x collaboration watch to the Store, too. ^_^ Because I can.

 

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Posted in Yuri Network News | 10 Comments »


Yuri Manga: Kase-san and Yamada (English)

February 13th, 2020

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’.

Posted in Kase-san Series, Yuri Manga | No Comments »


Yuri Manga: White Lilies in Love Watashi ga Yoishireru no ha, Natsu no Hizashi to Anata Dake. Shakaijin Yuri Anthology (White Lilies in Love 私が酔いしれるのは、夏の陽射しと貴方だけ。 社会人百合アンソロジー)

February 12th, 2020

Kadokawa’s “White Lilies” series of anthologies have been good and goofy and fun and sad. White Lilies in Love Watashi ga Yoishireru no ha, Natsu no Hizashi to Anata Dake. Shakaijin Yuri Anthology (White Lilies in Love 私が酔いしれるのは、夏の陽射しと貴方だけ。 社会人百合アンソロジー) is more of the same and happens to also include some of the top adult life Yuri creators in the biz right now, which makes for a really pleasant read. This member of the series of vaguely seasonalish collections is subtitled in English “Drunk Only To The Summer Sunshine And You.” Prepositions and particles are complicated and we understand the sentiment, so that’s fine.

Inui Ayu starts the collection off with a sweet (pun intended) story about women who bond over shaved ice. It was, frankly, adorable. Women meet on vacation and at work, they meet after long separations, and fall for each other after being together day and after day. The collection includes work by Suzuki-sempai, Seta Seta, Hazuki Ruri and Kurukuruhime, all names we’ve become familiar with here on Okazu.

Without a doubt the final story was my favorite. Called “Blue Well he Youkoso” by Yuki Yukiko, it is a by-the-shore love story that has a surprising ending. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 8

A strong collection in terms of story and art. This would make a great collection for Yen to put out if they wanted more adult-life stories. It’s one of those anthologies that makes you really enjoy anthologies. ^_^

Posted in Yuri Anthology, Yuri Manga | No Comments »


Yuri Manga: Kanade Aoharu Band Yuri Anthology (青春バンド百合アンソロジー)

February 10th, 2020

Well, so, Kanade  Aoharu Band Yuri Anthology (青春バンド百合アンソロジー) is definitely a Yuri anthology in which characters are near musical instruments and occasionally even play them. Which is not at all the same as being about people in bands. A couple of the included stories even go so far as to show members of a band. One especially derivative story is about two girls who play euphonium in a school whose uniforms look super familiar, but are not entirely the same, so it could not possibly be a rip-off. The Takeshima Eku story and a couple of others seems a little too like unused plot concepts from already existing Comic Yuri Hime story.

As you may be able to tell, I was a little disappointed with this collection. I had hoped it would be full of passionate relationships between girls in bands, but instead it read like rehashing of other series that we’re already watching or reading.

If you want to read stories that feel like other stories, so backpack on emotions you have from other stories, this a pretty gentle, safe way to do it. Nothing here is offensive. It’s just not what I had hoped from this collection. I have a lot of good and bad memories from my time in band and I could easily see so many of those situations leading to love. But sure, let’s just use the two or three scenarios we’re already familiar with. That’s okay, too.

Ratings:

Overall – 7

The art is good, the storytelling is fine, I can’t remember a single story seconds after I finish it.

I will share this with you. Via YNN Correspondent Verso S., here is a completely-worth-your-time video analysis of some of the music from Liza and the Blue Bird, which was vastly superior to every story in this collection. It got to me to sit still for 20+ minutes and listen and that’s saying something. Enjoy An Overlooked Track from Liz and the Blue Bird.

Did you know that a Flugelhorn is really a soprano tuba with its highly conical bore shape and a Euphonium is 3 or 4-valve, often compensating, conical-bore, tenor instrument which is not related to tuba, but is closer to other conical-bore instruments like flugelhorn, trumpet or cornet. I just thought you might want to know.

Posted in Yuri Anthology, Yuri Manga | 1 Comment »


Genjitsu Touhishitetara Boroboro ni Natta Hanashi Manga (現実逃避してたらボロボロになった話)

February 9th, 2020

Who could have imagined in 2016, when we all first discovered Nagata Kabi-sensei’s honest and touching diary of her struggles with mental health, that we’d be tuning back in repeatedly, like a manga reality show, hoping to see her feeling healthier, happier, more whole? And yet, here we are, reading the fourth volume of this real-world epic saga of a journey through her own life.

In Genjitsu Touhishitetara Boroboro ni Natta Hanashi (現実逃避してたらボロボロになった話), which has the English subtitle “A Story of Me, Trying to Escape From Reality Just to Be Worn Out,” Nagata-sensei finds herself at a new crisis point. She is suffering physically from her habit of self-medicating with alcohol, and ends up in the hospital with pancreatitis.

This book has shifted to a new color palette – using what my wife insists is the color of dayglo circus peanuts….a color schema which is correct, but perhaps a bit obscure as circus peanuts are a dying confection (“for good reason,” my wife insists, “since they are gross.”)

We’ve watched Nagata-sensei struggle with food, with alcohol, with depression, and now with her pancreas. It’s all very heavy going, but as a reader I don’t feel like I have the luxury of wallowing since, for any bleak feelings I might have, I have to believe that it’s harder for her. To some extent, the only thing we can do is be distant, abstract cheerleaders on the sidelines of the parts of her life she chooses to share with us. We have to know were not getting the whole story – and we have to be okay with that. So we mentally pull for her and send good thoughts.

And, in a way that means something to the universe, at least, there is some good news. She is getting work as a cover artist; her cover for Saotome Kanako’s Pants ha Haiteoke, (パンツははいておけ) is coming out this month, she’s got a lot of recent work on her Pixiv…including quite a bit of 18+  and lesbian work (which, to my mind, at least, mean’s she’s got some interest in sexuality and sensuality,) and a story in Shueisha’s Grand Jump Mecha, (sample available in Japanese on the Mecha website.) We know – we all know – that productivity does not equal health or happiness. But I hope that if she can concentrate on something that is not herself long enough to produce work that is not a diary, that something has shifted, if not improved. I’m interested to see what she creates when freed from her own story.

As a reader, I’m also torn between wanting to see how the rest of her life goes, and hope that it becomes enjoyable enough that she forgets to chronicle it. As per my last review, there will be no ratings, as it seems bizarre at best to rate the contents of a life being lived.

I note that this book is back with East Press and her other work is with Shueisha. I have no assumptions to make about that, I’m just noting it.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Nagata Kabi | 2 Comments »