Yuri Manga: Macaron Idol Yuri Anthology (マカロン アイドル百合アンソロジー)

August 11th, 2019

I’m not going to lie – I was not looking forward to reading Macaron Idol Yuri Anthology (マカロン アイドル百合アンソロジー). But my wife said to me, “You never know, you might enjoy it.” I believe I made a rude noise in reply.

My wife was right. I enjoyed this anthology, despite myself. The stories were, I suppose, predictable for an idol anthology, but more importantly, they were pretty sincere.

The first story by Sakagi, “Ponytail and Aoi Uso”  was a moving little story of an idol “graduating”  – that is to say, being forcibly retired by management – but leaving a deep impression on the kouhai who loves her.

Also entertaining, was a trio of idols who were being sold as a “Yuri” concept group, but in real life, are an actual threesome, story by Tsuji Yuzuna.

There are stories of fans and idols, idols and their idol partners, even an “evil” idol group recruiting a “innocent” idol,  and a surprising (to me) number of stories about the people behind the idols. Perhaps that should not have surprised me, but my impression of the idol industry is that they carefully do not want us, the audience, to ever think of the idols as humans, with lives and thoughts beyond just entertainment. I think that is a brutal and inhuman way to treat people. and I’m kind of glad to know that the creators in this anthology, at least, are willing to look past the curtain a little and explore the inner and off-stage lives of the entertainers.

Ratings:

All ratings are variable, but all were good to excellent.

Overall – 8

It’s not world-changing, but I was both surprised and pleased by this anthology.

 

Posted in Yuri Anthology, Yuri Manga | 7 Comments »


Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – August 10, 2019

August 10th, 2019

Yuri Events

We’ll be at Yurithon from August 16-18 in Montreal, QC. With panels and games and advice about Yuri, and prizes for good questions! Hope to see you there!

 

Yuri Anime

Following up a news item from last week, baseball anime Tamayomi is being worked on by the staff of baseball anime Major, and certainly, Yuri Navi thinks of it as a “Yuri” anime. It’s still not the sports story I want, but it’s a step forward. ^_^

Kase-san and Morning Glories is now available for pre-order directly from Sentail Filmworks for a sensible $19.99 for the Blu-Ray.

 

LGBTQ Live-Acton

Via YNN Correspondent Batwoman Tomoyo, The Paley Center in NYC is doing a free showing of the new Batwoman television series on September 7, in NYC.

 

Yuri Performance

Via Comic Natalie, Doctor Pepperco’s Sayonara Rose Garden, English woman x Japanese maid manga (of which I have reviewed Volume 1) will performed as a live reading at February 8th and 9th 2020 in Tokyo TACCS1179.

 

Other News

Not Yuri, but I can almost guarantee there will be lesbians, as old-school crime and violence manga (like Lady Snowblood) almost always did, take a look at Major Spoilers’ review of Ryuko, Volume 1.

Via Timeboxer, the Guardian’s Amal El-Mohtar asks Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians? The answer is quite good.

Always worth a read is any article about lesbian pulp. Erin Blakemore takes a look at how Pulp Fiction Helped Define American Lesbianism on JSTOR.

 

Do you have questions about Yuri? Write in and ask and I’ll do my best to address them on the Okazu YNN Podcast, Become a YNN Correspondent by reporting any Yuri-related news with your name and an email I can reply to!

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

Posted in Yuri Network News | 3 Comments »


LGBTQ Manga: Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2 (English)

August 9th, 2019

Every once in a while in any media, something comes along that is so radical, so once-in-a-lifetime, so game changing that even if the buzz around it is hyperbolic, it cannot be enough. (Except for television, which talks about every show as if it is a masterpiece, no matter how banal.) When it comes to queer manga, we’ve had a relative glut the past few years with manga like My Brother’s Husband, My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness and now this extraordinary story.

In Volume 1, we met Tasuku, a young man being bullied for his sexuality, something he wasn’t sure about at all. At the Drop-In Center, he meets a group of LGBTQ individuals, who change his life, Haruko and her wife Saki, Chaico, an elderly gay man, Nanami-kun older than Tasuku, but young and attractive to him, and Misora, a young trans girl.

In Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare, Volume 2, Tasuku tries to understand Misora a little better. She’s struggling with mutually exclusive gender identity and puberty. She’s so alone that Tasuku’s attempts to get closer are seen as insults. And Tasuku only has so much time and attention for the youngest member of the Drop-In Center, as he’s finally starting to admit to himself what the people around him have known…that he is gay. He is learning to accept that he has a crush on a classmate, to figure out what he’s going to do with the house he’s been given to rehabilitate and, in the few empty spaces, he’s trying to be there for Misora, who isn’t making it easy. Misora’s struggles are equal or greater to Tasuku’s, but he only has so much of himself to spread around. A friendly date to a local festival ends in disaster.

Haruko takes several opportunities to make important points about LGBTQ people and life, and is, as she has been from the beginning, the strong backbone of this circle.

Beyond the drama that is stirring at the Center, and unbeknownst to Tasuku, his crush may have learned his secret.  Volume 3 will be explosive.

The art is excellent, at times breathtaking. The representation of queer people living their lives, dealing with both society and individuals who seek to harm them, or make them invisible, and the internal struggle with acceptance and understanding that every individual must work through, is handled in very real, very nuanced strokes.

Creator Yuhki Kamatani and the series deserve all the praise they received. I also want to take a moment to note the folks who have worked on the English adaptation: translator Jocylene Allen; adapter Ysabet MacFarlane, both of whom I consider masters at their craft; Kaitlin Wiley, who did lettering and retouch – one of the most difficult jobs in manga; KC Fabellon whose cover design is true to the original and legible and striking; original designer Hiroshi Nigami, a credit I am very pleased to see here; proofreaders Kurestin Armada and Danielle King, editor Jenn Grunigen, and Production Manager Lissa Patillo the unsung heroes of great works. Amazing job, every one of you. Please note that Seven Seas credits every single person who brought this amazing manga to you. Not every manga company does and I want to say that this is definitely one of two things that has set Seven Seas apart from every other company since the beginning.  I’m also going to shout out to Lianne Sentar who is Marketing Manager for Seven Seas, and Jason and Adam at the top who make the choices. This was a really good one.

I hope to see this book break records, like Nagata-sensei’s work has, because if there is a manga series that I consider more important to LGBTQ folks than Lesbian Experience….it’s this one.

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare is a masterpiece of LGBTQ life in Japan and a masterwork of a manga.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters- 8
LGBTQ – 10
Service – 0

Overall – 9

It has been just shy of a year since I reviewed the Japanese edition of this book. Even knowing what will happen in Volume 3 (slated for a September release, whoo!) and Volume 4 (which hits shelves in December!), I cannot wait to read them all over again!

When I reviewed the Japanese edition, so many of you said you couldn’t wait for it in English. Well…here it is! This series will make a great  holiday gift for your young queer friends and relatives. ^_^

Posted in English Manga, LGBTQ | 8 Comments »


Haru to Midori Manga, Volume 1 ( 春とみどり)

August 7th, 2019

Midori is a loner. She’s competent at work, but does not have friends. She always wears black and prefers to be alone. Or so she believes. When she receives a phone call informing her that her friend from high school, Tsugumi, is dead, she is overwhelmed instantly by memories.

Midori attends the funeral, at which she learns that Tsugumi has a daughter, Haruko. Haru, as she prefers to be called, has no one else left except a distant relative. Moved by emotions she does not yet recognize, Midori offers to let Haru live with her.

And so, Haru to Midori, Volume 1 ( 春とみどり) begins the tale of an unlikely family,; two people connected only by the death of a loved one. Haru adapts quickly to Midori’s household. She is friendly, but not intimately so, with her new guardian.  Midori begins to shed layers of hurt and loneliness almost too quickly for her to handle. She admits to herself, perhaps for the first time, that she was in love with Tsugumi and had mourned her loss long before she died.

Awkardly, for Midori is an awkward person, she opens up to the daughter of her beloved. Hesitantly, because she is suffering from a recent loss, Haru opens up to the idea of caring for someone new. They change each other gradually. By the end of Volume 1, they could take tentative steps to becoming a family, but its Haruko who pulls back.

The art is solid. Midori always looks slightly unkempt, as you might expect, Haru looks like a young woman who has had to put her life on hold for an indefinite amount of time.

I had no expectations whatsoever when I started reading this manga. We’re at the section of the pile I think of as throwing darts –  could be good, could suck, won’t know until I read it. ^_^ This time it turned out to be much…nicer…than I expected. Not at all creepy or weird, I’m rooting for Haruko and Midori to be a child and a guardian who each learn what Tsugumi saw in the other.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 9 Not much is “happening,” per se, so we have a lot of time to spend on character
Yuri – 3 Only in retrospective, as Midori starts to unpack her feelings for Tsugumi
Service – Does Midori getting a new sweater count? No? 0

Overall –  Another solid 8

 

I’ll definitely look for Volume 2.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »


Yuri Manga: Shigoto no Ato ha Koishiyou (仕事の後は恋しよう)

August 6th, 2019

When you think about it, there are only a few office romance scenarios possible. Coworker x coworker, boss x employee or two people who don’t work together. Because the power differential is so one-sided when it comes to boss x employee, there’s a lot of potential for abusive relationships. And yet, Yuri tends to kind of not go there. (Of course exceptions exist.)

Recently I was discussing how tachi and neko don’t line up with seme and uke (something I have written about before.)  In particular, butch characters are often portrayed as reticent in lesbian media, afraid of abusing any physical or social power; simply unwilling or uncomfortable being aggressors. While this is not always true in Yuri, those series that have featured an uneven power dynamic come across as trying to replicate BL tropes – unsuccessfully, overall. (A new generation of adult Yuri manga has had to find other tropes to… use *.  As I’ve noted in the past, Yuri readers tend to be invested in the couple being happy with each other, rather than a sexual act as payoff. It was, therefore, with some interest, that I read Shigoto no ato ha Koishiyou (仕事の後は恋しよう) by Iwashita Kei, which falls into this familiar-to-western-readers pattern.

Kurashita appears to be a very typical clumsy, uninspired, unispiring career woman. She works under Suzuya Asahi, who is everything Kurashita is not – cool, classically attractive, an exceedingly  competent worker and a leader. Kurashita find herself being helped by Suzuya and…oddly, finds herself living up to the level of Suzuya’s example. She’s also finding herself attracted to the other woman, but unwilling to even address that in her own thoughts.

Here’s where it all goes Xena.. Suzuya is torturing herself. She’s fallen for Kurashita, but there are so many things that make their relationship unequal, she just cannot bring herself to be honest. Even as the company president is encouraging – even manipulating – them to work together, Suzuya’s in the middle of the kind of mental torture any number of women who have found themselves in love with women they think they cannot have would be familiar with. A happy accident ends up forcing them both to deal with their feelings, but a lot of stuff has happen before they can get there.

The climax of the story has absolutely nothing to do with their relationship, and I thought it absolutely delightful. This manga also addresses some real-world issues in the office, casual sexism, systemic sexism, and what it means to be good at your job. Again, the climax is more about work, than love, which was outstanding.

Kurashita and Suzuya are adorably awkward (especially Suzuya, as she should be) and they deserve every page of their happy ending.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story  – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 9
Service – Not really

Overall – A very strong 8.

But here’s the point I want to make about this – the dynamic in this volume reads “lesbian” to me, rather than Yuri, even though nothing else about this volume has any lesbian identity, because of the qualities I spoke of above.  It is, in this western lesbian’s experience and experience with media, that the butch is almost never really the seme. Except accidentally. ^_^ This manga is an East Press publication and to be honest, that’s another reason I read Iwashita Kei’s Yuri manga debut tankoubon as “lesbian.”

* YOU try and finish this sentence without finding yourself in the middle of a metaphor for sex.

Posted in Yuri Manga | 4 Comments »