In Lemonade, by Shioya Teruko, Youko and Maki are starting middle school. It’s a rough start for them both. Maki wants the two of them to join a club together, but Youko knows Maki wants to join a sports team, and she’s no good at sports. Maki’s pretty upset, but Youko sticks to her plan and joins the handicrafts club, while Maki joins Tennis Club – the one team Youko absolutely, positively will not join.

Youko’s day was no better – one of the upperclass boys finds out she’s the younger sister of the former Tennis team captain and gives her the unfortunate nickname “imouko” to which Youko, yearning to be free of comparisons to her perfect older sister, reacts very negatively. Things only become more tense when it turns out that Keta-sempai, the obnoxious upperclassman, is Maki’s mentor on the team AND had a crush on her sister. Youko finds it harder and harder to listen to Maki talking endlessly about this guy. It’s not much easier in Handicrafts club, as the one second-year student has a crush on Naomi-sempai, the club president, and speaks of nothing but love and crushes. All around Youko it’s “Who do you like?” “Who is going out with whom?’

Maki and Youko come to a crisis over Keta-sempai, which almost destroys their friendship, as Maki admits she like Keta, and wishes Youko could be friendly with him, But he’s *still* teasing Youko and it really upsets her…and she’s feeling what can only be labeled jealousy. When she realizes she’s jealous over Maki, it makes Youko uncomfortable, but for her friend’s sake, she sucks it up. Before he graduates Keta-sempai finally apologizes so she can move on.

As Youko and Maki come to the end of their third year, and face graduation, one of the underclassmen in the handicrafts club confesses to Youko. She replies that there’s already someone she likes – the rumor flies fast. Youko likes someone? Who? Maki comes over to find out, and in the final pages, Youko tearfully admits that it has been Maki all along. Maki says she likes Youko too. As the book draws to a close we see the two of them walking off hand in hand.

This is a school life story that reads awfully like what I remember school actually being like. Everyone around me obsessed endlessly about who was going out with whom and who liked whom. ^_^; We can see Youko, Maki and the others are in a school, but we never see them do any school work. In Lemonade, it’s all relationships all the time. Gosh, I’m glad I’m not in school anymore.

Ratings:

Art – Very simple and plain – 6
Characters – True to their age, so kinda boring for this adult – 6
Story – Same – 6
Yuri – 6
Service – 1 on principle

Overall – 6

The final confession isn’t out of left field, but it was vaguely vexing that Keta-sempai was made the McGuffin. He was really annoying.

Sugawa Tokushi’s  Zenryaku, Yuri no Sono Yori (前略、百合の園より)  is one of those manga I struggle to describe. It is very well named, as this collection of two mini-series from Tsubomi, is most definitely from the “Garden of Yuri.”

In the first series, Yuri is anti-social in school, but afterschool she draws Yuri manga that has been scripted by her one real friend, Shinobu. The sadistic protagonist is patterned after popular, accomplished student council member – and to Yuri’s mortification and annoyance, next seat over in class – Fujiwara.

Circumstances conspire to give Fujiwara the chance to read the story and she instantly realizes that she’s been appropriated  She slightly misunderstands, and assumes Yuri is the writer…and naturally assumes that she’s writing her own fantasy. Beneath the teasing, it’s pretty obvious to us that Fujiwara actually likes Yuri In turn Yuri, who plays the perfect tsundere to Fujiwara’s tease, just as clearly starts to like her back. The story ends – on a joke –  with them closer than before, but not “close,” per se.

This is followed by a quick side story about Yuri’s partner, Shinobu, who is blindsided by a female classmate’s feelings.

The final story starts off quite seriously, as Yuki believes she is the target of bullying, when she receives a love letter. When Hino-san, the writer, joins her in calligraphy club, she remains unconvinced that Hino-san is serious either about calligraphy or her. There’s a couple of rough patches, but in the end, it’s all happily-ever-after. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 7
Yuri – 7
Service – 1

Overall – 7

The collection gives a nice sampling of character types, so there’s probably someone for anyone to like, unless what you like best is 3-dimensional characters. There are none of those here, as “the Garden of Yuri” has never been particularly real. ^_^

BTW, the first word in the title, “zenryaku” is a great word – it’s shorthand for omitting the preliminaries in a letter instead of writing “Dear So-and-so –  How are you? I am fine? etc, etc, ” one just writes 前略 and moves on to the meat of the letter. I wish we had an analogous term in English. (Social Media has all but eliminated the need for those formalities, but I still like the idea of a single term that acknowledges the formalities with a nod.)

Himawari-san is a fantasy about a time when there might have been a small, independent bookstore just across the street from your school. But even more than that, Himwari-san (ひまわりさん) is a fantasy about the slightly old-fashioned, mysterious and attractive woman who runs that bookstore and on whom we, inveterate readers and browsers of used bookstores that we are, might have naturally formed a crush.

In Himawari-san, Volume 3, it is all too obvious that Matsuri is us (and by making her not a reader, the creator allows for a wider audience to identify with her than if she were,) and that we, like Matsuri, have a crush on Himawari-san. ^_^

We already know that “Himawari-san” is a title, rather than a name; a title borne by the current owner of the Himawari Shoubo used book store Through Matsuri, we start to realize how little we know about the current owner of the title. And, through Matsuri we get glimpses of her past and present that we have no real claim to demand, but feel privileged to know.

Himawari-san is a fantasy of a past that probably never was, a present that isn’t and a future that is unlikely to be, but a pleasant fantasy nonetheless. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 3
Service – 1
Lesbian Favoring Bibliophile – 10

Matsuri is becoming more comfortable speaking of her crush on Himawari-san. And we’re getting glimpses that the current Himawari may well have felt the same way about the former Himawari. ^_^