Archive for the Yuri Manga Category


Ikemen Onna to Hakoiri Musume, Volume 2 (イケメン女と箱入り娘)

April 26th, 2021

So in Volume 1, I missed the joke. My fault. Perhaps because it wasn’t funny? Ikemen Onna to Hakoiri Musume, Volume  2 (イケメン女と箱入り娘), written by Mochi_Au_Lait, drawn by majoccoid, drops the joke and ….well, I’d really like to say it takes off and becomes wonderful, and it eventually does, but the creators are really committed to the joke and let it linger way too long.

So what was the joke? Kanda Misaki is a woman, only her girlfriend, Okuma Satomi, thinks she’s a guy. True, “Kanda-kun” is handsome and androgynously attractive, with a tendency towards gallantry. She’s Satomi’s perfect boyfriend and despite the fact that pretty much every one else can see Kanda is a girl, Satomi is completely unaware. Meanwhile, they are actually pretty happy as a couple, only for Kanda, there is a big ole elephant in the room.

In Volume 2, something is going to have to shift. On Christmas, as part of their big romantic date, Kanda comes clean. And…Satomi doesn’t believe her. Well, more specifically, she decides on a kind of cluelessness that makes it almost impossible to believe. Naiveté is one thing, but being unsure of a person’s stated gender is kinda ugh and double ugh when they are standing there naked. When Misaki takes off her clothes and Satomi remains unsure, I was not sure I could continue. The way in which this was resolved probably made the creative team happier than it did me, BUT, finally Satomi is on board! At last. And props to Satomi here; she’s supremely unconcerned that the person she likes turns out to be a woman. It really didn’t matter to her.  The rest of the story settles into a pleasant little progression of their relationship and Satomi continuing to be completely happy to have Kanda as her girlfriend.

The art is very much in my wheelhouse. majoccoid’s handsome and cool Kanda is on point. Satomi is cute, but her cluelessness had to be pushed a good leap past what I was willing to accept, but that is the kind of overplaying a gag Mochi_Au_Lait does. While it’s an imperfect story,  it has a much better end than I hoped going into this volume.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 7 If only it had not overplayed its hand, I might have even given it an 8
Characters – 9
Service – 3 Coy nudity
Yuri – 8

Overall – 8





Strawberry Fields Once Again, Volume 2

April 23rd, 2021

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.





Galette, No. 17 (ガレット)

April 22nd, 2021

Since I’m doing books that include my A-Team creators this week, it seems like a good day for talking about Galette, No. 17 (ガレット). And, much like my post yesterday, I really wanted to talk about it for one specific story.

Those of you who follow Morishima Akiko’s series Hanjuku Joshi when it ran Yuri Hime, will remember that there were two main couples. We’ve been enjoying the return of Yae and Chitose in Motto Hanjuku Joshi, and this chapter we see the return of Mari and Ran! Now that Mari is in pre-med, we might expect their relationship goes more smoothly, but…nope! ^_^ The reason why is the subject of this issue.

Akiyama Haru’s story is very short, but absolutely lovely, with a magical portal to a ryokan in a women’s basement. “How come we don’t have one of those?” my wife asks.

And the remaining stories give us a number of ways to look at relationships and the people in them. Interestingly, Hamano Ringo’s “Sora-iro Melancholic” continues on and wow is the Bun-chan we see here a different person. She’s really grown since that first volume that I recently reviewed.

The magazine has seen some changes in the past few issues, as I’m sure both artists and supporters have found their circumstances altered by the pandemic, but makes me happy to go through the list of supporters and see some of your names there! I know that as long as I can, I’ll be helping to make this magazine, because I think it needs to exist. They’ve opened up a Pixiv Fanbox in addition to their Fantia page, so now you have another way to help good Yuri manga be created.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

Every day Galette exists is a good day for Yuri. ^_^





Our Teachers Are Dating!, Volume 3

April 20th, 2021

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.





Sora-iro Melancholic, Volume 1 (空色メランコリック )

April 15th, 2021

Fumino, known to her friends as Bun-chan, is really irritated by that cool, mischievous Kiko-sempai. For on thing, she’s pretty sure that, while her best friend Mahiro really likes Kiko-sempai, things will go badly and Mahiro will be hurt.

Hamano Ringo’s Sora-iro Melancholic, Volume 1 (空色メランコリック ) is the fist volume of this series that runs in Galette magazine.

When Mahiro loses something that Kiko-sempai gave her and Bun-chan finds it, she pretends she knows nothing about it, until something snaps and she gives it back. Even then she isn’t entirelyhonest about it. There is something about Kiko-sempai that just annoys the daylights out of Bun, although we’re able to put our finger on it pretty quickly. Kiko-sempai also seems to be aware of it. Bun-chan is jealous of Mahiro and of Kiko-sempai.  And Kiko knows it. Initially it looks like Bun-chan is jealous that Mahiro is thinking about Kiko so much, but maybe that’s not the problem.

When club activities forced her to go out shopping for materials with Kiko, the older girl confronts Bun-chan by kissing her, thereby making her confront the way she feels about the older girl. As the volume comes to a close, Mahiro can see that something has happened between Kiko-sempai and Bun-chan, and, maybe, she too, can guess.

This series is ongoing in Galette magazine, and the characters have changed considerably from these early chapters. In a later chapter, too, Bun-chan will have a very edifying conversation with an adult who also fell in love with a girl during her school years. I look forward to that being collected up. I like Hamano-sensei’s sketchy art style, and while these early chapters seem very typical Yuri, one can feel a depth that this part of the story barely touches upon.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 7
Service  – 0

Overall – 7

The cover design is lovely – what you can’t see in the picture here is the lustrous pearly quality of the book cover. In fact that’s probably how I think of this series – a pearl seed, still developing. We’re waiting to see what kind of gem we’ll have at the end of it all.