I Am a Ghost

I Am Deceased.

Dmnit! It still feels like the emotional dynamics between Sakurako and Kasumi is out of balance. While Sakurako is obviously all in, on their relationship, it still feels like Kasumi is just using it as a marriage of convenience.

No. You’re too much of a yuri worrier. Kasumi is just as all-in as Sakurako.

A yurier, one might say.

Isn't "Yuri Aquarium" redundant in manga?

I was going to say usagi drop actually

Strange, I didn't know there was a manga for that, I thought there was only an anime. Whenever I think about an Usagi Drop manga, I get this weird headache…

I just wanna know what's throwing off the fumes this is huffing (please don't say Hot Gimmick).

Oh noooo... Maekawa's back, and this time she's a JK!

Super psyched to have a new series from Akashi. Thanks, SAD!

Yes, this manga is clearly rooted in naturalism and gritty verisimilitude, what with the alien idols at the shrine, the character who is a high school student and also a stormlord shaman, and the main character carries a digital scale with her at all times. Nothing about any of this is absurd, and the creator clearly intends it all to be read at face value.

Thanks for picking this up, Kirin. It's super entertaining and I love the art.

Tamate, you horndog.

I would never belittle my fujoshi friends by accusing them of being less depraved than yuri fandom.

I'm talking mostly about marketing and editing here, and yeah, things have opened up a lot in the last 10 years. Editors and marketers want stuff they can sell to the largest possible audience, so they care more about the straight male audience (although my hope would be that that emphasis would shift as the lesbian and female audience grows – I'm a little skeptical, though, based on my understanding of the Japanese publishing world, which is pretty conservative). My favorite yuri mangakas, people like Akiko Morishima and Shuninta Amano, are queer creators who are really good at putting together works that appeal to both of these audiences. (As a side note, I don't think it's really a coincidence that Morishima's and Amano's most aggressively queer works, like Hanjuku Joshi and The Feelings We All Must Endure, have not gotten officially localized into English.)

And yeah, Battan seems to write for an older audience, and also doesn't seem to be overly worried about fitting into specific categories. I don't even know where her stuff gets serialized, but what I have seen is all over the place. That's one of the things I really like about her – she writes complicated, character-driven stories, lesbian themes are central to her work, and she doesn't get too tropey – just look at the forum threads for this story and Run Away With Me, Girl, where people consistently expected / feared that she would go one way and she took the story somewhere entirely different.

My pointing it out here was because I felt that the person I was answering to was too focused on a very specific theme of the story, while overlooking other parts.

It's the theme that appealed to me the most. I agree (and really like) that this a character-driven story and is more about following the working-out of the characters' own stories rather than (to reuse a word I used before) a schematic plot that ticks off archetypal story beats. I think that makes for a more sophisticated and nuanced story. And I take your point about Nacchan having more going on than just dealing with compulsory heterosexuality, although I think her insecurity and inability to see herself on an equal footing with Kyouko is itself in part a consequence of the way that being with another woman is at the very least not encouraged by Japanese society.

It feels like the sort of thing I'd expect from a het writing about queer love and seeing it as a chance to just throw in lots of angst but not actually confirm anything queer in the ending

I think this reading of the story erases Nacchan's bisexuality – her husband wouldn't care about the flowers if he didn't suspect (seemingly correctly) that Nacchan still loves Kyouko on some level. Nobody in the story acts if they treat Nacchan's love for Kyouko as being a different kind of feeling than her love for her husband – and if she doesn't feel as strongly about her husband as Kyouko, she at the very least seems to feel genuine affection for him.

Yeah, but queer love wins in the end in the other manga. If I wanted to read about comphet winning I'd just read UK politics.

At the end of the story (spoilers tagged):
- Kyouko is flirting with a woman who seems receptive.
- Ruriko has broken up with but is still friends with a boy, and is heavily implied to have figured out that she's a lesbian, if not in a relationship with another woman.
- Nacchan is the only one of the three stuck in the comp het salt mines, and seems to have made her peace with her choices, even if her husband has not.

I don't think it's a matter of comp het "winning", it's about how the various main characters navigate the complications it causes to their lives and self-images, and it feels very grounded and, to me at least, not that pessimistic. This isn't really a romance manga, and the ending is bittersweet, but I found it to be a touching character study and I appreciated its mood. Kind of like a less complicated Even Though We're Adults.

It's nice to read a story where grownup people deal with grownup problems and everything isn't laid out neatly and schematically. The plot of this is different from Run Away With Me, Girl, but the themes are the same – the way that compulsory heterosexuality deforms queer love, and the way that it leads queer people away from their authentic selves by concealing that there are other alternatives available to them than falling in love with a member of the opposite sex, getting married, and starting a family. I think the way in which heterosexuality exists in this story makes its message more, not less, queer (although it also makes it less yuri, in the sense that "yuri" as a marketing category is largely about depicting a homosocial as well as homosexual world with the messy interface between genders largely airbrushed out, idealized and streamlined for the consumption of a straight, male audience).

At this point, everything Battan produces is buy on sight for me. I love her art style, and I love the way she tells stories. She reminds me a lot of Takako Shimamura and Tomoko Yamashita. I wish there were more mangaka like them.

last edited at Nov 11, 2021 1:20AM

Not sure why Kurumi is getting upset about the fact that Ruriko is questioning her level of commitment. She has treated this relationship as nothing more than a relationship of convenience so far. She comes and goes as she pleases, does whatever she wants, whenever she wants to, and is basically emotionally uninvested.

This whole chapter revolves around Kurumi thinking about buying an expensive appliance pretty much exclusively because it would make Ruriko's life easier. A few chapters ago she dropped everything as soon as she found out that Ruriko was hospitalized, and was clearly distressed because her wife had not seen fit to let her know she was in serious pain and was going to the hospital. Before that, she spent most of a trip to another city thinking about what her bff / wife might find amusing or interesting about the things she was doing and seeing.

She might not be taking the marriage as seriously as she could or should, but she is definitely emotionally invested. In fact, it's often Ruriko who goes out of her way to not get in Kurumi's way. My interpretation of Kurumi's surprise at Ruriko's question is that she has steadily been treating whatever they've got going on as more and more a real, "normal" marriage (why would she care about it ending otherwise? If she was just doing what she wanted, when she wanted, why would she so obviously feel a twinge when the issue of inequitable distribution of household labor was listed as a primary cause of breakups?) and has been losing sight of the fact that it more or less started as a lark (or that that's how Ruriko framed it to her – a thing that could be ended without any hard feelings at any time).

If this story is about anything, it is about Ruriko and Kurumi figuring out together that the fifth rule was a mistake and that their marriage done for lols and subject material for a column is actually real. It seems likely to me that the story will resolve by Kurumi realizing that "somebody else" isn't going to come along because Ruriko is what she needed all along, and Ruriko is going to realize that she needs to come clean about what she's really wanted from Kurumi (real commitment / a real relationship / hot makeouts) this whole time.

I also don't think their relationship is that unhealthy or would have come unstuck in real life. I have seen roommates put each other through some real circumstances, and this is pretty tame, as these things go.

last edited at Nov 8, 2021 4:25AM

So about $1k to sit in a bed for a day, maybe had a scan, and get a few pills? Great value lol.

You don't even want to know what that would net out if you were to receive the same treatment in the US, especially if you're uninsured. The bed for the night alone might cost $3k.

MangaDex has it listed as completed at chapter 14. Did it get cancelled?

The "Completed" on MangaDex means that the Manga itself has finished publication, not the scanlation.

There are 35 chapters in 8 volumes, as well as an additional epilogue in the "Aftertime" volume, which is really a collection of short stories that also includes this super cute and charming one-shot.

Also, I was looking at the bonus pack-in with the Amazon version of volume 8, and just now noticed that it's designed to look like a lifestyle magazine profile of everybody's favorite OL on the make Louko. I won't leave any spoilers, but I will say that this pleases me as she is lowkey my favorite character in the series. She tries hard!

This just recently got an additional "after story" volume in Japan, inadvertently making my earlier mistake (that this story has nine volumes) correct.

I have had this exact scenario play out at a Gram location in Tokyo when trying to order super fluffy pancakes. That's fine. The ones we got down the street were better anyway!

I really like it when comic artists smoosh their stories together like this. I see a lot of it on Pixiv but not so much in stuff that actually gets turned into a story.

Oh my god, one of the stories on her Pixiv has these two getting drinks with Ise and Shima and it is almost too cute for words.

Thanks for translating this. Tokuwo Tsumu's two for two with me after this and Ise-san and Shima-san.

She doesn't seem to have anything else in serialization right now, but if you go to her Pixiv, there's acres of good stuff, some of it featuring some very familiar faces.

This turn of events is all I could have hoped and dreamed it would be. Delightful!

I hope Miyako's mom grandma doesn't turn out to be a total bitch or anything.

last edited at Oct 29, 2021 1:08AM

Cute. I like the way Yodokawa draws eyes and cute, oblivious faces in general.

The way it looks like Liane feels when standing in between Sera and Ruri is exactly the way I'd feel standing between the two of them too.

God do I love this dumbassed manga.

If you think about it, were someone to create a large-scale, shared, simulated environment that wasn't bound to one person's experience of it, it would be effectively as difficult as creating a real universe to mirror all of the low-level physical behaviors of a non-simulated universe that confirms to the physical laws we know. It's actually really clever to run some of these experiments testing directly observable physical constants to try to determine if you're living inside a simulation. It's also clever world-building and storytelling to use this approach to explain what's been going on.