She said she wouldn't go out with her... so I bet she just vomited on her clothers so she had to undress her and just left her naked as she was.

I can see it now...

"Umm can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"Why are we naked?"
"Oh yeah, you vomited so I had to take your clothes off"
"Why are you naked?"
"I just like sleeping naked."
"What kind of reason is that?"

A great reason.

Neither do you, you single-cell organism.

Made me laugh, good comeback from an amoeba.

Okay, everyone back to neutral sides of the petrie dish.

Now I want a good, clean fight. No flagella pulling, no hitting below the nucleolus.

Ah, c'mon! Can they at least twist cilia? I wanna see some protoplasm, here!

Ch.2 first page, is this in the original or a relic of translation?
"Lady Harmony, blah blah . . . "
" . . . and you ain't calling me 'lady Harmony' any more."

But, surely she just did call her 'lady Harmony'.

Eeeh maybe she stopped calling her Harmony-sama and started calling her Harmony-san or something, like, dropped the honorifics.

I'm sure what is meant is a command to stop using the honorific and just call her Harmony. "...and you ain't [going to] call(ing) me 'lady Harmony' any more."

That seems plausible, thanks.

...did they just introduce a childhood friend and put her on a bus in the same chapter?

Seems more like a "childhood harasser".

Witches nowadays! Why, when I was young, witches wore simple black robes without any frills, with proper black witch hats or cowls, and flew their brooms uphill both ways, in the snow. And we feared and hated them, as is proper!

Meanwhile, my wife could certainly tell you that just because one wears black doesn't mean it has to be frumpy or the same outfit every day. She still hasn't got her Morticia outfit yet, though.

last edited at Jun 12, 2017 9:48PM

Ch.2 first page, is this in the original or a relic of translation?
"Lady Harmony, blah blah . . . "
" . . . and you ain't calling me 'lady Harmony' any more."

But, surely she just did call her 'lady Harmony'.

last edited at Jun 12, 2017 12:49AM

knowing full well that its killing her inside.

That seems a bit of an exaggeration, though?

Art is rough. Did not think it starting off in the middle of things does anyone any favors. But the characters are funny and I love delinquents! I also love cats.

This one seems like she will be especially fun to watch when/if she falls for the inspector.(I assume that's the pairing here anyway) The inspector also seems very likeable. Her attempts to diffuse the situation were both interesting and sweet.

The art is a bit rough. I don't mind the way it starts--it's a little different, and something is happening from the beginning. It looks like it could be interesting.
Pet peeve: De-fuse. Radioactive cesium diffuses into the Pacific ocean near Fukushima. You de-fuse a situation, like removing the fuse on a powder keg, to stop it from metaphorically exploding. But weirdly, it doesn't seem like she was actually trying to do that, she was just clueless. She didn't realize she was being felt out as the possible tattler, and top left frame of p.21 makes it look to me like she really thought Ying had paid some attention to what she'd said about rule-breaking hair and was implicitly accepting correction of that as payback for the kick, or something.

Moral of the story: if you're unhappy with the relationship you are in speak up to your partner or your friends or family adultery/cheating is a horrible thing to do

Mmm. Well, in most contexts I'd tend to agree. But the idea that everything can be solved by communication assumes that people are all going to have both flexible attitudes--that they will all listen to each other and want to do something--and fairly broad and meaningful choices available to them which will allow the communication to lead to making some choices which will have good outcomes. Those are assumptions that we make without even noticing in upper-middle-class touchy-feely educated-culture parts of the "west", even though it often isn't true even for us. Unlimited choice is part of our social mythology, one of our big social fictions.

But is it true for her? Probably not. Family or friends are going to say well, he's a typical Japanese husband and that's how it works and if she's not happy she should just suck it up and make the best of it. Live for her kids and the daytime soaps like everyone else. My wife's ex-husband is a nasty selfish bastard who treated her and the kids very badly, and when she was splitting up with him her whole community (church people, her family and so on) were on her case and on her case to work it out and stick together; all this in Canada. Enforcement of social cohesion is a bit stronger in Japan. She'd regret ever saying a word.
As to him, if he's in the fairly common kind of job situation Nevri describes, she can explain her troubles all she wants, but he can't do a damn thing about it even if he wants to. Probably he'd be resentful--he's doing his part by working hard and drinking hard and being vaguely affable when he comes home and leaves, what more does she want??--but even if he understood the only thing that changes is, he knows that she's unhappy and that he can do nothing about it. The household's atmosphere sours. Now everyone's unhappy instead of just her. Big win.

Communication is not necessarily a cureall. It's damned useful if the basic situation can let it work. However, the nature of big chunks of Japanese society seems to revolve around the careful maintenance of social fictions. You know, the kind of things that communication rips big holes in.

If you want a moral, I would say the moral of this story is that Japanese standard marriage and employment models are patriarchal and degrading for everyone who participates (because that helps prop up the authoritarian oligarchy who run things). If the situation is shitty, people will do shitty things to deal with it.
The model of marriage, family and employment being horrible crap would be to me a plausible explanation why they're having so damn much trouble getting young people to get involved in it.

last edited at Jun 11, 2017 7:05PM

Nevri, all this stuff you're saying is no doubt fairly true (although frankly I think it's a bit of an overdone stereotype--it applies to the classic salaryman of a big business in a big city with a long term stable job, which was never anything like all of Japan and is now quite a bit less of Japan than it used to be, although they do their best to pretend the model's still there).

But if they're in the kind of relationship you describe, then who the hell cares if she cheats? What's she supposed to be even cheating on? If they're in a formal relationship to perpetuate family units, then what does who she is intimate with have to do with it?

last edited at Jun 11, 2017 6:17PM

It is classic. There's a tradition of cute little throwaway shoujo romance oneshots where an adorable shy girl finds herself at the beach and ends up getting the cool guy. This is precisely one of those only better because she gets the cool girl.

Mind you . . . isn't anyone going to say it's terrible and rapey because the girl forces a kiss on her while she's semiconscious?

Well, speaking as a husband myself, I'd like to take a dissenting view. I'm not a fan of wives cheating on their husbands or vice versa, and in chapter 1 we had essentially 0 information about the husband one way or another, so the issue of betrayal loomed pretty large for me. In this chapter, we still don't have that much, but it seems increasingly clear that we don't have that much because he's just one of those husbands who isn't around that much and considers that to be just how it works: He goes to work and makes money (and probably goes out drinking in the evening with his co-workers because it's expected, and so on), she is his housekeeper and feeds him and raises the kid. He's not nasty, but he has vacated the position of her lover. Once maybe he was a man who loved a woman, once maybe he cherished her and wanted to know more about her, once maybe he wanted to drive her wild sexually, but now it seems like all that kind of thing is just . . . not relevant, not a role related to him. Now I know this seems to be a quite traditional approach to marriage, not just in Japan but practically everywhere, but that seems to be frankly because sexism is a traditional approach practically everywhere. It still sucks.

And so frankly, if he were just not very good at being her lover, if he wasn't putting in as much effort as he used to, taking her a little for granted, then they could work on that. But if he's vacated the position he shouldn't be too surprised if someone else fills it. He may vaguely assume that the roles he assigns to her--housekeeper and mother--are therefore all there is to her, but that does not make it so.

In short: IMO, being a husband includes being your wife's lover, and I don't just mean using her for sex now and then. One of the responsibilities of the position, and a delicious one. If you fail to meet that responsibility, you have a whole lot less to complain about if someone else does.

So, OK, uh . . . In this Eve-and-Eve paradise, they're still referring to God as "he". So then, presumably God is one of those voyeur dudes (uh, like me I suppose) who wants to see two girls getting it on.
Meanwhile, Yay Winged Victory!

last edited at Jun 8, 2017 7:28PM

^ That was useful - thanks :) I was wondering why it might be called nutmeg. Does nutmeg only have those properties when raw or in larger amounts? I've had it many times in various cakes etc and never noticed an effect?

William S. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch actually explains how to get stoned off nutmeg.

Why does this leave me unsurprised?
William S. Burroughs was one freaky messed up dude.

Alternatively, she removes the bow because she wears it at school to look cute but it's actually kind of uncomfortable and can give her headaches if she keeps it on too long, and there are no plot implications whatsoever. :p
I know that's roughly how I feel about putting my hair back in a ponytail for semi-formal occasions.

I don't think this chapter got continued and it's from 2 years ago.

Well even if so - it's very nice to visit with old friends once more and see how they are doing.

Very nice indeed. The frustrations of my work day are falling away.

My brain kept reading "Breast Master" for some reason... :D

Can't imagine what could have put that in your head.

She verily lacks in chill

My fucking god, I'm dying.

Lol I got a good laugh out of that line too. Also liked it how the meek one ended being dominant.

Sort of.

What do you interpret of the end of chapter 2, and the bow removal? What do you think it signifies?

If I had to spin a just-so story, my guess would be:
--She either does something like compensated dating for reasons which are strong if you're in her shoes (poverty, abuse etc), OR She desperately loves a married man who is taking advantage of her and she is heading off to "see" him.
--Whoever saw her at a love hotel did see her, but the person with her was not her boyfriend.
--She has short and superficial relationships with boyfriends in an attempt to reach for some kind of normality and as camouflage; she does not tell them about any of this.
--She does not, in fact, have sex with any of her boyfriends, for various reasons revolving around being alienated from sex as a pleasurable thing, self-esteem issues and feeling distant from them

Something about this story feels really empty.

Well . . . you've got this crybaby kid so pathetically starved for affection and attention that she stalks someone for weeks and then pretends, badly, to be a cat just to get to talk to them a bit and doesn't even mind that she's getting blown off most of the time. And then you've got this other person who is deadpan and unemotional from beginning to end. And the finish is just a minor reveal, it has no emotional significance; the two still have no real connection.

So, all in all, lots of emptiness candidates there.

last edited at Jun 5, 2017 11:55PM

Is 'que' really right, though? I've only ever heard " por que".

"Qué" means 'what?' (or 'that' in a sentence), "porque" altogether means 'because' and "Por qué" separated means 'why?'

It's always seemed fairly reasonable to me that what is literally "for what" should effectively mean "why".

leann123 posted:

Still though. I feel bad for the husband.

Are they still actually together though? The story's not exactly clear on the subject but it seems to suggest that they're still technically married but aren't actually together.

Considering how she made a big deal of hearing her name, I don't think she's seen her husband for a while...

She mentions "losing her first name" upon having kids; I'm pretty sure it's about what Nezchan said: I've seen it in manga and heard it said a few times that Japanese couples with children often actually address each other as "mom" and "dad" rather than by name. This has always struck me as a freaky custom; I can see experiencing it as a sort of erasure of the self.
As to the husband, though . . . looking over it again, we have almost no information. He appears, faceless, in a frame or two at the very beginning, saying polite morning commonplaces that indicate zero about the relationship either way. She mentions once near the end that she is married, present tense, and that is all we know. This seems in a weird way a bit unfair. Talk about erasure--it's a kind of manipulation by the author. Chitose's getting ready to cheat on this guy and we notice her perspective--the forbidden passion, the identity crisis--but we don't notice that there's another person being betrayed because he's been almost completely removed from the picture.

last edited at Jun 3, 2017 4:35AM

There's plenty of ways Ririha can "rob" Yuzumori from Mimika.

Just denouncing her as a pervert lolicon should be enough to make their relationship "complicated".

I don't see why that would work. She's a little kid making allegations about a girl, in a sexist society. Sexism cuts different ways--people aren't going to be disposed to see a woman, let alone a high school girl, as a sexual aggressor. And they're not going to be disposed to pay attention to the hysterical irresponsible claims of a little kid--maybe if her allegations fit a classic frame, like if she was accusing a male stranger, and if the victim backed her up, but only then. In a case like this? Likely they wouldn't even give her the respect of politely doubting her, they'd just scold her for being a troublemaker/having an overactive imagination. And when Yuzumori-san calmly and maturely ripped her claims to shreds? Fuggedaboutit.
So yeah, I don't buy her ability to successfully blackmail; she's got nothing on them. I don't even see how she has a basis to suspect what's going on. It's not like we have any indication Yuzumori-san has a history of lesbianism (which would be kind of bizarre at her age). All she can plausibly know is that Yuzumori-san has a friend or something who she seems happy to be with. Of course, she could lie and have her lie accidentally happen to be the truth--but as I said, I don't see why she would be believed.

Wasn't there a time skip at some point early on? Was it just getting Ding Yi to a slightly more appropriate age, or was it retconned, or does anyone remember what happened there?

If you're talking about the initial bit where she's at her friend's mother's place, I don't think it's a significant time skip. It's just an inverted teasing approach to the storytelling, where you have her shortly after the scene in the mountains thinking back to it and reacting to it. I'm pretty sure it's still previous to her possibly going abroad, and probably before the scene near the end where she finds out who would be going with her. Meanwhile my money is strongly on the final pool scene being a flashback, fairly far back at that. The ex, as people have been saying.
Does that make sense?

last edited at Jun 1, 2017 9:07PM

One thing I really like about this story is the way that, every time either the older lead or the audience start to take the younger girl for granted, think of her like a sort of placeholder or generic "young" person, she hits back hard.