It would make more sense later on if we get to see Sato agonizing over having to give Shio's sock to the boy, if only for a few panels. For simplicity's sake, Sato probably gave the real one.

What I meant to say was that I could imagine her going about this another way xP Getting him familiar/addicted to her scent and existence instead of Shio's so that she can have a certain control over his trauma of women and insert other twisted reasons.

I can imagine Satou giving a sock Shio had never touched, but she might not have a problem with Mitsuboshi having her sock after all. She doesn't seem to care about other people loving Shio as much as she cares about Shio loving other people - when she heard Asahi repeat the vow she's been saying with Shio all this time, she almost ended him on the spot, but she never had that reaction to Mitsuboshi. The difference seems to be that Asahi's interactions with Shio were mutual, whereas Mitsuboshi only has this one-sided worship. Of course, it could be that she hates Mitsuboshi as well and is planning on murdering him once she's through using him.

The really twisted thing to do would be to give Mitsuboshi her aunt's sock. He'd just die on the spot if he ever found out.

Ploy twist, now we have two yandere characters

I count 4 so far: Satou, Mitsuboshi, the manager who molested Mitsuboshi, and Suu.

Mitsuboshi acts so goofy so much of the time that it's easy to dismiss him, but I found his lines this chapter profoundly disturbing. I think that's what I like so much about this series - even though it's so theatrical and extreme, I still end up empathizing with the characters.

last edited at May 4, 2017 6:41AM

"I just love characters like Ririko, who are cute but have a naturally bad personality"
You don't say...

In sum, it depends on the author to turn table from Yuri to Het or Het to Yuri. But for Yuri fans, Scum wish, Cross Ange, Binbougami ga, Mnemosyne are some thing we Don't want to see in this series.

I think Kodama Naoko is pretty committed to yuri these days. It feels like the male characters are there just to add drama and serve as foils to the main characters' awful, dishonest, manipulative, codependent relationship. According to the author's notes in her various works, she loves these twisted relationships more than anything, so I doubt she'd throw that away for some bullshit happy boy-gets-girl ending.

This story wasn't my favorite, but I really enjoyed it, like all of Imura Ei's work. Something about these awful, dependent relationships really gets me.

I've been working on translating her collection Innocent Noise for a while, hopefully will be able to release that eventually.

The earlier part about her experience with mental illness is very engaging, but like most works about dealing with depression, the part about her improvement is insubstantial. I think this is mostly due to the nature of recovering from severe mental illness, where statements that hold life-changing significance for one person sound like empty platitudes to another.

She attributes a lot of her improvement to her newfound willingness to be honest to herself to be open about herself. But in her case, open honesty resulted in her receiving widespread external support and a publishing deal. The cynic in me asks: "does she feel better now because of inward change, or because her life circumstances have improved?" The epilogue as a whole feels somewhat self-satisfied and lacking in insight, a bland "what I learned" tacked on at the end of an otherwise deep and personal story.

last edited at Apr 11, 2017 8:04PM

I'd be so happy if you could remember the title, it sounds like something I must read

sorry that I've spoiled the ending. Take heart that that is probably the most mundane of the of the bizarre revelations in this story https://dynasty-scans.com/series/mugen_no_minamo_ni

Secret ending reveal: Shio's the murderer.

Shiro's the mastermind she is just acting all cute while in real she is the devil her self.

And Sato being the agressive yandere is a ploy to protect everyone around her. Its not gona happen but if it did that would be so amazeing.

I remember reading some other yuri psychological horror with an amnesiac little girl and a murderous older girl where the murderous older girl was attempting the whole time to prevent the little girl from remembering that she herself had killed her parents.

last edited at Apr 7, 2017 5:54PM

Secret ending reveal: Shio's the murderer.

No matter how many times I read it, this page does not make sense. I get that it's supposed to be a flashback, but why is the aunt telling Satou of all people this? Surely the manga is not implying Satou is the one who inflicted all those wounds on her? Then again, note that little Satou's little stuffed bear had its head ripped off.

I don't really know what's going on in that flashback either.
The original text on from the flashback lines on 174-176:

「さとうちゃん」
「いいの」
「何をしたって　かまわない」
「ね？」
大丈夫
どんな欲望でも　全部飲み込んで　あげるから
だって　それが
愛だから

One problem is that the lines serve two different functions: They're a continuation of the Aunt's lines in the present, and they're what she said in the flashback. There is some ambiguity in the lines, so they could mean slightly different things in the different scenes.

The main problem is that there's just not much there - two panels.

My assumption is that the child Satou was upset about something and threw a tantrum, destroying her toy. Her aunt responded to Satou the same way she did to whoever beat her up - "go ahead and do it, I'll happily swallow your every desire, because that's the meaning of love."

I'm not sure exactly what function this scene is supposed to serve - is our partial understanding intentional or not. Are we supposed to know exactly what happened? Is it just a snapshot meant to convey an impression of Satou's childhood? Is there more to the scene that will be revealed later? What seems to be most important is just the knowledge that this is the definition of love Satou grew up with, and what she is attempting to rebel against.

Shouko didn't fail a test. The past two chapters were Sato's deliberate scheme to drive her away, just like all the other threats to her castle. Sato is very good at customizing her plots for each victim:

Sane friend (Shouko): Show her something unbelievably fucked up. Then, when she shows the slightest hesitation at getting involved (you know, the sane reaction), heap guilt upon her to make sure she never tries again.

Stalker (Suu): Give her everything she wants and more. Then, threaten to take it all away unless strict conditions are met--namely, stay away.

Adults (teacher and manager): Adults have a public face they need to protect, so threatening them with exposure is a good way to get them to back off and provide favors (trash disposal and higher pay).

I feel like there might be a little more depth in the case of Shouko - a possibility that Satou, deep down, felt some hope that she might be accepted, and that she pushed Shouko away partially as a defense to protect herself from one more rejection. I do believe that it was mainly a ploy, she was using Shouko as a pawn in her game, and this was her way of eliminating a piece that was no longer needed. But Satou's flashbacks after she leaves Shouko standing in the street show genuine pain.

Either way, it seems like it will be incredibly effective in getting Shouko to leave her alone. That girl will probably blame herself for this for the rest of her life, and will find approaching Satou again overwhelmingly difficult.

I do wonder though how Satou would've reacted if Shouko hadn't wavered like that.... It's really a question of how completely corrupted her soul is. Will she ever be able to trust anyone again?

last edited at Apr 6, 2017 7:16AM

My favorite part of meeting the aunt is going back to the chapter with Suu, where Satou's aunt "guides" her via Satou's hallucination.

The sudden trip abroad might bother me more if it seemed like it was the sole driver of the conflict (like in that Ratana Satis series, what a mediocre ending...). But in this case, it was clear from the beginning that Wei was resisting the idea of a relationship with this girl and was planning on dumping her all along. The trip isn't some imposition from outside forcing the characters to react - she has internal reasons for wanting to break up, and this is, at most, an excuse to do what she was already intending to do.

Whoever she ends up with is gonna have a rough time keeping up with her.

If you look at the tail of the speech bubble in that panel, it seems the girl was asking the Doctor to buy a new carton of eggs. The Doctor then replied that she would buy more eggs, but she purposely chose not to. The lack of a new egg carton (and the emptying egg carton) foreshadowed the limit on the girl's stay at Doc's home and possibly an attempt to end the relationship. If the Doctor had bought more eggs, then it would be safe for the girl to believe she can stay longer because someone has to eat them.

Eggs = a promise of a place to be. She figured it out.

I think the metaphor was a somewhat heavy-handed in its presentation, but it was helped along by existing network of associations surrounding cooking as a sign of domesticity and companionship, and eggs as fragile things that are inevitably and necessarily broken. Add in the art showing a bleak, sterile view of the cartoon sitting in the refrigerator, being used up one by one, and it was a very effective and compelling symbol for the chapter.

What the fuck am I reading?

The greatest literature known to man.

The first two in this collection were pretty brutal, but this one was sweeter.

Also, SFX are definitely the worst. Often they are untranslatable - the original "onomatopoiea" is meaningless in English, the intended meaning has no English SFX equivalent, and putting a whole phrase or sentence in would be unfaithful to the original.

Personally I think "Stab" works well, since it conveys a sudden, piercing pain, of the kind that might result from an emotional shock, and is common in English figurative language about emotion and betrayal.

last edited at Apr 1, 2017 2:46AM

Date for 2 years before calling each other by their first names, and then have sex for the first time five seconds after.

That is some real acceleration in progress.

For some reason, I had confused this series with another I didn't like this whole time and never gave it a chance. Well, now I'm all caught up and enjoy it a lot.

Zombies are certainly hard to do without being, well, overdone as they are but I'm really enjoying this series.

Like any good zombie series, it's not really about the zombies. The fragility of the human mind is a more interesting topic, and it's covered well here, especially with the focus on mutual dependence.

How far through are you?

I'm just talking about what's been translated and presented so far on this site (that's all I've read). So purely speculating about further developments. But the ex-boyfriend turning into a crazy stalker is simply boring, and contributes nothing to this story. The main plot is much more interesting than this kind of tired cliche.

Sadly that horrific stuff is a trope unto itself in a whole subset of television, in Soap Operas, Telenovella, K-Drama, etc.

Agreed. I don't mind it if it's well-developed. After all, people are assaulted in real life, and often they find themselves unwilling or unable to go to the authorities. I do know people who have had horrible things done to them, and in an attempt to forget them and return to their normal lives, they try to pretend that it never happened.

However, the way it's presented in fiction is often really aggravating because it's somehow shown to be the "right" thing to do - that declining to press charges on the stalker/serial-rapist goes somehow makes you the better person, when in reality it's a personal failure that (though understandable - not blaming people who suffer for the decisions they make out of fear) could condemn the next victim to the same fate.

Hopefully this story is going in a different direction. But I'm already irritated enough that her decision to give him back his ring instead of pawning it to cover his debt was somehow shown as liberating. That plus this stalking plot-line have triggered some warning signals for me.

I really hope this isn't going somewhere awful. In almost every Korean romance comic I've read, some guy (or sometimes a woman) does something horrific and illegal (assault, rape, attempted rape, threatening someone's family, blackmail, etc.) and NO ONE EVER GOES TO THE POLICE. Even when the police get involved, THE VICTIM DOESN'T PRESS CHARGES, rationalizing it with some bullshit, like "as long as they stay away from me from now on, it's enough".

Aside from my rant, this is just a really tired and cliche plot development that has nothing to do with the actually interesting parts of the story and just serves to create meaningless suspense.

last edited at Mar 20, 2017 2:33PM

I'm thinking this is all a red herring, and Kusanagi is actually targeting Mikoto in order to get to Sayuri. Just for maximum drama.

In the epilogue, they go to family services and the father gets imprisoned. The older sister is hit by a bus. Jun's existence is punishment enough for her crimes. Happily ever after.

There's nothing in the Japanese in that panel about it being a same-sex lover. Possibly the translator mistook 同棲 (cohabitation) for 同性 (same-sex) as the furigana and first kanji is the same.

Oh. You're right. Apologies for the screw-up, looks like I'm blind.

It's still a bit of a stretch to deduce that she's sharing a home with a girlfriend just because he had to dispose of a body.

Satou also talked a lot about love in the presence of her teacher, in her kinda psychotic way, plus he's been stalking her for a while, so he has quite a bit of evidence to put together.