Goodness, my plaintive cries were answered quickly. Three chapters, my cup runneth over.
Although that third chapter . . .
Kase-san and cliffhangers.

last edited at Aug 10, 2016 2:40PM

@takachi
She means since she started working there, i.e. since chapter one.

I don't get it T__T Hina says, "I haven't even been working here for half a year." Or did she want to say that she didn't feel as if she was working over the last half a year because it was too much fun with Hana?

What's there to get? She just feels bad that she's quitting without having worked there for a long enough amount of time (6 months)
It means that in total, the amount of time she worked there is less than 6 months.
Obviously she's been working there for more than "half a month" man, lmao
The story started roughly around March I'd say, Hina haven't entered HS yet and the weather still being cold enough for Hana to wear the tanuki cosplay and feel at ease/warm.
Now they're thinking about their upcoming summer break, so probs around July, so I'm guessing that ever since Hina started working, approximately 3-4 months.
She does say less than half a year, not that 6 months have passed, that'd be way after summer break at that point

I see. Could be my Engrish, but I'd sure prefer it phrased as "I've started working here less than even half a year" as opposed to "I haven't even been working here for half a year".

Nezchan is right. (spoilering a long, pedantic dissection of the grammar and usage involved. Could be useful as a lesson but ignore it otherwise)

Your first phrasing is not only not as good, it's bad grammar--and not the kind of "bad grammar that everyone uses and understands" either, but the sort of bad grammar that causes confusion. Whereas the second phrasing is correct and also to me, and I think to most native English speakers, quite clear and normal usage. "I haven't (even) been working here half a year" == "I have been working here less than half a year" with the implication that "half a year" is, how to put it, the next significant time division that would have been reached (so for instance, you wouldn't say that after ten days; you'd say "I haven't . . . two weeks"). The "even" part implies that, considering some other thing under discussion, this is a (surprisingly or inappropriately) short time. This could be either good or bad, e.g. "X got promoted for being so awesome, and she hasn't even been working here for half a year!" or "Ei-chan made the final four at the Whatever Cup, and he hasn't even been playing tennis for two years!"

English usage, frankly, is weird--it seemed so natural and inevitable to me until I started dissecting it and realized half of that stuff isn't really implied by anything grammatical. It's just the way that phrasing works.

(On that first phrasing--the things wrong. 1: "I've started working" isn't necessarily wrong, but if you're going to attach a time to it, it probably is. So for instance, it would be "I started working yesterday" not "I've started working yesterday". 2: If you have a sentence where you did X in the past and you're talking about the amount of time that has passed rather than talking about a specific time in the past, you probably need to add "ago". So you'd say "I started work last week", but you'd say "I started work one week ago". So your sentence needed an "ago" at the end to make sense. 3. Like Nezchan says, "even" just doesn't fit there. You might say "less than" by itself, or you might say "**not** even" (without any "less than"), but you wouldn't combine them and you wouldn't have "even" by itself. So. Closest construction to your first that would be correct grammar would be "I started working here less than half a year ago." or "I started working here not even half a year ago." Even then, it wouldn't express the sentiments we're looking for as well as the phrasing the scanlators went with.)

last edited at Aug 9, 2016 10:00PM by Nezchan

I keep getting this Bob Marley refrain in my head when I see this.
"Fall in love . . . fall in love . . . Let's get together and feel all right!"

last edited at Aug 4, 2016 7:22PM

Thinking of people doing things for free on their own time--
So, um . . . I notice the front page for Kase-san lists a bunch of chapters which are not scanlated. For which I am pining. Does anyone know, maybe somewhere in the depths of the 27 pages of discussion it's already been said, if anyone has plans to do any of those, and if there are any hints as to how long-range such plans might be if they exist?

last edited at Aug 2, 2016 3:43PM

I don't get why everyone's so weirded out about the eyelashes thing. There are two obvious explanations, one naturalistic, one tactical. The first is that Qiu Tong is very very lovely and Sun Jing is head over heels for her and was looking, half-hypnotized, deep into her eyes and thinking "Wowww, those beautiful eyes, those lovely eyelashes" and then was interrupted with "Why are you looking at me?" and just sort of said what she thought--those are so fascinating I wanna touch them. In which case she's just lucky she wasn't checking out Qiu Tong's boobs at the time.

The second is, Sun Jing wants to flirt with Qiu Tong and get across to her viscerally that she should be considering Sun Jing in a sensual context. One of the best ways, obviously, is physical contact. But there are a lot of physical contacts you can't ask for--it would not go over well if she said "Can I run my finger across your lips", "can I stroke your throat" et cetera, let alone naughtier areas. Eyelashes is great--it's barely a touch, doesn't have direct and obvious sexual connotations, so it's maybe OK to ask, and yet it's romantic--eyelashes are a site of beauty, and you clearly wouldn't be asking if you weren't captivated by the person, and a touch will be done very delicately.

And they are tickly. Nobody ever heard of "butterfly kisses"?

last edited at Aug 1, 2016 7:41PM

Ah, Russians. Doesn't matter if they're poetic intelligentsia, earthy peasants, or brash promiscuous clubbers, they're all angsty as hell.

SOMEONE HOLD ME BACK IM ABOUT TO PUNCH THE SHIT OUTTA THAT LAST PAGE

. . . And we would want to hold you back why?
(Oh, right, you might hurt your hand and/or your monitor)

The girl has just marked her territory, yeah.

Yup.
That is a gorgeous avatar. Who/what is it?

last edited at Jul 25, 2016 5:11PM

Relax everyone. There is a sequel to this story.

Well, hurrah!

Man. This feels like a weird cross between Tamen de Gushi and "Always Human", that cute little Western yuri comic on Webtoon. Which is kind of a good thing.

:o Not to be totally off-topic, but thank you so much for the reference to "Always Human." First I'd heard of it, and I just archive-binged what's available :)

At your service. It's sweet, isn't it? There's at least one person around here who has an avatar from it.
Tamen de Gushi is what some places call "Their Story". It really feels to me like what people have been saying about resemblances to that, but with the art and sensibility somewhat like "Always Human".

I don't understand the beginning... she goes to some music event concert randomly looking for a dancer to teach her and then she sees a women kicking a can and she think of course this is a dance expert...

Kinda hard to show fluid motion in a comic. Just pretend she did it extremely gracefully.

Well anyway I'm thinking that may be partly luck. Like she saw this girl and what she was thinking deep down was "This chick mesmerizes me I must have an excuse to get closer" and then she thought "She's so graceful! My need to get closer tells me she's a dancer!" and then it turned out she actually was, yo.

Man. This feels like a weird cross between Tamen de Gushi and "Always Human", that cute little Western yuri comic on Webtoon. Which is kind of a good thing.

A match made in purgatory.

I don't have any complaints about this manga but I wish people would stop telling people not to complain.
People are allowed to not like things you like, and it's even OK if something you don't find creepy strikes a creepy vibe with someone else. What I find particularly annoying is the complaint cleft stick: On one hand, I see a bunch of people saying "If you don't like it, just don't read it!" -- but on the other, it's also a common and strong criticism to say "If you haven't read it, how do you know it's bad?" And the same people will say both things.

Basically, there's a school of thought that nobody should ever say anything critical about any piece of fiction, ever (except the ones it becomes the "in" thing to bash, like Twilight and Citrus). If they haven't read it, they don't know if they really wouldn't like it, and if they have they should have known before they read it that they wouldn't like it, and so in either case they should shut up. Sorry. I say good things about manga I like, and I'll say bad things about ones I dislike if I feel like it, or even comment about less-than-perfect aspects of manga I like overall.

(I do actually see that there is vague creepiness going on here, I just don't mind for various reasons--which actually seems to be how many of the people pointing out creepiness feel)

Ugh. It's kind of looking like it. If she does, I dearly hope it's just a phase.

Well, can't say this story has no suspense.

Kind of a surprise that it was Wendy's mother's anonymous lover who was the kind voice of reason who helped smooth the way for the two of them to leave for boarding school. That's... not how that character is usually used in these kinds of stories. ><;

Was it? I thought maybe the husband was now back from the war . . . but maybe you're right.
Marly noticing that the man with Wendy's mother was different from who she remembered could work either way; either she remembers the wartime lover and is surprised to now see the husband, or she remembers the husband from before the war and is surprised to now see the lover. Lemme think . . . actually, I don't think Marly knew Wendy before the war and the lover. 'Cause, she first got to know Wendy when her mother was crying all the time, which would be during the war when she had a lover. So the first man she would have associated with Wendy's mother would be the lover. Which means if there's a different guy around now, it's either a different anonymous lover, or it's the husband, back from the war. Also, Wendy's story says "While he was gone for the war", which suggests he is no longer gone for the war.

So pretty sure guy stepping up is Wendy's returned father.

Except the very first page, narrated by Wendy, says that her father "didn't come back in the end".

Ah, right. A couple other people have also corrected me. So not the dad.
But it was made clear that the mom quit with the guy who impregnated her, so this would be a newer guy, one who got together with a widow rather than one who took advantage of a lonely wife.

A great work. Yuri needs more works like this. Great writing, interesting and atypical setting and mood, fantastic art. I hope more Ugawa Hiroki works appear in future.

Thanks, Yuri Project.

Yes, really impressive stuff. I'd also like to see more by this person.

Wow. I don't know why, but somehow this manga really got to me.
My interpretation is that Kishi made a deal with someone to stay in the human world during elementary school and if someone falls in love with her during that time, she can stay there.
Yuu's love for her and them being together all the time is what gave her enough strength to stay way past elementary school.
But when she started distancing herself from Yuu, she became too weak to stay in the human world and had to go back to wherever she came from.
And when she turns 18, I guess her "powers" will have matured enough to allow her to go to the human world by herself and stay indefinitely.

I'm not sure what kind of being Kishi is, but honestly I don't think it really matters here.

Presumably you could read this as a metaphor, to an extent, where Kishi is a lesbian and thus different from the other girls. Yuu recognizes something in her, possibly a sense of shame at being how she is, and her acceptance of Kishi makes that darkness recede. Yuu's seeming rejection makes her fall back into her old self, although she's gotten good at faking it around others. At the end, Kishi is happy despite needing to leave, which itself may be a metaphor for not taking things further for now, but will be back, or free to pursue their relationship, after they're grown and free of the constraints of high school and beyond the "it's just a phase" years. In this scenario, the blood drinking and healing would represent intimacy, with Yuu letting Kishi past all barriers, although not necessarily sexual.

Of course, none of this is likely the case, just me musing "aloud". Pay it no mind.

My impression is that while all those metaphors are operating, they are operating as a function of the literal supernatural stuff which is also very much there.

Kind of a surprise that it was Wendy's mother's anonymous lover who was the kind voice of reason who helped smooth the way for the two of them to leave for boarding school. That's... not how that character is usually used in these kinds of stories. ><;

Was it? I thought maybe the husband was now back from the war . . . but maybe you're right.
Marly noticing that the man with Wendy's mother was different from who she remembered could work either way; either she remembers the wartime lover and is surprised to now see the husband, or she remembers the husband from before the war and is surprised to now see the lover. Lemme think . . . actually, I don't think Marly knew Wendy before the war and the lover. 'Cause, she first got to know Wendy when her mother was crying all the time, which would be during the war when she had a lover. So the first man she would have associated with Wendy's mother would be the lover. Which means if there's a different guy around now, it's either a different anonymous lover, or it's the husband, back from the war. Also, Wendy's story says "While he was gone for the war", which suggests he is no longer gone for the war.

So pretty sure guy stepping up is Wendy's returned father.

Wait. So Wendy killed that unborn child?!

Marly: Your mom's so mean, let's get out of here!
Wendy: Yeah about that, I've physically abused my mom for years and even aborted her baby.
Marly: That's okay I still love you. Let's go!
Wendy: :)

*I am sleep deprived and probably misunderstood the story completely so by all means correct me

I think, it isn't stated that Wendy killed the child, but she blames herself for its death.

Because she was constantly assaulting her mother.

It's ambiguous just what she did; she might have just smashed things and yelled at her and stressed her out. Or she might have regularly beaten her with broken crockery. Or anything in between.
Similarly her mother might have been mainly crying because her daughter was treating her bad, or she might have been mainly crying because she'd been cheating on her husband with some no-good and gotten herself pregnant and then lost the kid (and her daughter reminding her all the time didn't help), or anywhere in between.
Pick what suits your sense of the story.

I think that the butch/femme is more a real life stereotype. But when I read/watch/consume any kind of fictional narrative or media, the femme/femme is the more prevalent couple of the lesbian world. Maybe authors think that they'll be more accessible by heterosexual people or that they'll at least be both attractive to heterosexual males (who are probably the main consumers, at least in Japan, of lesbian works).

You think so? I've always gotten the impression that yuri never became as big a genre as BL precisely because marketing it to heterosexual males never really caught on the way marketing BL to heterosexual females did. Rather, yuri seems to be, to this day, mostly marketed to females, both gay and hetero--gay ones for obvious reasons, and hetero ones who, I dunno, like certain qualities in their romances that don't seem to work as well when there are guys around. And OK, sure, a few guys with good taste, but guys with good taste aren't a market.

That's why for the most part, the artistic and plot style of yuri seems to come out of shoujo and josei rather than shounen or seinen. There are exceptions, they often stick out like a sore thumb, of clearly shounen-oriented yuri where somebody thought "Hey, maybe the boys would like to see all girls in the story so there will be 100% boobies", but it never seems to have caught on very well--perhaps because with the prevalence of the harem subgenre in shounen, the boys already get like 80% plus boobies and a viewpoint character they can project into. Even though it would technically grow the genre I'm just as pleased those never took off, because stupid shounen fanservice manga are stupid and I don't want them taking over my yuri.

That last page would have been better if they just put the "This is the past" dark border around it instead of using a confusing caption thing.

Reading page 17 first makes this much more coherent. I love Canno's stuff. :D

Not usually a fan of unrequited love, but this was pretty sweet.

But it's clearly not unrequited. They just both imagine so.

I'm kind of coming at this from a different direction, I guess? I read the tags, and was actually expecting something even more rapey and stuff and with less emotion or plot than what I got when I read it. I mean, I wouldn't say I found it sweet, but considering the space it inhabits, as it were . . .

I liked it. Sweet, and there was some genuine suspense for a while about what would happen.

Probably. I remember a while ago I watched this chunk of Japanese TV show where an older well known manga artist went around filming the art processes of famous mangaka and talking to them about how they worked and stuff. Anyway, so he was doing the guy who did Oyasumi Punpun and now Dead Dead Demons de de . . . and the guy was working mostly computer-based and he would bring in photographs, do some kind of transform so they were black and white and stuff, and then touch them up to feel more manga-like and "right" for the scene. I suspect it's not too uncommon these days.