This was so beautiful it made me tear up. Morinaga at her best.

is there ever a time its not the best?

Depends on your taste. Did you ever read the one where the girl is working at a bunny-themed cabaret place and part of her punishment for messing up involves the senior girl f***ing her with a carrot?
. . . OK, that one was pretty funny though. But some people might not like it.

Some people might consider Girl Friends the best yuri manga of all time and some might consider it one of the best yuri manga of all time, but there are only those two groups. What doesn't change is the fact that Volume 2 ended with the best kiss in any kind of romance ever told.

To this day I always tear up when I re-read that bit.

last edited at Feb 9, 2015 11:40PM

Is anyone else posting not sure who Morinaga Milk is ? Is it just me? I thought she was a dear until she wrote chapter 4. Give it a look.

It's just you. To enlighten you, Morinaga Milk is one of the titans of yuri manga. Among many other classic yuri series and oneshots, she wrote Girl Friends, which is arguably the best yuri manga everrr. Even if to your taste it isn't the best, I always feel like it was oddly groundbreaking. I mean, it's nothing but cliches, but it's about the first yuri series I can think of to just GO for it straight up. That is, a multi-volume series that just said OK, we're doing a romance between two girls, we're going to tell it like a shoujo and do all the things and have the plot twists and the pure feelings, we're going to be neither played for laughs (like, say, Strawberry Shake Sweet) nor ambiguous nor hate boys because of trauma--that is no distancing, no minimizing, no apologies for girls loving girls--we're just going to take all the good stuff from yuri oneshots and short series and turn it into a full-blown for-real long-running manga. And we're going to go all the way from "dense protagonists" to "fluffy feelings" to SEX and planning a life together.
For that matter, there haven't been that many such series since then, either. Hanjuku Joshi, Sasameki Koto, um . . .

Lots of her other stuff is great too. Much of it is innocent and cute, some is hilarious, some is explicitly sexual, some is more than one of those things at the same time. Passionate Electric Wave
http://dynasty-scans.com/series/passionate_electric_wave
is hilarious, very bizarre, sexy, and sweet all at once. But the Nana and Hitomi stories are some of the most passionate, poignant, heartfelt stuff ever published in manga, yuri or otherwise.

last edited at Feb 9, 2015 10:59PM

Really liked the ending - quite surprised by exactly how it played out - and I loved that her ex girl school mom had no problem with it lol. And don't go to France - come get married in the UK :)

Or Canada! Come to Canada, it's closer!

Thought I'd add my take on the girls school thing. My impression is that Miu was thinking that her mom must be used to the idea of girl girl romances since she went to a girls school. I didn't get any feeling that either of them expected it to end after graduation. After all, Miu's mom basically said "Go to France so that you can marry her." That doesn't sound to me like it's supposed to end.

Yeah, that. Actually, I've never really gotten the impression from Morinaga Milk's stuff that it would end after high school. Not in Girl Friends, certainly not in the Nana & Hitomi stuff, in both of which there were plans to live together as adults. You might have figured in the Secret Recipe which was so light-hearted and school-ish, but actually the ending of that pretty explicitly pushed the relationship post-school. And so on. Even in high school one-shots, an awful lot of them give the impression very strongly of a love that feels life-long.
And in this one, the theme throughout is of this girl, who has always thought of both romance and the frame of her whole future life as being very explicitly wrapped around the figure of a male prince, coming to completely reject that and see that her life can orient in a different direction. The story is structured around confronting head-on the idea of "You have to fall for a man so you can marry a man and be taken care of by a man". She couldn't accept her love until she could dump that whole thing. So I think the whole basis of the story opposes the "just until graduation" idea.

Ahhhhh I'm on my phone, that's why it took forever to load.
So now after China and Korea we have Yuri from Thailand too? 2015 seems to be a good year. Not much happen in chapter 1 but I really love the art. Look forward for more.
Thank you for bringing us this series.

Yeah, I was thinking the same . . . all Asia gets Yuri, hurrah!
As to smoking . . . I presumed the translators were letting us know of a social convention so we could dig what might be driving the atmosphere in the scene. Nothing wrong with that.
(Plus, really, smoking is bad for men or women, everywhere. Paying billionaires to kill you slowly, blegh)

Thank you so much Yuri Project, I am a desperate refugee bathing in the curative wonders of Kase-san to recover from The Feelings We All Must Endure (or rather The Feelings I Foolishly Chose to Endure). I needed this release, I really did.

All this overblown rage towards Remi seems a tad misplaced, would you blame a wolf surrounded by sheep?

Well, no, not blame . . . but if I were a shepherd I'd sure kill it. But Remi isn't a wolf; she doesn't need to pull this crap to live, and she has self-awareness. She can choose.
But if she gets to hide behind "it's just her nature" then where do you get off complaining about those of us whose nature it is to get enraged at vicious people?

She is not a very nice person to be sure, but hey at least she is proactive and knows exactly what she wants, not afraid to take it either.

So were Ted Bundy and Clifford Olson. I fail to see what's so wonderful about being decisive in the pursuit of nasty goals.

having an affair or sex in general is a foreign thing to most people i guess

Oh, please. I've known some very hedonistic, sleep-with-lots-of-people, kind of folks. And they're really nice people. Why? Because while they're open to plenty of sex with plenty of people, they don't deliberately fuck other people up in the process. Their sexuality is open, generous and giving. Remi is not like that, she's a selfish twisted bitch who gets off on seeing people she "likes" suffer.

Well. Right now I'm thinking the title about the "dust that makes up my world" makes Rather More Sense for this story than the title the scanlators went with, good and suffiicient though their reasons may have been.

last edited at Feb 5, 2015 1:47AM

Maybe I'm showing my age here, but every time I see the title The Last Uniform it makes me think of this:
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/product/9780451450524-item.html?s_campaign=goo-PLATest&gclid=CL22iMWM8MICFYKUfgodHgoA7w

Showing your age, huh? I hold in my hand a VHS videotape of the movie adaption of The Last Unicorn. I haven't thought of that story in years. Oops, pretend you didn't hear all that. If you ask my age I'll say "I tell people I'm 29."

Hah! i'm an old lady and not afraid to admit it, and CTV here in Canada used to show TLU on Crimmis Day here in Canada when I was a teenager so for me it'll always be a Crimmis movie. Still sad the live-action adaption didn't really go anywhere, the designs for that were super. Too bad they aren't online any more.

Well, a fellow Canadian! Well met. Apparently there's been a stage play done--for some reason I get Peter S. Beagle's email newsletter thing.

This is so damn hilarious I can't even process it.

Y'know, the tag says "Non-moe art". No doubt that's technically true . . . their eyes aren't ginormous, for instance . . . but they're sure as heck moe enough for me.

That credit page just summed up the whole chapter, I love it. I'm probably thinking too far ahead but I can't help but wonder how the characters will handle things like: sex, marriage, or maybe even children. I really can't wait to see where this all goes.

OMG I would love to see them raising kids hahaha

Ye-ess . . . Kind of tough fate to be wishing on the kids though.
I'm imagining their kids talking to other kids . . .
"You mean your mommy doesn't try to kill your other mommy every day? But then, how do you know they love each other?"

Way not to show a kiss :(

On a side note, I really, really want to see a longer series from this author. A bit less cliched and we might have a second Morinaga Milk. But with less high school.

Morinaga Milk's stuff is totally cliched. But it doesn't matter because she does all the little things so well she shows you why it became a cliche in the first place.

That was a lovely chapter ending, but not a manga ending. This needs a few more chapters. Or maybe I just need a few more chapters of this.

Ah, I think I'll read this again. It has to be one of the funniest manga I have ever read, and the funniest yuri hands down. So bizarre, so hilarious. And a bit of sweet added in . . . Morinaga Milk is a goddess of yuri.

Horn: Well, "while keeping it interesting"--sure, I'd agree, but there are a bunch of manga that go on forever about cute girls randomly interacting in some kind of half-assed school club or whatever, doing mild comedy and maybe pursuing yuri relationships which never really get anywhere and are half there as comic relief fodder. The art style here and some of the interactions feels just like them.

On the cliche thing--well, everything is relative. Sure, at some level every story has been told umpteen gazillion times before. But that's talking in a very bare-bones way. Person-meets-person, they fall in love, obstacle, obstacle, they get together the end. God, I've seen that so many times . . . wait, that's why they call it "romance", isn't it?

When we say something is "cliche" usually we mean something a bit more than that. Certain kinds of characters, certain particular elements of setting, certain specific plot points, get used much more often than others. Maybe they fit the general culture very well, maybe someone did it once and sold a billion copies, but in any writing environment (like Japanese shoujo manga or North American fantasy novels or whatever) there are some "bits" that are floating around ready to use because they've been used so much lately. If an author just kind of grabs a bunch of those and doesn't add much to 'em or change anything up or grab any bits from elsewhere, we call the results cliche and I don't think there's too much wrong with that. And it's totally relative to where and when you are. If I tell a shoujo romance and go back to Icelandic sagas and grab one of the bits that's totally overdone in the sagas, that was a cliche in the sagas but it really isn't in shoujo romance (it might not work, but it won't be a cliche).
People know what it means until they overthink it. Then you have to overthink it even more to get the meaning back.

Now personally, I don't mind yuri or shoujo manga cliches much, at least if the mangaka's adding something, making it her own in some way. I like the genres ultimately because I like their cliches. But I think it's just as pretentious to claim it's verboten to call "cliche" as it is to use the term in the first place.

While he/she used the most pretentious word possible to explain it (I really do hate the word cliche because of how fucking overused it is)

So you're saying calling things cliche is . . . cliche?

I expect there will be. It certainly doesn't have a one-shot feel to it, more like one of those "pilot for a series" pseudo-oneshots. I mean, there's no real resolution of plot or anything, just introduction of a few characters and their situation. If it gets one the problem for me will likely be a lack of progress; it has that shounen-ish feel to it that says "Lots of stuff will happen but it will be mostly filler and every forward step will be forgotten a couple chapters later so they can do it again". With luck I'm wrong.

last edited at Jan 20, 2015 5:01PM

I think it's too late about that. If we're going from the colored pages which are probably a bit in the future, Ayu sees Hii and the teacher kissing.

Am I the only one who thinks the mangaka might be messing with us? That scene is certainly made to look like a kiss, to certainly be something that gives both us and the MC the impression of a kiss. But it's a bad view . . . worse for us because we can't see the contact point past the MC's head. But it strikes me as one of those things that could be angle--like their faces are very close but the impression of contact could be false.

The MC might have seen just the wrong moment that looked like a kiss. Or might have seen something that almost became a kiss, but didn't. Or the sensei might have realized she was there and is deliberately scheming to create jealousy to give those kids a push. She seems like the meddlesome type.
Or maybe not. But the way it was shown just made me feel like the mangaka was maybe deliberately leaving a little wiggle room to go back on our first impression later.

I wonder if the editorial staff privately call ch 9 "Boobs and Kase-san"?
Aw, man, I just had to re-read this again and I'm just squee-ing all over again at how unconquerably cute it is.

That was way more cliche than I expected.

Well, from a Korean point of view it's like the first one. So it can't be cliche, it gets to use all the topoi like they're fresh and new.

What the heck are you guys talking about?!

Awww, her knight in shining armour with a baseball bat! Sooo cute!

This takes me back. Wow, I'd forgotten just how smutty it is.