If you follow one of the accounts on Twitter that translates manga sales statistics you'll see that yuri makes up something like 1% at most of sales. Then you make it about old women and it's a niche within a niche. All of the old women manga I see are josei in smaller artsy magazines that our publishers never touch. I wouldn't expect any major publisher to pick this up unfortunately.
That's largely true, but Seven Seas does quite a lot of yuri manga, much more than 1% of their sales. There's a decent enough chance that they'd pick it up, especially something like this that went viral last year outside of Japan and is more likely to do better with an international audience. Not to mention, Seven Seas had a very large hand in getting I'm in Love with the Villainess enough notoriety (being the first of anyone to publish the light novels) to get it published in Japan. Regarding genre, this isn't a manga for old women in a josei mag but rather manga about old women for a larger audience.
I'm not sure who published this originally, but it could be slightly more complicated by having Kadokawa or a publisher other than Kodansha being the ones with the license because they have their own English publishers (and Seven Seas works with Kodansha on a lot of YH titles). Basically, just wanted to say that it's more than viable that Seven Seas or Yen Press pick this up, less so that Kadokawa would and next to impossible that Viz would.
Something I think that would be trickier about this is that the story is not shy about being a feminist tale (not unlike All My Darling Daughters). Yoshiko seems to pretty clearly be a 70s-era feminist guiding a woman dealing with intentionally portrayed compulsory heterosexuality. Hmmm, might be worth the josei tag...
(tricky because detractors are kinda nuts and supporters are very critical of representation being perfect)
last edited at Jul 30, 2024 6:40PM