Somebody's going to burst into the room and interrupt them.

I gotta say this is all very interesting but in the end it's still purely speculative. I have no probs with interpretations and such but claiming to know for sure what Nanase's or Fuuko's motivations are is just bs.

Your analysises can be as deep as the Mariana trench and it still will be nothing more than speculation. Some humility might be in order, I mean interpret all you want but don't act like the authority unless the evidence is definitef.

Reading this, I have to presume you aren't familiar with Roland Barthes' literary theory people refer to as "Death of the Author." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

It's ubiquitous enough at this point I don't usually feel like I have to reference and explicate it. The argument the theory makes that is germane to what we're talking about is the idea that meaning is created by the reader interpreting the text, not by the author crafting it. It is a literary theory by-and-large assumed to be part of the firmament of modern criticism, and it seems as if most of the readers here understand that I'm assuming it as a premise when I'm writing here.

As for humility, I feel that you're misinterpreting the tone of my writing. My goal in writing is to make my act of interpreting the text make sense, and I feel strongly that in order to make sense, the ideas have to be presented very directly, and without any demure. If I begin every section with a preamble indicating that what I'm saying is just something I think, and not some sort of inside knowledge of authorial intent I've gleaned from the author, it only gets in the way of making the interpretive argument cogent. That a theory is speculation, based on close reading of the text, is something which can be assumed. It's an assumption I make in regards to everyone's theories of the text written here, yours included. I feel like you're receiving a certain aggression from my writing, and all I can tell you is that it isn't intended. I write how I write, based on the kind of literary criticism I read and enjoy. If it sounds arrogant, all I can tell you is that it is the main way I know how to construct meaning and make arguments, and that every argument offered therein is simply, as you say, a theory. It being a theory is what makes it mine; no presentation of facts was ever intended––and I don't believe any presentation of facts was overtly communicated to most reader or contributors to the forum. Furthermore, ANY interpretation of a text, absent the author's voice of assent, for whatever that is worth, is inherently over-reach, vis-a-vis the original text––any interpretation is extra to the text––including, I might add, translation, which inherently alters the meaning of the original work. If we apply Death of the Author theory here, I think you can easily make a credible case that anything an author says about their work is also extra to the text, and therefore not dispositive of meaning. So I acknowledge that you seem to be upset with my writing, but I don't see that you are making an argument towards any purpose. I am not the author of My Girlfriend's Not Here Today. Therefore, any interpretive writing I do on the subject, however lengthy or brief it is, over-reaches from the concrete text––though the idea that the text is concrete is not so clear-cut to me, in the first place.

How is one meant, for instance, to integrate the chapters into the work that appear exclusively on particular platforms, like the zero chapter? In the official English language publication of the book, that chapter doesn't even appear. What about the extra chapter where Yuni thinks about strangling Fuuko? Is it meant to be part of the continuity of the story? Is it a diegetic event in the story, or a dream? None of this stuff is clearly established by the author, so far as I can see. All we have to help us integrate all that into the reading is our ability to interpret the text. And the whole point of my writing this is to offer one avenue of possible interpretation. You can see how some readers here respond to it with their own formulations, or with amendations and criticisms of the arguments I'm making. This is what we're doing, interpreting and making arguments for or against certain interpretations. It's exercise for your brain––it's meant to be fun. By nature, doing this does not nail down any official meaning to the text at hand. I do hope you can come around to being okay with this. No argument here is meant as a personal insult, after all. I just don't agree with your assertion that the text presents Nanase as an ideal, or even and acceptable girlfriend for Yuni. And I'm trying to argue that there are many signposts in the text that Nanase's tone, her lack of character development in comparison to the other two main characters, and her leaning on status in lieu of either argument or genuine feeling means that she cares for Yuni less than Fuuko does, and inherently fills the antagonist role in the story. Nanase loves Yuni, as Cordelia says in King Lear, "according to my bond, no more nor less." Lear interprets that in the Shakespeare play to mean the conditional bond of subject to ruler, but in fact Cordelia means their bond as father and daughter, which she is trying to imply means more than Lear's status as liege, and is, for her, ultimate and unconditional. In My Girlfriend's Not Here Today, Nanase's bond with Yuni is much shallower; it's the bond of high school girlfriend––and I think we tend to understand that as a bond which has very little stable value. One need not love one's high school girlfriend; dating is a pro forma activity for people of that age, people sometimes hardly know what they want of one another's intimacy. And by comparison, Fuuko loves Yuni far outside the range of their extremely tentative bond. They are acquaintances, but Fuuko treats Yuni as someone she has made a serious commitment to. We do see that this is pretty much the only way Fuuko can communicate or receive affection (she has no friends, it seems, only would-be exes and family she is quasi-divorced from), but it really comes down, in my formulation, to whether the title of "lover" is more or less vital than the substance of love––the difference between the performance of love ("performance" here meaning all it implies about artifice) and the act of love. Nanase does not want Yuni to occupy much more of her time and consideration than the position of high-school girlfriend might imply; Fuuko clearly wants more for herself, and more for Yuni. And the masochism we see in Fuuko comes across, I feel, as proof of far more sincerity than Nanase's insubstantial protestations of a love she never really has to prove. It's clear from the outset that Fuuko is willing to sacrifice a lot to be with Yuni. She is willing to do without the respect of others, willing to sacrifice her self-respect, willing to take a chance on a feeling that won't necessarily be reciprocated. Nanase, meanwhile, is not willing to sacrifice anything for the same. When I look at those two that way, in the context of fiction, where we are generally encouraged to pick winners and losers, those deserving and those not so––in that context, one character is deserving of love, always denied it, and still tries for it again and again, hopefully. The other character acts like devotion is owed her, and does not grow as a character to understand the relationship she's being handed, or the needs of her partner. Of course, that's just my opinion, but that's the whole point––it IS my opinion. It is my interpretation of the text. It is the reading which validates my participation in the creation of meaning around the text. And that's it, at the end of the day.

last edited at Dec 20, 2024 6:48PM

Bruh Yuni is finished. One girl is genuinely in love with her but she's too messed up to make it work. The other girl wants to infantilize her to play momy.

Well, I hold out hope Yuni will recognize that love that Fuuko feels for her. In the meantime, we'll all have to put up with more of Nanase's infantilizing.

Let's not forget, after all, who was picking Yuni up and carrying her around like a baby for all to see. Fuuko invites Yuni to play games with her; games where Yuni is a full participant. We can see how Yuni uses the parameters Fuuko has set up for their game to take charge of what happens in their game together, taking control and giving up control to explore the nature of what Fuuko feels for her. The game rewards both the girls and honors their individual agencies. Nanase, by contrast, wants to show Yuni off like a trophy. Her reason for doing it isn't deep love, but possessiveness––she wants to show off Yuni, even if Yuni doesn't want to be exposed to everyone in such a bombastic way (this is a girl who mostly hoped her girlfriend would acknowledge her as such in the classroom and hold hands––she doesn't have grand ambitions to be some power couple in the school. She wants bare-bones acknowledgement of her relationship, and the sense of relative security that would come with it. But Nanase can only process her feelings in relationship to her social role. She aspires to love Yuni only as much as she feels wouldn't violate some mythical sense of propriety (after the zero chapter, it's obvious that Nanase has fallen into this relationship partly because Yuni was the only person who gave full-throated affirmation to her "risky" lesbian haircut. And Nanase's form of affection is to play a game of neglect where only Nanase holds the reigns. Yuni is not consulted, and isn't permitted to impress her desires on Nanase. As Yuni realizes in this last chapter, Nanase has only begun clumsily trying to express affection for her because she's afraid she'll lose Yuni to Fuuko.

It's the one-sided game that's the infantilizing one. The game you play with a toddler, where you, the adult, control the rules and parameters, and allow for no broad transgression––keeping the infant in the dark about your purpose. That game denies the other player's agency, just as Nanase denies Yuni's agency. Conversely, the game Fuuko plays with Yuni respects Yuni's choices and desires, and alters to accommodate Yuni's desire for expression. This game fulfills Yuni in a way that Nanase's hollow show of devotion doesn't. And this is doubly ironic, because the game Fuuko plays with Yuni is conducted entirely in secret––the exact situation that frustrates Yuni about Nanase's strangled attempts at passion.

So why is Fuuko's secret game so much more fulfilling than Nanase's public expression of possession? Which of these looks like love to you? One of these two suitors wants Yuni to be herself, and express herself. The other one treats her as though she is fundamentally ashamed to be with her. This show of alleged affection at the end of the chapter, after all, is only a garbled communication with the rest of the school––Nanase isn't declaring anything or standing up to her volleyball teammates so she can have time with Yuni; she's just playing along in a public game––the meaning of which is hidden from the audience at large by being confined to the scavenger hunt card Nanase is handed. Nanase's performative "cherishing" of Yuni humiliates her without conferring on her the public awareness Yuni wants for her status as Nanase's girlfriend to feel substantial and real. There is no respect here, no thought on Nanase's part but a selfish one. She isn't enabling Yuni to have any control of her own person here––almost like Yuni is a baby, who needs to be siloed off in a crib, while Nanase chats with her peers in a nearby space Yuni just can't get to. Fuuko, by comparison, wants to climb into the crib with Yuni so they can be babies together. Which sounds more fun? Which player sounds like they really value Yuni?

As for my previous post, people seem keen to focus on the ways in which Yuni isn't technically lower-class and Fuuko isn't necessarily richer than Nanase. I did a second posed trying to hone this formulation a little more, but in case that didn't come through, I think the author is using the setting of a school which is, basically, full of middle-class girls. Fuuko, Nanase, and Yuni all appear to be––in terms of their physical realities, as the author draws them––middle-class. I don't think the author could readily justify schoolgirls of all income brackets attending the same school. But in literary terms, each of them stand in for a space in the larger socio-economic structure. The way that seems to work in the text is that the author codes the language and behavior of the three girls to epitomize viewpoints and mannerisms of different socio-economic classes––not the classes they actually seem to inhabit, but the classes they serve to represent. So even though Yuni isn't necessarily living hard, she demonstrates traits of someone in the lower classes. She takes care of her hard-working mother when the mother gets home, fulfilling family duties that a working parent is unable to complete because of long work hours. Yuni can't afford the trip to Nanase's game that everyone else we see has no problem affording. Yuni has a practicality about money her friends don't––when they ask to borrow anything from her, quick as lightning, and disguised by a jokey tone, she quotes them a price for the transaction. This is a girl used to counting Yen and Sen, used to making a meal out of whatever she and her mom has in the refrigerator, used to helping stretch her little family's budget and make it last. Look at how tense she becomes once her mother tells her not to worry about the money for college. Yuni knows what that means, and is savvy to the hidden meaning of the phrase. She knows her mom will be making sacrifices, going without to make Yuni's schooling work, if Yuni takes her up on it. Whether or not the author draws her in a big apartment, whether or not the kind of snack bar service worker her mom is can make a middle-class income, the thoughts that are on Yuni's mind are representative of working class struggles, worries, practicalities, fantasies, and dreads. Note how Yuni instinctually doesn't tell Nanase what her mother does for a living––she knows Nanase will look at her mother's job as one to be ashamed of (there's also some ambiguity about whether Yuni's mom owns the snack bar or simply works at it––but it's Nanase who suggests Yuni's mom is a "small business owner," and Yuni doesn't correct it.

In the same way, Fuuko isn't rich like mansion-and-butler rich. But the way she represents the wealthy upper classes is in the haughty way she carries herself, the way she feels entitled to total social mobility (look how the wealthy in the world today expect any door to be open to them). Fuuko's everyday realities are none of them practical matters of survival––not in the way Yuni worries about survival. Fuuko's problem in her own milieu is her failure to equal the conformist achievements of her siblings––achievements which are un-subtle-y coded as masculine and hypercompetitive. Fuuko is not worried about surviving; she's worried about people not taking her seriously; when you have everything already, respect is the only thing people can really deny you. And Fuuko wants respect, wants legitimacy. This is one of the ways the author codes her as upper-class, even though in terms of the school, Fuuko is probably upper-middle-class, Yuni is probably lower-middle-class, and Nanase is squarely middle-class. Regardless of the material reality of their conditions as the author has drawn them (I keep in mind here, as well, that there isn't really a pre-drawn "squalid apartment" background the author can pull as a quick asset for Yuni's brief scenes at home), what's important to the analogy––as I'm trying to make it, at least––is the class differences that the characters stand in for; the class identities they represent. It's a literary device the author uses––my hunch is that the symbolic class analysis it creates comes from common anarcho-communist beliefs which we encounter in a lot of disparate Japanese literary sources––the idea that Japanese society began to "go wrong" with the countrywide postwar pivot towards mega-capitalism, which decimated the communal village life which dominated at least the Japanese cultural imaginary, if not the culture itself, before capitalist values overtook them. It's an outlook that necessarily leads the kind of class analysis I see in the manga to view the main characters as trapped in an impossible stalemate, where the transcendent personal goals of the characters on the extreme sides of class struggle are made impossible by an unimaginative middle class enforcing hegemony (operating as a proxy for the rich, in order to prevent, say, violent insurrection.

In a way, all the joys and pains of this work come out in that stalemate between the three proxies for rich, poor, and middle. The lack of imagination in so self-satisfied a character as Nanase obliterates the more specific and meaningful fantasies of the other two. And the values Nanase fronts to enforce her point of view (values which clearly oppress both Yuni and Fuuko) are so effective because of their hegemony; Yuni and Fuuko have internalized these values themselves. This is what leads to Yuni's indecision––because even if the passion and care she recognizes from Fuuko seems real, it flies in the face of the middle-class values and virtues Yuni has internalized all her life. She thinks there is virtue in staying with your first choice of love, even if the person is a bad choice for the part. She sees Nanase's hollow overtures as being proof of affection––and she accepts Nanase's hollow words as truth over and above Fuuko's more genuine constancy––because she recognizes Nanase as a figure embodying authority (look at Nanase in the latest chapter, playing a very fasc-y figurehead at a disturbing pep-rally). Words can be proven hollow, but if they're said by the so-called "right people," most of us tend to believe them anyway. Another way to slice this: notice how the character whose living conditions we never see is, in fact, Nanase––because we don't need to see it. Don't we already know Nanase lives as the epitome of the middle-class? As with everything that is Nanase, we can read it in, accept it as true because of her position, rather than anything else. That's what you're supposed to do for the figure who represents cultural orthodoxy, like Nanase does.

And, hey: Nanase gets worse. When the three girls confront each other, and Nanase wins Yuni back, she doesn't mount any effective argument to do it––she just insists on the assumed, inherent integrity of her feeling, as representative of social orthodoxy. Fuuko, meanwhile, constructs a complex argument and in a sense actually proves that she a) listens to Yuni, b) respects Yuni, c) cherises Yuni above others, d) yearns to make Yuni happy and that e) Nanase actively does the opposite––but it doesn't matter. When the volleyball star says "I can has volleyball and girlfriend both! Bookworm girl baaaaddd!!!" it lands with the weight of orthodoxy behind it––never mind that it doesn't add up, or that Nanase has proved time and again that she doesn't value Yuni enough to be recognized as her girlfriend (In fact, Nanase actually calls Fuuko crazy––rather than offering an argument for her own devotion, Nanase can only point at the girl who just made a case for her passion and pronounce her outside of the fold, a roamer of the borders. Discredit her, and the defender of orthodoxy need never answer her piercing challenges, nor her sound reasoning).

Something else comes out of that confrontation which really moves me, and that's when Yuni discovers Fuuko's Vent account. Fuuko has posted a picture she has taken after setting up the star projector to make her overture of love to Yuni. The caption is Fuuko, baring her hopes and dreams to her Vent followers (is this why she is so much more popular than Yuni on the platform? Fuuko shares her vulnerability on the platform, while Yuni can't help but show a mask still). Fuuko says under the picture of the star projector, whose constellations she was about to show Yuni, "I hope she'll tell me it's beautiful." This is the Rosetta Stone of the writer's sympathies. Fuuko is fanciful, creative; maybe even a little ephemeral. She plays games with Yuni, prodding and drawing Yuni out––but Fuuko doesn't lie, and doesn't deceive. She yearns for Yuni in a breathless, poetic way, and she approaches Yuni with sincerity. Nanase, meanwhile, lies to Yuni about remembering their anniversary, lies in a larger way about how important Yuni is to her, and consistently leads Yuni to get her hopes up about an advance in their relationship which never really comes. As representative of middle-class values, the meritocratic hegemony the middle-class fronts to the world, Nanase is given the benefit of the doubt, and even taken MORE seriously than fringe elements like Yuni and Fuuko. But she is completely full of sh*t at just about all times, so deep in her own lies she doesn't realize they aren't true. To dovetail ungracefully back to the first argument I was trying to make, there are really only two characters in the narrative we're meant to understand as individual people, beyond their representation of one class value or another. Nanase is never really in the picture as more than a guard for the orthodox position––we hardly get any deep insight into what Nanase thinks. In front of us, she acts like a dope, a thug (her response to Fuuko: "Get away from my girlfriend!"), a patsy, and an ignoramus (she does not see her friend is into her, and a way better match––but beyond that, Nanase is palpably ignorant throughout, as when she stumbles in on the star projector and immediately draws the curtains, spoiling the image without even a hint of curiosity). This isn't about a character whose embodiment of class values makes her little more than a prop. This is about Yuni and Fuuko, who burn, flame and burst with passion. It's about the genuine feelings Fuuko has for Yuni, and about the genuine feelings for Fuuko which Yuni tries so hard to deny––because accepting them goes against her assumptions of how her world works (and, by extension, since the girls all serve as stand-ins, as metaphorical representations of different classes, dating Fuuko rather than Nanase disrupts Yuni's blithe ignorance of the real nature of class war, and of the socio-economic assumptions she has made until now). I hope this all doesn't end in tragedy––though there's that chapter where Yuni fantasizes about choking out Fuuko. But to me the only reasonable way to see it is to hope for the happiness of the two really obvious main characters here––the ones that think and feel deeply, not just as shallow representations of the way people assume things should be. Breaking tradition––breaking peoples' expectations––is hard, convulsive, painful. Moralizing the situation––in this case, especially––is such unnecessary torment.

That was a fantastic essay of a post, hell yes. I love media analysis of that level. My only critique is even bothering to question authorial intent because really, does that matter? On some level it's kind of like a "does that politician believe what they're saying in their heart" kind of notion: who cares if they believe it internally, they're still saying it externally. I would guess at least most the elements you've pointed out are absolutely intentional: Yuni's poverty and Nanase's privilege is textually highlighted with the away game arc, after all. I don't really think Nanase and Fuuko are actually in different economic classes though, just two people who respond differently to the toxic cage of privileged respectability. Nanase is perfectly at home in that mainstream normal, Fuuko is super not. Yuni, in her poverty, never even had a chance to fit those expectations. She hides her class now and I bet that's due to past bullying over things like cheap thrifted clothes and old shoes and not going on field trips. Yuni desperately wants to fit in with Nanase and people like her because she knows what they do to people like her if they find her. It might not be Nanase specifically who bullies her but enough people *like" Nanase would to make her school life an isolated hell. Ironically, she's experiencing an isolated hell ANYWAY due to Nanase keeping her in a cage. Poor Yuni :(

Edit: in fact Nanase being so ultra "normal" to the point where she's practically the poster child for "good normal people" even though she's a lesbian points to possibly even more of a privileged economic status than Fuuko. You've got be pretty well protected from the world to know you have to hide your sexuality and yet never once question that. People like that, every other aspect of society besides the heteronormativity is working just fine for them so they never stop to question society. Fuuko meanwhile is a lesbian, artistically inclined in a stemlord family, and not exactly neurotypical, so society really isn't working well for her even past sexuality.

I think if you were to zoom back on the society in which the girls live, they would all basically slot into the middle class. Yuni isn't necessarily facing extinction, Fuuko isn't really rich, per se. But in the microcosm of a school full of middle-class students, the different economic coding the author has assigned the three girls becomes pretty consciously differentiated. To me, Fuuko is coded as the representative of wealth over Nanase, because she embodies the cultural values of the wealth. She is cultured herself, and she sees a virtue in projecting idleness and ease (even as she works hard at all sorts of things)––essentially she projects a sense of being above it all, and she seems to inherit that attitude from her family, who champion values of old-world money, like a perfectly manicured family picture and the crushing conservatism of Fuuko's mother, believing it was a "mistake" to have a daughter who might make the family "look bad." This is all upper-class bullshit, focused on the generational transfer of wealth, power, and influence, and the maintaining of self-conscious facades––all of it basically antithetical to the middle-class bastion of merit––merit doesn't even figure in. Whether or not Fuuko's family lives in genuine wealth and luxury is less important to the text than the way in which they are the projectors of this upper-class value system––just as Yuni carries the working underclass value system by internalizing it, regardless of the level of actual poverty she experiences (which doesn't really feel like terribly visceral poverty as it's presented in the story). Nanase really sticks out to me as the one blindly fronting and gatekeeping the kind of notional meritocracy that preserves the status quo for the rich, and which situates the middle class as defenders of its hegemony. If you put the guard in charge of castle security, he soon comes to feel that the castle is "his" in some way––even though it absolutely isn't. Nanase is carrying water for a system which––in the microcosm of the story––benefits Fuuko's family's value system more than Nanase's own treasured future, filled with assumed promise.

Fuuko is definitely outside of the boundaries of upper-class norms in a lot of ways––but that's a trope of the upper-class as well––the prodigal son, the one who rejects his birth, still subconsciously carrying the upper-crust values he's absorbed out into the world even as he rebells against them. Fuuko's subtlety, her fanciful trickiness, the way her sense of "right" and "wrong" is totally divorced from conventional morality...these are upper-class values Fuuko brings to the story whether she wants to or not. She's the prodigal son cliche, but she's also the king who dresses as a beggar to walk amongst his subjects, and that lust for the romance of living roughly is in Fuuko when she protects Yuni from the predatory boys in the street at night, and in the sense that Fuuko always seems a hair's-breadth from running away from home (I believe she even seems to have considered it during the away-game date, when Yuni asks her if that's what she's doing). And just like the upper class and the working class in most societies, Fuuko and Yuni instinctively recognize that the meritocracy Nanase wields like a club is an illusion. They instinctively recognize it, even as their subconscious actions in the world betray how enslaved they are to this conventional moral imprisonment.

I guess when I think about the author's point of view, I wonder how far they might take this. Could these characters be alienated from their assumed class interests? Could they achieve some form of recognition of their positions vis-a-vis one another? How would that change the dynamic at play? Or would self-consciousness on the part of the author change their reading of the text going forward? I still have bitter memories of the anime Wonder Egg Priority, pulling a nearly complete 180-degree pivot and pursue an opposite ideological agenda in the last third of its episodes. Of course, I believe that was the result of firing the lead writer and replacing them with someone with an ideologically opposite viewpoint. But I'm still worried about the book remaining rich in its themes, and so, in that context, what is conscious storymaking on the part of the author does matter a bit to me. Thanks all for the kind words––I went back and tried to fix some of the errors in the writing, sorry if that made things hard to parse before!

last edited at Dec 8, 2024 5:55AM

I’m very late to this party, having discovered the series when the official adaptation was published. But since then it’s grown into easily my favorite current book––not only for what’s there on the page, or what's there in the author’s intentions (which I’ll speculate heavily on in a bit), but for what reading the book has illuminated for me about the way I process other manga, and, indeed, other comics in general. This has allowed me to see the alleged “trashiness” a lot of people here seem to complain about as potentially a very deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the author, a confrontational ploy that is meant to engage us in a deeper class analysis which the text is proposing. I’ve seen people complain that the situation of the story hasn’t advanced, and while I don’t really agree with that even on a textual basis, I want to point out that the subtextual reading I’ve been able to enjoy in this comic is very lively, and it works, for me, at least, to develop the book as a piece of art. In fact, I think there is a considerable difference between My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today and pretty much any other Yuri book I’ve ever read. It’s a difference tthat so far continues to make for remarkable reading. I’m going to attempt to explain what I mean, but for haters, I suppose it goes without saying that I obviously have no inherent objection to the subject matter, the cheating or the “trashy” aesthetic––and while I’ve been very hurt by cheating in my own relationships in the past, not only do I not hold it against anyone now, but my current understanding of the violent, changeable state in which we live––the knife’s edge of existence we all tiptoe across––makes it really impossible for me to condemn anyone for finding a new relationship that helps them learn more about themselves, a new, intimate interaction which can extend some of our most vital feelings into the world. As far as the cheating in the story is concerned, I think it has far more to do with socioeconomic class than anyone I’ve seen writing about the series has reckoned with yet. As for the trashiness, trash has never hurt me, and in this case especially, it tastes delicious. But I guess you have to get down in the dirt to know? You can get something from the trashy book you might never encounter in the classy one.

It occurred to me as I have read My Girlfriend's Not Here Today that virtually all other Yuri I’ve read has been written under the sign of capitalist realism. In fact, I’d say most American and Japanese comics I’ve read have this idea that capitalism is some sort of natural state of existence––as old as the cave people, I guess––buried in the bedrock assumptions of what the book is communicating to us. The Frederic Jameson/Slavoj Zizek quote is especially relevant here: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” because this isn’t necessarily a conscious decision on any author’s part, adopting the dominant economic model most of them have lived their whole lives under as a given in their storytelling. Breaking out of that mold to look for truths beyond those assumptions is something that would really set a book apart from the rest. And My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today distinguishes itself first and foremost by not really making that assumption of capitalist realism at all. In fact, the thematic payload of the book so far has largely been an extended illustration of class difference as the essential, defining conflict behind the frustrated romances in the story. It isn’t that Fuuko wants Yuni to cheat on Nanase with her: it’s that the upper-class Fuuko desires the working-class Yuni to be hers and leave middle-class Nanase. In this conflict, it becomes apparent that the author sees a kind of potential magical transfer of wealth and cultural capital a la Cinderella––taking Yuni out of the working class to become part of Fuuko's more rarified world––being held back by middle-class social mores which exist for the precise purpose of keeping such socioeconomic mobility (or socioeconomic friction) from happening. This is the undercurrent that plays throughout the book, providing principal character motivations and the subconscious triggers of conflict.

We can see a lot about this from copious textual clues, which goes to great lengths early on to explicate Fuuko’s relative wealth, in a coded form. Her family owns their home, and even if she doesn’t live in a mansion, her family is the type to take posed group photos, the type to treat an upper level of social and economic achievement as a baseline of success, and we get the sense from her scenes with her family that they would never look upon Fuuko’s choice to date a poor girl as an acceptable use of Fuuko’s energy and resources. We don’t get this made explicit, but it seems heavily implied that Fuuko is meant to be carrying on a name and a lineage or at least the semblance of one (I’m going a little harder on this than the text quite implies––my theory is that the author couldn’t justify too stratified a difference between the characters to make them genuinely, fully separated into the different socioeconomic groups they stand for, because then the girls wouldn’t all realistically be attending the same high school, since there tend to be differences between the school settings for rich, poor, and middle-class students. But within the boundaries of their school you’ll see each of the three main characters standing for a socio-economic class position apart from the others, and they'll illustrate this through their articulated attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, most of which represent the class they are assigned). The stress of conforming to the demands of her coded class seems to push Fuuko to a sort of alienation from her class roots. That alienation might contribute at least a little bit to her wanting to date Yuni, but I think the ways we see that alienation expressed most fully are in Fuuko’s intense romantic interiority, her orientation towards reading and doing well in school (part pressure, but also fantastic ways of socially absenting oneself from pressurized familial situations), and my favorite aspect of her personality: her penchant for theatrical self-reinvention and disguise. Twice now Fuuko has given herself new identities that she self-consciously name-checks. She’ll be Yuni’s Sugar-daddy when Yuni needs cash to continue dating Nanase, and when she wins Yuni back, she’ll be her Mother-figure. Each new identity brings with it delightful dramatic and visual accoutrements, from a wonderfully tacky wardrobe replacement as Yuni’s sugar-daddy to a whole new way of speaking to and treating Yuni as her replacement mother figure. She even has a Vent account personality as a fragile romantic which is a good deal more popular and successful than Yuni’s more flip, cool Vent persona. These transformations turn Fuuko into new versions of herself, and they show us the endless resources wealth can provide (here Fuuko's personal wealth, as compared to other students her age, is crucial to the way she is representing upper-class value-structures), but these theatrical disguises and illusions also make Fuuko into a magical figure in the book; a fairy godmother, who can actualize Yuni’s desires in an almost uncanny way––only it’s a fairy godmother that wants to f*ck in return. And throughout we get little flitters of other alternate characters Fuuko might play for one scene or another––like the meek-seeming lover in the second part of her travel date (after her ear starts bleeding), or the mischievous seducer, or the allegedly cold and reserved member of the health committee. Fuuko is easily the most complex character in the trio; her magical freedom to act seems a result of her class outlook, with its emphasis on impunity. She simply doesn’t perceive any horizons, as long as she continues to magically reinvent herself––and that reinvention is possible in a harsh, capitalist economy through hoarding of and capitalizing endless resources (even though she appears to be upper-middle class rather than a keiretsu-chairman’s daughter or something like that, Fuuko is conspicuously associated with money, and with that accompanying freedom of mobility). But Fuuko’s desire to move outside of her class––to date below her station, to play games and flirt with losing name and money, to utilize extreme intellectual and creative resources to get what she can’t exactly lay claim to with money alone––comes from her alienation from the rest of her cadre. Perhaps one of the reasons for her relentless passion for Yuni is the way Yuni exists so far outside of the ideology of Fuuko’s class background.

Early on in the narrative, Yuni seems very much like other schoolgirls her age, and her integration into several school groups makes it seem she is no different from her classmates. But then there is a sequence of key scenes, in which Yuni’s facade is dispelled for the reader, and we can get a fix on where Yuni stands on the ladder of success––along with the more tenuous grasp on survival that mark’s Yuni’s participation in the narrative. When Yuni's mother appears, we begin to see Yuni in a much more challenging space than most of her classmates would be used to. Yuni is not desperate; but there is instability and need all around, emphasized by the way, when Yuni’s mother comes home from her work as a bar girl, Yuni is the only one available to care for her. We get the sense this has been the uncomfortable status quo for a long time, this exchange of roles and responsibilities––and we see how Yuni struggles to be both a teen who blends in with the rank superficiality of high school life and also a partner with her mother in a very stringent, straightened economic program which far from ensures their chances of survival. We get the sense that no one at school knows that Yuni comes from this sort of relative underclass; no one knows her mother is a bar-girl, or that Yuni lives alone with her single mother––and it’s obvious from the college tour that Yuni is determined no one at school see her as she truly is. None of her friends probably imagines that Yuni cooks and cleans for her mother, and nurses her nominal caretaker through the aftermath of most grueling workdays. This set of scenes also very effectively establishes just what it is that makes Fuuko so very irresistible to Yuni; we see right away that Yuni’s mother is almost exactly the same kind of personality as Fuuko––sympathetic to a degree which outwardly rankles the more buttoned-up, pent-up Yuni, but which is a kind of flirtatious, fantastical expression of love Yuni secretly craves. And Yuni’s mother does for a living what Fuuko does for a hobby, playing dress-up and make-believe, and re-inventing herself to snare a would-be paramour with a fantasy, and sell him drinks and peanuts (forget that last part in Fuuko's case). A lot of people criticize the weakness they see in Yuni, giving in to this very ideal seducer, who so uncannily echoes Yuni’s loving mother’s beguiling charm––but in this scene with her mother I find her very admirable, too; for we see that Yuni has no real ambition in life but to eventually do right by her lone parent, her raconteur, her charmer, her original paramour. She doesn’t want her mother to cry. In a way, Yuni’s chasing of a girlfriend outside of her own class––while not seeming to be a conscious strategy on her part––kind of indicates that she’s hoping to eventually relieve her mother of her financial burden in the only way she can conceive of––transferring that burden onto someone else, maybe someone who can better afford it, like, say, a middle-class striver. “Don’t worry about money, okay?” Her mother assures her, and in Yuni’s assent we can tell she can hardly help but worry. What all this characterization goes to amplify is the scene of the college visit, where Nanase’s position vis-a-vis the other two cranks its way into focus.

So if Fuuko stands for the upper-class socio-economic strata of her society, and Yuni for the working underclass, where does Nanase sit in this equation? People seem to really hate Nanase here on the board. Hell, I hate her too, no argument there. But a lot of the criticism of Nanase tends to start and stop at personal behaviors, the ways in which she makes Yuni feel first neglected, and second small, and petty, for feeling hurt about it. Nanase is the police of the story, swooping in to break up the fun and games. The truncheon she wields is indicative of the values of her class; guilt, shame, striving, merit, delayed gratification, and, most deadly to the other characters in the narrative, entitlement. In a way, Nanase is the paramour as trope of a lot of Japanese fiction––suggestive of romance because of the character’s intense dedication to an ideology. In her pursuit of volleyball perfection, she is redolent of the glasses-wearing, too-serious, misogynist boy geniuses of many high school romance manga, redolent too of the samurai in her unwavering focus, and this is the source of a lot of Yuni’s obvious pain and suffering (notably, the samurai often served as a buffer between the rich and poor in an era before the middle-class existed, both the middle-class defenders of orthodoxy and quasi-police authoritatians, and they were largely supplanted by the merchant class, which eventually became the middle-class Nanase stands in for today). It’s clear that Yuni feels enormous pressure to value Nanase more as a girlfriend because of her unsmiling drive for merit, even as this is the principal element that excludes Yuni from Nanase’s world. I think it’s because Nanase’s dedication is such a universally-recognized, almost self-sufficient-seeming value in Japanese society that this needs no significant explication in the story. Focused dedication to an ideal is so common a value that it’s the defacto theme in a huge majority of Japanese popular fiction (how many manga and anime devolve a protagonist's purpose into exactly that need for seriousness and dedication to...tennis? Student council? Saving the world? Being a "good" cop?), and buried under it is the cultural assumption central to its middle-class origin: the idea that we live in a meritocracy.

Nanase is middle-class; I’ve hardly seen so dead-center, straightforwardly middle-class a figure in fiction. She personifies the belief in a meritocracy which underpins a middle-class value structure. It’s crucial, I think, to realize here that neither Yuni nor Fuuko are really convinced by this world-view. Both of them value passion over unwavering dedication, inspiration over fairness, fantasy over fact––in contradistinction with Nanase, whose principal value is earnest striving towards a reward fixed in the future. For Fuuko and Yuni, their affair is an awakening, a realization of their dreams for right now. Yuni has the passion and the attention she craves in Fuuko, Fuuko has the excitement of a kindred outcast from another world. But Yuni can’t be happy with her affair, because she feels such extraordinary guilt for it. That’s because the affair, for Nanase, is just a crime. It’s a violation of Nanase’s trust, of her earnest striving––and, quintessentially, it’s a violation of Nanase’s sacrifice, the delayed gratification she has committed to (without telling Yuni, who must be on board, right?), which puts the fullness of her romance off until later, after she has made something of herself in sports. Also, as the college tour chapter tells us, after she and her girlfriend go to colleges where they study things for careers. And after they go into careers, well, then, in the time they’re not striving after merit at work, then I guess they can romance one another. Is it really even necessary (there is a kind of sadomasochistic aspect to Nanase that seems to stealthily resent having to participate in this relationship with her girlfriend)? The belief that her achievement in track is connected to her life success, is connected to her romance is a big part of the way Nanase embodies middle-class values, and a part of the way she serves as an endless buffer against the poor girl and the rich girl, who are actually quite a lot more compatible; a buffer to keep them from getting together. Nanase’s belief that her society will reward the merit she works for spurs her to repeatedly neglect Yuni. Nanase isn’t trying to put Yuni through the wringer (or is she? Is part of the middle-class outlook Nanase embodies a kind of lacerating self-hatred, directed outward at those closest to her?); the college tour episode makes it clear that Nanase believes there is no difference between her circumstances and Yuni’s––and in that assumption, wouldn’t it follow that Yuni must feel the same as Nanase, and recognize the sacrifice Nanase is making by neglecting her––all in order to be a really good volleyball player? What could be more admirable and important than that? This is about their futures, after all. And what Nanase doesn’t realize is that the world doesn’t work this way for Yuni at all. There is no real way Yuni sees out of her socioeconomic class; and thus no benefit to bearing any such delayed gratification. When Yuni attends the college tour, we hear the bleakness in her distress––she simply doesn’t see a future for herself in the way Nanase does. The poor are often better-served with generous helpings of cynicism; it has a bitter taste, but you've got to put something in your stomach. It doesn’t matter that Yuni’s attending school now; it won’t lead her to success, a poor girl in a world dictated by values she can't easily replicate. Yet Nanase assumes a level of success in her future comparable to that in her current life, and strives to achieve it. But Yuni knows from her mother’s experience; hard work doesn’t make you comfortable, or happy. No one helps the poor person up when they’re striving, the way they might with Nanase. And in Fuuko’s position, value is assigned at birth; some are destined for success, others marked out for failure. For Yuni, there’s no future. For Nanase, the sky’s the limit, if you earn it. For Fuuko, there isn’t anywhere to go but down. The three girls sit in highly differentiated spaces, regarding one another with alien fascination. Both romantic impulses, Yuni and Nanase and Yuni and Fuuko, are based on this exotic connection between people from different worlds.

It’s safe to say, though, that Nanase doesn’t recognize the difference between herself and Yuni. She makes assumptions that prove this, like when she guilts Yuni into attending the away game she can’t afford––and she often belittles Yuni when Yuni’s expression of her values proves different from the middle-class mores Nanase confidently assumes are just the way things are. The guilt that torments Yuni throughout the series is effectively communicated by Nanase as a common cultural value––and yet, nothing in Yuni’s world teaches her to value the rigorous, boring constant settling for less that Nanase’s volleyball striving demands of Yuni. Most disturbing of all is the way in which Nanase consistently isolates Yuni, putting her in the position of secret girlfriend, a permanent tagalong, hiding from everyone but her alleged "lover." For Nanase, this is all a typically middle-class show of devotion––a variation on the lonely homemaker wife, who prepares any extravagant meal for a husband and his spontaneous dinner guests, invisibly, and without complaint. That's how that little lady loves her man, after all, and it's a model inherent to Nanase's worldview, compatible with her theory of striving and delayed gratification leading to eventual success. Nanase assumes Yuni will tolerate this because from her viewpoint, Yuni must internalize the same cultural values that she does. At the same time, the isolation of Yuni has a kind of sadism in it that is part and parcel of the value-package communicated by all this middle-class striving. Pointlessly delayed gratification, isolation of power that must be contained, (here Yuni is representing what might be considered the feminine agency that must be controlled in a sadomasochistic, inherently misogynist worldview (like a capitalist worldview, for instance)––and Nanase does seem to view Yuni’s release of feminine energy and enthusiasm as shameful and embarrassing enough that she wants it locked up for no one else to see. Nanase also has an amplifier for her meritocratic world-view––her friend Yuki, who reflects the same depressing outlook she has and doubles its impact with her support. In the college tour chapter, every assumed value Nanase places upon Yuni is echoed by Yuki, who further isolates Yuni using these assumed hegemonic values as the lever of her harassment. In the world of college, and, by extension, of the girls’ high school, middle class values confer a kind of cultural capital, and how close you come to embodying those values gives you, really, the most capital. This is why Fuuko and Yuni, neither of whom have much of this cultural capital, can be bullied by the exceptionally dull Nanase and her coarse toady, Yuki (we know Yuki’s interest in Nanase is ultimately romantic, and based on shared attitudes, but for the purposes of this reading, Yuki’s value is in reinforcing the values of the middle-class as the principal structure of this rigid society).

The most oppressive use Nanase has for her cultural capital is in the way she uses it to reclaim her girlfriend from Fuuko. Fuuko’s case that she should be Yuni’s legit girlfriend is supported by an upper-class reading of the situation: Fuuko really deserves Yuni, doesn't she? She has been receptive to Yuni’s feelings, and they mirror her own. Love excites them both, and that excitement should be the reward for those talented and inspired enough to grab it (her hatred of Nanase seems to spring largely from Nanase's flat, uninspired way of "loving"––what Fuuko values––brilliance, inspiration, fortuosity––is aligned with her class values, also––the shininess of gold! the magic of one's lucky birth) Nanase’s initial breakdown over this criticism pathetic, and fun to watch, because it's all true, and she really has no answer for it. But she eventually comes back with a killing blow. Because middle-class meritocracy is essentially hegemonic (insofar as it serves to placate the suffering lower classes and divide them into smaller, more vulnerable ideological groupings, preventing an uprising against the rich), Nanase can leverage instant acceptance of her worldview on the part of her competitors Fuuko and Yuni––both of which see this worldview as baked in all around them, and both of whom view their own differing value structures as personal faults or aberrations, rather than expressions of their varied life experiences. Nanase can’t justify neglecting her girlfriend as she has, and so she just ignores it, and makes the ultimate in meritocratic pitches. Why can’t she just have it all, if she works hard enough? If Nanase is just a better girlfriend, taking it more seriously, surely she can still strive for volleyball (never mind that the situation will never devolve that way, and volleyball will always be her preference)? It is telling that neither Fuuko nor Yuni has an argument in the face of this––it is, essentially, what they all believe that everyone believes––the argument they all feel they must capitulate to. And this argument conjures up Yuni’s guilt and uses it to imprison her once again in an unhappy relationship that is essentially unchanged. Nanase is free to keep her devotion to volleyball paramount, and Yuni’s punishment will mean continued isolation, along with added helpings of guilt, and the feeling she has to earn back Nanase’s trust. There’s another meritocratic assumption undergirding Yuni’s guilt which isn’t quite expressed on the page, but which is likely an element of Yuni’s surrender to Nanase’s flat, stupid assertion that she can just have everything, and that’s the common cultural believe that there is merit in mating for life with your first partner, incompatibility be damned. This folk-belief is as oppressive as any other to people from the middle and lower classes––though the rich have always had their workarounds for this absurd assertion of "morality." Yuni seems to have a knee-jerk preference not to trade up her relationship, and this baseless meritocratic assumption that there’s value in being first in line is helping to cage Yuni alone with her unhappiness, isolated by herself with a girlfriend who wants her only insofar as having Yuni means winning and earning, somehow. Fuuko, meanwhile, offers Yuni ultimate freedom, with no fixed, required way of being, and no authority greater than passion––but Fuuko, like Tinkerbell, runs off her audience’s belief in her magic, and she almost literally shrinks away when Yuni accedes to Nanase’s unromantic, possessive bellowing and steps away from the brink of real love. Who knows what these girls from opposite sides of the tracks, with so much need and fantasy in common could make of one another, were they free to? But Nanase’s dull, paralyzing world view holds these volatile representatives of competing classes apart. It wouldn’t be all right for Fuuko to deny her own birthright and love a commoner; and Yuni might be able to advance into the middle-class rather than the upper (in some isolated, means-tested cases, this has always been acceptable), but only if she completely transforms herself into one of them (rather than perpetuating the smokescreen she puts up for her classmates). Until that happens, Nanase will continue to isolate and belittle her––heck, Nanase might keep doing this whether Yuni meets her demands or not. Either way, the buffer will keep the exploitative relationships of the capitalist system in place, and inequities will be masked behind the illusion of a merit-based system.

This realization on the author’s part of how middle-class meritocratic values serve to hide inequality, stymie the social mobility of volatile members of other classes, and enforce the deliberate striation and isolation of people within class structures so far seem to be the dynamic underpinning the book's melodrama. There are so many moments when these structures, and the way the characters fit into and don’t fit into them, are underlined––and the quintessential conflict is one in which both Fuuko and Yuni are trying to shatter the status quo, and Nanase, with her status-quo value structure and her larger helping of social capital, is essentially holding them back from doing. People seem to feel that the story does not advance, but in a sense, this is a tale of class-based detente, in which two people trying to transcend their inherited value structure are repeatedly stymied from doing so––both by the people around them and by their inherited senses of inadequacy and unworthiness (which they have primarily inherited from a middle-class worldview that doesn’t map to their own life experiences and offers them no truth). Yuni stands a chance of happiness with Fuuko that she doesn’t with Nanase; but so long as Yuni remains prisoner of an assumed set of values that don’t serve her and aren’t hers to begin with, Yuni will remain stuck. The structures that impede Yuni from accepting the love she wants from Fuuko, the structures that cause Yuni to read Fuuko as the “wrong person,” are there to preserve a socioeconomic status quo which serves neither Yuni nor Fuuko. Nanase, as the exponent of these values, thinks of herself as a beneficiary of them, but in reality she is the thug enforcing those values, stopping the other two girls from finding happiness together, in a world more open to vast flux and socioeconomic change. And from this depiction of the stagnation of passions, the author creates a proxy exposition of the way a capitalist social structure preserves its own sclerotic structure at the expense of the people trapped in its system.

Is this the author’s formulation of themes, or is it just my interpretation? I’m not positive. It is credible for the author to have simply internalized––or more consciously externalized––the kind of anti-capitalist critique common to a lot of Japanese artists of the previous century. Peter Yacavone reads a lot of similar critiques in the midcentury action films and melodramas of Seijun Suzuki, so why not a Yuri author in an era where these concerns dominate our politics more than they have in a very long time? My hunch is that this is all conscious thematic construction on the author’s part, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the story kind of leaves this setup behind as it tries to drill down on a resolution––similar to the way in which Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Immortal Hulk offers us an inspiring Hulk that wages war on the capitalist establishment, before abandoning that greatest-ever Hulk storyline in favor of a story which pulls familiar characters together into a kind of psychological showdown. The political storyline––which expounds helpfully on the way nostalgia, for instance, is weaponized by capitalists in order to disrupt organized resistance––cedes the stage, and the need for the Hulk to rebuild his own shattered psyche takes over as the main plot line. Here, it’s quite conceivable that we’ve seen the last of this anti-capitalist critique as part of the overt text, and that the story will become more focused on the plot going forward (it seems as if they’re preparing a second conflict between the three main characters, in which perhaps Fuuko wins out––not sure if that’s an intended conclusion or just the next leg of the conflict––but I think the author is being very clear in setting up the ways in which we empathize with Fuuko and with Yuni––and the ways in which we tend to empathize much less with Nanase (who has an ideal girlfriend waiting in the wings). But I think the situating the author has done, positioning these characters according to their sociopolitical social roles, will continue to inform the relationship conflict going forwards, and that the book will continue to be exciting because of it. There are not, so far as I’ve seen, Yuri manga that undergird their romance with a dynamic class reading like this; capitalist realism is an assumed stance in even the more sophisticated Yuri I’ve enjoyed, from Octave and The Brides of Iberis to Run Away with Me, Girl, to Whispered Words (a rare book that is cognizant of class differences between characters, but which does not explore them in depth or offer a reading that challenges any of our assumptions), to any of the Takemiya Jin stories. This sociopolitical valence to the conflict adds enormous complexity to the book, and makes each chapter feel fresh and entertaining, so far. And that’s a significant part of the really high esteem I continue to have for the story. It keeps impressing me, and it keeps relentlessly engaging me. It’s the comic I most look forward to reading in the right this very minute immediate now.

last edited at Dec 19, 2024 7:18AM

A very sugary-sweet chapter... The ending kind reduced the sweetness, but it's not enough to entirely offset it.

A shame the flag raised in chapter 24 wasn't like some adult lady scouting out talent like it looked to me. For some reason, the glasses-ponytail-combo screams adult to me. But no, apparently, it was a junior high student looking into a high school to enroll at. Wonder how her role will develop from this not-too-flattering introduction.

As for the death flag comments... what are you talking about? This manga doesn't really have the kinda vibe that we should be expecting a major character death. Or any character death for that matter. Or is something going over my head?

I thought that the death flag tag was present early on in the series, when we were seeing Mashiro entirely through Nagisa's perspective, and it wasn't clear just what was wrong with Mashiro. Or perhaps it was just because the first comment on this thread mentions it? But that would be an insane swerve for the series; one which I couldn't picture it making. The Summer You were There is much clearer about the oncoming death element––even the colors chosen for the early color portions and the covers seem to augur doom. By comparison, this book has been light, bright, and colorful. The swerve would be so violent, not even just on a story level, but on the visual level, too.

I liked the previous arc with Uda; contrasted to Whispering You a Love Song, here I would have been happy to follow Uda's lover story for a while longer. This new challenger does the thing I hate the most in manga, calling people out and challenging them to sh*tty scenarios in which the protagonists have to prove their dedication, or something. Seems an inauspicious entrance into the story––though honestly, if one of these books could make all these challenges zany and hilarious, instead of angst-ridden, I could find the energy to love it. I felt like the Kase-San plot line pulled itself out of a death-spiral at the end, there––but this confrontational beginning often makes it hard to make the story about more than confrontation for its own sake. The Kase-san story, for instance, could have explored Kase's reticence at coming out to her teammates––but that was hardly dealt with. Here in Anemone, I have trouble imagining what the confrontation could lead to, thematically-speaking. Nagisa and Mashiro aren't hiding much of anything from anyone. If the story is about Mashiro's guilt, it did feel like the creator already went there in a previous story. The conflict here could be more specific, is what it boils down to for me. I don't really need all the mystery around the character––if anything, it detracts from anything else the character is introducing for us.

The art is delightful, but what a strange way to play this story. So far it's like Rei is Elmer Fudd and Ami is Bugs Bunny, constantly yanking the rug out from under Rei to reveal an aching chasm beneath. Rei winds up to receive love, and gets hit in the face with a mallet or has her feelings blown up with dynamite every time.

The youth of the characters is handled very strangely, as well. They look extremely young, but they act increasingly sophisticated. And when they get dressed up to do out, they sort of present as adults. I think by the end of this third chapter it seems clear enough that Ami isn't some quirky girl who doesn't understand her feelings, but she is rather a straight-up sociopath. She tells Rei point-blank she prioritizes her own well-being above everyone else's, and tells Rei she enjoys tormenting her, because she enjoys seeing all the emotions Rei produces flit over her face as a result. She describes feeling not much of anything for Rei, and every time Rei decides it's better to give up (at least once in each chapter so far, unless I'm mistaken), Ami starts splitting hairs over how she words things, does whatever she thinks she needs to do, whatever little doling out of "affection" will keep Rei coming back for more.

I appreciate the earnestness of Rei a lot, and that, combined with the art, has kept me reading so far––that, and knowing it's not very long. But gosh, the emotional cruelty is not what I'm ever here for. It reminds me quite a bit of The Feelings We All Must Endure––which I gradually came around to appreciating quite a lot? So maybe I'll come around on this one, too. The author isn't making it hard to hate Ami, though.

Even though I really loathed Fukami when the author raised her from the background into this awful centerpiece villain role, now I feel frustrated thinking, what use will the author have for her in the future? Is she going to get written out now that Kase has shut down her harebrained scheme? It seems pretty likely. And yet there was so much buildup of Fukami, for so long before this––only to really make nothing of it. In the end, the race added nothing to the story but fake drama. Because it had no more serious tie to Kase and Yamada living together than just this up-or-down, yes-or-no, win-the-race-and-find-out sort of denouement, it offered no possibility of a serious test of or change to the couple's relationship. I would have much preferred if the conflict had forced Kase to reach out to other members of her track team, for instance, and find some sort of allies to help her reach a solution with Fukami that didn't call for the race. If the result was that Kase was forced to trust her teammates more, reveal to at least one or two of them why she wanted to leave the dorm in the first place––and then they got Fukami to relent––then I would have been cool with Fukami wanting the race anyway, just to see who would have won. That would have been a great moment for Kase to clean her clock--better than what we got, even though after months of being frustrated with Fukami's aggravating dense obstinance, it was still gratifying to watch her get beat so decisively as to show that there was no chance of her ever winning. I just wanted the author to make something productive out of some of this, some character advancement or change of situation...and I don't think we really got any. I agree that Kase and Yamada's relationship seems to have taken a step back in terms of communication, but I also think that was basically by accident, and not what the author intended. So I feel that probably the damage to their relationship, like Fukami, will be ignored, relegated to the background, and ultimately dismissed.

Huh. I like the art a lot. But that is bad form on the drummer's part to try and step on the lead instruments like that. I used to know a drummer who would speed up and get louder on purpose when he wanted to end a gig early. Pretty obnoxious.

I found myself wishing there was a supporting character or a subplot somewhere here, or just anything to distract just a little from the relentless forward drive of the story. The pacing and repetition made this chapter seem just a little joyless when we weren't being treated to cool panels of drumming. The double-page spread following the first page was breathtakingly cool, but then we get almost the same material repeated on the third page. We get double-duty on flashbacks to the main character with her dad in a recording studio. The guitar pick gets produced with almost no hesitation, ultimately, even though main girl had pledged not to reveal it in front of others. Stakes for why she's trying so hard to fit in? Not established. And I found the drummer girl's freakout at the end, well...just not funny? I think it was the timing, the sense that it just wasn't set up with much suspense, and that it didn't land with the subversion of expectation the artist wanted to convey.

Still, it sets up a decently contentious relationship (yet not one of any casual realism––the characters feel set up just to go off on one another in the crudest ways possible), and it offers some very animated drawing, so I'm hoping there's space and time for the writing to improve, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next. Still love that first double-page spread.

The art feels a little threadbare in this new chapter. The beach chapters seemed like a major leap forward in how this series looked, but maybe some exhaustion is setting in, leaving us with a chapter that is one single scene, with Kase and Fukami's bedroom backdrop hardly there, and with a very unimaginative treatment of the back-and-forth of the scenario. But Kase does finally start to steer out of this disaster of a plot.

But here the writer gives us this absolutely bizarre twist, and it turns out that Fukami hasn't really known what her feelings for Kase were really about until now. So Fukami has been stomping around like a jealous, possessive creep, throwing temper-tantrums about the roommate she's hardly spoken to "abandoning" her, and she herself believes that this level of vitriol is basically over...friendship? Track-team camaraderie? What is it Fukami thinks is happening here? Why has she been so manipulative and cruel when she doesn't really understand the nature of her attachment to Kase––why go as far as she has? This seems so strange, and if this is what the author planned, then Fukami really comes across as a painfully awkward person. This last chapter does suggest that Fukami has done something like this before, but if Fukami's cold-to-hot relationship with Kase was meant to be a part of the story, then I think the repetitive behavior should have been foregrounded in the story somehow. Or perhaps Fukami's sort of borderline tendencies could have been pre-established. Here it feels like an afterthought, a course correction to backfill Fukami's character development. There was plenty of time over the course of the very gradual introduction of Fukami into the book to give us something more of her character. And if this is some sort of conclusive arc to the series, then one would hope Fukami would arrive with a little more purpose early on. So little is established about her initially; she just makes side-eye at Kase and then at Yamada. In that space, Fukami's "I'm the worst roommate ever" drama had time to play out. We could maybe have seen that her standoffish attitude initially came from being too clingy with another roommate in the past––maybe Fukami is just too dense to realize that her clinginess is in both cases about romantic attraction? Then the character starts to be just a little interesting. Then if we had known that was how Fukami behaved, and that she wasn't really in exceptional control over her actions, she would have been potentially a little more sympathetic, and Kase's reliance on being clueless, hunky and carefree would have been tested by this storyline. Kase would have had to develop some emotional maturity.

In this chapter, Kase's weird stab at emotional maturity seems to come wholecloth, entirely out of nowhere. We see her using her power to "think deeply," but the resultant brainstorm really seems beyond Kase's level of emotional understanding. I guess I'm saying that it doesn't feel at all earned by the story. If this is what the series has been building towards, then Kase's emotional development ought to be more hard-won and gratifying to us than it seems to be so far. Like, reallly, the outcome of this race shouldn't be the climax of this series––or this storyline, if that's all it is. If the climax of the storyline is that Kase sees the need to develop greater maturity, that would be really good. So far, it seems like that's happened virtually between the panels of this chapter (Kase is clueless in the beginning of the chapter, and suddenly wise and supportive by the end, and the shift comes with the immediate pop of a car engine backfiring), and we're still building towards this horrible race. I have personally never cared how fast Kase can run.

One of my favorite storylines of any yuri manga is the one in Milk Morinaga's Girlfriends after Mari has all but confessed to Akko, pinning her down and kissing her, after Akko has told her that if she were a guy, she'd fall for Mari in a second. Suddenly the story––which had been centered upon Mari up until that point––shifts focus to Akko, and we go through a really sure-footed, clear arc of understanding, in which Akko tries to make sense of what Mari was trying to say to her, works it out, tries to gauge whether Mari was serious (hard, because Mari keeps dissembling to her and taking back the gesture any way she can), thinks about how she herself feels about Mari, decides to make a move, tries to make her move, and finally makes it. It's a lot of story, but the increasing melancholy the story had been steering into is leavened and renewed by the shift to Akko's perspective, and the needs of the new protagonist. And the grand purpose of this shift in perspective in the midst of Girlfriends is to transform Akko into the motivated romantic foil Mari wants and needs. A similar shift doesn't happen to Kase, exactly––for some reason, we see the whole encounter in this chapter through interloper Fukami's eyes. And I don't really see the grand purpose of it. I'm not sure what we get by Fukami seeing Kase and Yamada's relationship for what it is; certainly Fukami is not there yet, but that seems to be what this is building up to. But...why? What does Fukami bring to the table?

Yet again, the Fukami we see is underdeveloped for the task of witness she is being expected to perform. Not only does she not understand Kase and Yamada's relationship, she doesn't seem to understand relationships, period. If the purpose of this arc is for someone on the outside––not a friend of Kase and Yamada's, but someone more risky––to discover Kase and Yamada's relationship, I don't know why Fukami would be the best choice. She's not prepared for this; there is no supplemental storyline to Fukami, which would be augmented by witnessing proof of the central couple's love (a la the younger character who works in the cafe in Takemiya Jin's Fragments of Love). Fukami doesn't have another possible love interest for herself. She has nowhere constructive to go with this storyline yet. If Fukami had a girl who was interested in her––maybe a fan of her for her running, or something like that––and the girl's interest in her was something Fukami didn't understand, well then her unanalyzed clinginess to her roommate Kase would carry a little more heft as a storyline. Perhaps then, by understanding what Kase and Yamada have together, she could then recognize the way this other girl feels about her. Perhaps a little cliched, but without some balancing factor, without some richness in Fukami's own life, without another purpose for Fukami being here besides just being an inarticulate spoiler of the main couple's happiness...well, without any of that, Fukami's role in the story is just not very meaningful or satisfying. And that's where we're at; with a character who had no foregrounding of purpose, taking a storyline to a conclusion that is, so far, bound to be unsatisfactory. It's not the best-written storyline in this series, is I guess what I'm saying. And just like in Whispering You a Love Song, it's going on so darn long.

last edited at May 23, 2023 6:20AM

The author is a woman.

Ah, yes, that explains the beard stubble on the author's avatar.

I mean you can be sarcastic all you want but Hiromi-sensei is a woman.

[citation needed]

I can find no actual source confirming this.

Erica Friedman's book, "By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga," repeatedly references Takashima being a woman. In a chapter about the Kase-San series Friedman describes meeting her.

. . .

Here's another series being invaded by a simply awful character, a sociopath who sucks the oxygen from the room. Fukami's style here is beyond declasse––it's at least subconsciously malicious, because Fukami knows Kase is dating someone, and she's a) never brought it up with Kase, and b) she won't let that little detail get in the way of her own confession, and its obvious attendant expectation of reciprocation. Fukami holes up inside her own, silent world, stewing about Kase, but never even trying to imagine Kase might have reasons for doing what she's doing. Her self-centered-ness goes way beyond any frustration I have with Kase's cluelessness. Fukami is actually almost completely insensitive to Kase's needs being independent of her own. It's almost as if Fukami believes they're already in a kind of a romantic relationship, in all but name––which is the main way, I think, to explain her irrational anger at Kase moving out. It's not "sadness" at Kase moving out––Fukami acts like a spurned lover, one with some sort of claim on Kase. This is as frustrating a character as Shiho in Whispering You a Love Song, but at least in this case, Kase and Yamada remain the characters the story is articulated around (and Fukami doesn't seem quite so out-of-step with the other characters in her comic as Shiho does to me).

Still, it'd be nice if the stakes of this confrontation for Kase were outlined a little clearer. It seems like this could have been a story in which Kase might opt to out herself to her teammates, in order to potentially win their sympathy for her situation––even though the risk would be alienation from this social unit (the track team)––a social unit which seems more suffocatingly restrictive by the chapter. This would enable her to win allies on the team that could help pry Fukami's miserable, gripping fingers off Kase's arm long enough that Kase could move out, without this dunderheaded race coming to fruition. This wouldn't have been a very happy storyline, as it would be awful to force Kase to make such a choice in this way––but a major thread for a while now has been how the track team's private huddle hamstrings Kase's attempts to be with Yamada (the whole summer break storyline keeps underlining this, and the way Kase's refusal to reveal her lover to her peers makes so many situations a problem for her), so that the theme could have been the socially restrictive aspect of that little microcosm, and Kase might have had to struggle against it a bit. It could even be a storyline in which the resolution wasn't entirely happy, or satisfying––maybe not everyone on the squad is willing to acknowledge the way Kase wants to live her life. But I feel like those are pretty realistic stakes for such a conflict. In Yamada's case, I feel like her challenges in the conflict are all relatively clear. But for Kase, it's hard to know how much of the conflict Kase even perceives. I suppose this could be the way the storyline resolves even yet, but if that's so, then the jealousy angle is a severe detour, and a road we've already been down a couple of times with these characters. As it is, the repetitiveness and the slowness of this plot to advance are both grating...as is the Fukami of it all.

last edited at Apr 4, 2023 4:20AM

Gads, reading the full translation, the note sounds more final than not about the series. I feel like the author is in a way paying for the pace they set up for the story. The slow-boil development of the series may have killed their own momentum. It sounds like they want to try a series that delivers more romance, maybe a little quicker. I'd agree the side characters seemed to overwhelm the central story idea. They are all really neat characters, though. It's just a shame. The series was always good value, and it came out regularly. Is it my imagination, or are there fewer series like that right now than there have been in the past?

Wow. I didn't know about the hiatus until today. This has been the most involving yuri manga still being released for a while now, so I feel a bit like Utsugi at the end of this last chapter.

I'm happy the artist indicates in her notice she's working on other yuri stories, at least, but...things felt like they were actually moving forward a bit in this comic, recently. The main couple seemed to be moving in some direction, getting a little more sympatico. I was really keen to discover what the mystery was about Utsugi that seemed to captivate the nurse in that one chapter. Now we probably won't know. But there is the feeling also, which I guess I can't really deny, that some of these potential progressions in the story of this one were not quite coming off, but that the conclusion of the progression in the story seemed to be mostly a return to the status quo. Maybe the author's approach to the book, centering the comedy as she did, made it difficult to figure out how to advance the characters' stories and relationships?

Anyway, it bums me out.

I wonder what options really exist for the resolution of this storyline? I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out how I'd even want it to end.

I don't want Mizuguchi to get together with Shiho; Aki has been earnest and noble throughout this whole ordeal. Shiho has been, at the very least, passive-aggressive in a way that is really hard to deal with. If I dig really deep, the only thing I want for Shiho is for there to be an unsecured trapdoor on the performance stage, which she falls through, to her death. Hopefully my lengthy previous post will convince people I don't have it in for Shiho for irrational reasons, but I can't deny that for me, Shiho has been steering this manga towards a cliff for a good two years now, and I just want her gone.

In my previous post, a few pages ago, I talked about the way Shiho isn't balanced with another character in the story. I suggested Yori should be the equivalent character to square off against Shiho: someone who feels...who feels some sort of feeling just as strongly as Shiho feels all these feels. Even if Aki is the one who is meant to be Shiho's opposite, then Shiho still overpowers her and throws off the balance of the series. The problem is that everyone else in this series besides Shiho is reasonable, practical, and generally upbeat––and Shiho probably has a borderline personality. I know some people here have compared Shiho to standard, garden-variety real teenagers, but I think that, in order to understand the source of annoyance and distress for longtime readers in Shiho's takeover of the book, you have to look a little closer at Shiho's deviances from the standard, the tone in which she couches her "acting out"––which is different than it is even for real teens. For instance, a teen might tell another teen they aren't friends anymore...and then a few days later they'll have reconciled, and they'll be relieved to have their friend back, in most cases. That's fairly normal behavior. Cutting an ostensibly friendly, encouraging and unthreatening person out of your life––and doing it with a weird, conceited smile on your face--and then really meaning it, as Shiho does--is a different kettle of fish. Why does Shiho's promise to have nothing to do with Mizuguchi anymore feel like she really means it? She does mean it, and that makes her response much stranger than that of the average person. Most people will cut someone else out of their life entirely only if that person's behavior is really toxic. Shiho has no cause here. Liking someone and not even being rebuffed, but just being friendzoned––and not even on purpose––shouldn't earn that person excommunication. Shiho seems so pleased with herself over this. It's not unthinkable to have a person like this in your story, or in real life. My father is this kind of guy, who would just cut off his friendships for good, at a moment's notice. He's one of the weirdest, and sometimes one of the most frightening people I know. He's like...who's he like, what character that's so familiar to me? Oh, he's like Shiho. They're both creeps.

Not that it should matter to readers whether Shiho is a specimen that can be found in real life, observable in the wild, or not. The problem is that, when you try and envision where this storyline might wrap up, what ending would feel satisfactory? I wouldn't want to condemn Mizuguchi to a relationship with a vengeful, over-the-top meanie like Shiho. What if Yori plays the best sooooong in the woooooorld (or I'll steal your soul!), and Shiho loses the battle of the bands? I don't think Shiho, as she's been presented to us, can take that. Plus, it doesn't solve the romantic subplot between Shiho and Mizuguchi. Yori has been nearly absent from this entire storyline––a huge deficiency in the writing of this story, so far as I'm concerned--as I outlined in my last post. If Yori produces this great song, just what is it supposed to do? Does Yori's idea of love, as expressed in the song, overwhelm Shiho's uncomfortable, proud obstreperousness? Does she apologize to Mizuguchi? And if she does that, does that make up for two years of this painfully decompressed storyline, seeing Shiho humbled, slightly?

And then, what if Shiho wins the battle of the bands, but maybe Yori's song mellows her a little bit, so that she doesn't want to cut every tie with Mizuguchi? Is that a satisfying ending to the arc? I'd much prefer that our heroes emerge with something worth lifting their spirits a little, like maybe they at least feel good about how they played, they're excited for the future, etc. That could temper the annoyance I'd feel if Yori and Mizuguchi lost the battle of the bands to the arrogant, self-centered Shiho.

But here's the thing; Takeshima Eku has not written this story with that level of nuance. Everything we've seen since Shiho has appeared goes to the idea that Mizuguchi's band, SS Girls, is not good enough––that there's a platonic ideal of what these bands should sound like, and that Shiho's hypercompetitive drive to succeed, coupled with her band's dedication (and the motivation they share about this dead friend, super-yuck) has them placed a lot closer to that ideal than Mizuguchi's band. By giving Shiho most of the page time in this arc, and by couching most of the drama in Shiho telling Himari how things are all the time, like she's schooling Himari in the ways of high school rock bands, the author is underlining the primacy of Shiho's view of the case (and giving us little to balance that with––SS Girls don't appear frequently enough in this arc to balance the overwhelming nature of Shiho's point of view, which sloughs all over the storyline). By staging the whole conflict around a battle of the bands that takes more than a year of publication time to get off the ground, the author is underlining for us how important the competition is, and how important the idea of winning it is. There are countless lines of dialogue, all of which go unchallenged, where Shiho or someone else articulates that this competition is decided around a question of skill and competence––and Shiho frequently characterizes Yori as "wrong" for the SS Girls, and not "serious enough" to equal up to Shiho's own crazy ideal for this competition. Almost nothing we've seen so far disabuses us of the idea that the competition is important to resolve––but really, there's nothing important about it. The wager over it––as many people here have pointed out––has been altered and amended, and ended up a moot point in this last chapter, seemingly by accident (it doesn't seem like Eku intended to give away the secret when she first set up this storyline). Shiho claims to be "over" Mizuguchi, so that's allegedly off the table as a conclusion to the battle––and I can't really imagine the two of them mending fences and dating by the time this arc is hopefully over (though perhaps this so far two-year-long arc will never end, giving the two a long runway in which for Mizuguchi to fall in love with the awful girl who left her band in the lurch and who has been negging her for seemingly no reason ever since). Let's say Shiho wasn't really "over" Mizuguchi. Does that relationship have an immediate future? This relationship has been at Defcon 1 for quite a while now. How would the author pivot and make this relationship meaningful or worth pursuing (at least, in Mizuguchi's case) in the next few chapters that follow the battle of the bands? I don't really see it happening––at least, not plausibly so.

So I guess that's where I'm at with this; stuck, unable to envision an ending to this story arc that would satisfy my modest goals. I've liked this series all along––Eku's art is exciting to look at, and early on the story seemed to be pretty in-control of its' tone––though that era has gone the way of the dodo. I still like the characters––the characters we met in the first arc, at least. In theory I like a story arc where the SS Girls do battle with another band; in theory I like an arc where Mizuguchi finds love (instead of just harassment and frustration); In theory I even like a character with some strong, negative motivations, that could contrast with other characters' in the story. But Shiho's motivations are never modulated by other perspectives. Her band members back her up no matter what (despicable), and Himari has so far made very little headway, I'd say, in helping Shiho solve her personal problems––all she's really done is get Shiho to admit she has them. Then Himari helped Shiho set up Mizuguchi for this "I used to love you" surprise maneuver––really uncool of Himari, I think, not to warn Mizuguchi what Shiho was up to. I don't know. Maybe it didn't even occur to Himari what Shiho was planning. Either way, Himari hasn't done much, and her talking with Shiho has only made Shiho more upset with the way things have ended up. Yori never talks to Shiho––here's someone with a 180-degree different perspective, but we don't get them facing off with one another (2 years of reading have passed waiting for it, though). And the battle of the bands is still potentially a chapter or two or even three off. At the moment, I'm clinging to the art, and the characters from the initial arc, as insurance that the book can still go somewhere rewarding. But I want to get something from this arc for the characters I'm actually invested in, like Himari, Yori, and Mizuguchi. If two years of this all culminates in meaningful character growth mostly just for Shiho, it honestly feels like I'm reading a different manga than I started out with––and then I might quite seriously consider not reading any further.

As for Shiho's reveal of her feelings for Mizuguchi? I was dismayed that was the cliffhanger in this last chapter. Didn't she basically already reveal all of this to Himari a couple of chapters ago? It all felt supremely redundant from a reader's perspective. Trouble is, I don't think Eku had a way of getting around showing the admission of love a second time, since Mizuguchi is the one who needs to hear it. So there's another thing: if the climax of this arc boils down to Shiho and Mizuguchi, instead of Shiho and Yori––well, we haven't had much of Yori to balance out Shiho's angst, but really, we haven't had much of Mizuguchi, either! Mostly we've been seeing Shiho and Himari––and that relationship doesn't seem to be going much further than it has. I suppose another question could be, what do we want Himari to get out of all this? What does she learn about meddling in people's old love non-stories? Does she get to play cupid for these two? Does that mean anything for her character?

The biggest problem I can see here is that, as a writer, Takeshima Eku has bitten off a lot more than she can chew. There are so many characters here, and the big problem is that, as one gets developed, the others get abandoned. She doesn't use the characters as natural foils for one another––even though she has the material to do it. Instead, we get this preposterously didactic story, laboriously unpacking Shiho's every motivation, until her angst and her anger overwhelm the previously fairly light-hearted tone of the story, and no other character has anything meaningful to add. It's not that a serious or morbid character couldn't be interjected into this mix; its that their story threatens now to be the main story, and they're going through that story almost alone. Yori and Himari's journey was one where we watched both of them grow into a relationship together. Here I don't see anyone growing or changing at all. Normally we'd expect at least Shiho to have an arc of some kind here. But if no one else has one, then there's not a lot to follow here. No one else matches Shiho's intensity, or brings her level of hysteria down a notch. No one else is finding an equivalent meaning in the events transpiring to contrast with Shiho's nihilism. And I find that when the balancing of characters is off this much, what I'm reading is just really bad writing. How do you walk your character back from the cliff? I don't see any evidence that the author has any idea how to do it.

I know people say she has a crush on Kase, but in order to maintain that crush she's ignoring the fact that she knows Kase has a significant other, and she confronts Kase only with petulance, aggression, and bullying.

Fukami knows Kase has a significant other?? When did she find out???

Chapter 7, although Fukami currently assumes it's a guy.

This is why I think the blame for this amongst the fictional characters has to land mostly on Fukami's shoulders. Knowing this, she doesn't care, and demands this race like a sociopath. Doesn't matter Kase has a special friend, Fukami wants this thing––she only feels Kase's being unfair because Kase isn't giving her exactly what she––Fukami––wants. She's been entirely quiet and non-communicative the entire time she's roomed with Kase (and Kase, while not around sometimes, always makes time to talk with Fukami), and now she blows up and throws a tantrum she frankly has no business throwing in the first place.

Kase, meanwhile, goes out of her way to accommodate Fukami's feelings––and Fukami's response is bitter, as if Kase's done something to wrong her. But this wrong never occurred in the first place. Fukami is totally out of line here. I've heard that in Japanese argumentative traditions the point will often go to the person who expresses the most convincing passion for the subject (not that it's unheard of in the west as a way to win an argument, but apparently the method we prefer to employ in the west––of arranging and directly deploying our best argumentative points––has very little purchase there). Presumably this means that more people are moved by that person's feeling for what they are saying at the time. I suppose this could be what is happening when Fukami faces down Kase. Still, Fukami is entirely in the wrong. And no wonder Kase and Yama react the way they do. Fukami makes it literally impossible for Kase to find any alternative solution to the problem––she has one way she wants this to be resolved; she wants to beat Kase-san––and in doing so, take over her life, I guess. This is such a gross character. She's been a jerk for ages, but in this end game she is really despicable.

In fairness vis a vis my previous post, I suppose none of the members of the team do much for Fukami, either. Both girls are left out to dry here. Fukami has literally no one to talk to. On the other hand, she also chooses not to talk to anyone about anything she's feeling. So I still have no sympathy for her. She has a wretched attitude, in which she seeks to bully others for her own, self-manufactured unhappiness. The annoying thing is, I kind of want a bully's end for her storyline, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen. I don't want to feel any extra sympathy for this character––she's blown through all the guardrails for me, and is not just a creep. But I'm sure there will be an understanding at the end of this, where Fukami learns something important––something she really could have learned by thinking about things and talking them out with other people, instead of just internalizing––but that understanding will be supposed to ennoble her in the readers' minds. Not appreciated.

This story unearthed traumatic memories from my own previous relationships. I kept looking at Glasses and seeing myself 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It's played for laughs in the story, but Glasses is internalizing an unhealthy level of self censorship and associated tension. She's unwittingly trained herself to cater tirelessly to her girlfriend's notably lazy and confusing attempts at communication, with a sort of masochism which Glasses herself seems unaware that she's placing on herself. Even if Mayumayu didn't torment Glasses and threaten her constantly--like a grotesque creep--Glasses' own self-abnegation has clearly damaged her psyche, and made her a nervous wreck. Glasses probably already operates with a higher degree of tension than is healthy, but she needs a more supportive partner, who doesn't weigh down celebrations and gift exchanges with catastrophic threats.

You can say that both partners here have agreed to this relationship, so no one should split them asunder, but Glasses is clearly traumatized here, and holding on for dear life. The relationship has been a long one, and Glasses indicates that this has been the status quo the whole time. I think of it a bit like the traumatized soldiers who come to feel more at home on the battlefield than off it; regardless of what the soldier thinks they want, it isn't a healthy attitude for them, and they generally need help to get rid of this subliminal programming––it's a defense mechanism kicking into gear to help them survive their trauma. It isn't who they are at a baseline level; it's the adrenaline doing the talking. Well, it's the adrenaline talking with Glasses, too. She's made it this far, and it makes her feel like she's achieved something, and she subliminally feels closer to Mayumayu as a result. It probably only rarely occurs to her how much the relationship is stressing her out--but it's very clear in the comic, and it's what makes the comic such an uncomfortable read. And even though the knife Mayumayu brandishes could be read as metaphorical, just what is it standing in for? Let's not forget, Glasses is so worried about not guessing the correct cake to eat, she is definitely––not merely metaphorically––doing self-harm, and buying herself extra time with her emotionally unstable girlfriend in order to hopefully get the answer to the question. Nonetheless, punching herself in the face is clearly standing in for some torment Glasses thinks her girlfriend would want her to suffer for not getting the riddle right so far. It's a pretty good indication that Glasses at least perceives Mayumayu's angry responses to her as coming with a measure of deliberate hurt attached. You might say all that indicates is Glasses' perception of the stakes of this game, but we see a lot of evidence that Mayumayu is playing along with it, and it certainly seems like the way the game is played in the story is the usual way the game is played between these two––with Glasses the put-upon one, expected to perform to prove herself worthy, and Mayumayu as the judge of Glasses' performance, and the one who doles out punishments and rewards.

To my mind, Glasses would do better with a more even-keeled girlfriend, who treated her like a partner in their relationship, rather than treating her as someone continually auditioning to be treated like a human being. And I think Mayumayu needs to be alone––at least for a while. She needs to learn to judge which of her expectations of people are reasonable, and she needs to learn how to handle disappointments with responses more appropriate to the nature of disappointment in question. Based on my own experience, I'm probably more naturally biased towards Glasses, but I have to admit that Glasses' own unacknowledged masochism has probably led her into this situation. However, that is, I think, a trait which might most often dissipate without the expectation by her partner to be constantly performing this masochism, as a demonstration of devotion.

Anyways, in spite of the pretty drawings, the story of this one really harshed my vibe. I guess it's a little funny, but it bothered me much more than it entertained.

last edited at Jan 5, 2023 9:34AM

Fukami has been a really frustrating character, a passive-aggressive personality that mutates in this chapter into someone with a more intense borderline personality disorder. I know people say she has a crush on Kase, but in order to maintain that crush she's ignoring the fact that she knows Kase has a significant other, and she confronts Kase only with petulance, aggression, and bullying. And then the rest of the team jump in and add ridiculous peer pressure to the mix.

Also kind of amazing none of Kase's friends on her team try to see things from Kase's point of view at any point. I suppose you could say Kase hasn't been communicative enough with them to earn their trust? But Kase is generally friendly to all of them, and Fukami is moody, selectively withdrawn, and always putting the burden of maintaining a relationship with her on them. Yet, all of them take Fukami's side, and don't seem to care why Kase might be leaving. In story-logic, Kase could defuse this situation by telling them all the truth about why she's moving out, but that would be such a painful way to force Kase into coming out to her teammates. So Yamada takes the hit, instead. Grim.

I guess there was need of a little drama in the series at this point, but this is kind of a lot. The beach episodes had more than enough drama for me at this point. I would have been happy enough to see them having trouble adapting to life together in some intimate ways––a little like what is done in My Cute Little Kitten. Unless the author can make something funny and sensitive and revelatory out of this footrace that's being set up now, I feel I'm being set up for disappointment.

Seems really promising. I'll be looking out for the next installment of this one.

It’s been a fairly recent development that authors have been intentionally creating ace (or aroace) characters at all. What was much more common were lead characters reacting against comphet by claiming “they don’t understand love at all,” feeling abnormal, etc., then discovering that they had feelings about a same-sex partner, i.e., discovering their own lesbianism, with kissing/physical intimacy as the standard yuri-genre narrative endgame.

Yuri has been a romance genre, full stop, and authors are still in the process of exploring how to incorporate non-romantic and/or non-sexual emotional connections into a romance genre and discovering how audiences react to such characters.

So, sure, some readers have reacted negatively to the mere presence of ace characters, but it’s much more common that stories with ace characters have confused readers about what kind of stories they are going to turn out to be.

I think Crescent Moon and Doughnuts is kind of a breakthrough in showing an OTP ending up in a deep and mutually satisfying emotional connection without one or both characters having a “lesbian conversion experience.” (I mean, there have been such stories before, but this one seems like it uses the yuri story template for ace characters as if it’s just a standard genre variant.)

This makes a lot of sense to me, and I really appreciate the context you've presented for the series. As a reader for whom the melodramatic romance aspects of yuri are enormous, convulsive, and deeply involving reasons for reading, I have to admit that I kept thinking the series was going to be just an incredibly slow burn towards realizing sexualized romantic feelings––and in that context, I read the characters protests against having sexualized romantic feelings as something that was bound to change over the course of the story (I also thought we'd have chapters of the series coming out for years to come before we got there). As I was reading this final chapter, it dawned on me what was happening ("wait...is this series...ending???), and I was...fairly surprised. In respect of what you said, through, it makes sense that, with the resolution of the sister arc, the confrontation with the mother resolved as well, and the conveyance of feelings of love and value between the two of them, the story was ready to be wrapped up. The important emotional barriers to the two of them having a more intimate, if not a more sexual relationship, are essentially cleared away, so...cool. I think with the eventual existence of more stories like this, I'll come to understand better how this kind of romance might work in a literary context––and I think I get enough out of the story on its own terms to understand it, and to appreciate the characters for who they are rather than who I assumed them to be. I can't really lie and say I don't miss the melodrama inherent in most yuri––but then, After Hours also knocked me upside the head with its ending. I suppose I'm guilty of expecting more sensually-expressive romance in yuri––but, more to the point, I really want it, and hope to see it even in series that aren't ultimately going in that direction, like this, or A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, or The Two Sides of Seiyuu Radio (though in the case of those later two, my hunch is that they change direction at one point or another, behind the scenes––whereas I don't think that's what happens in Crescent Moon & Doughnuts). I'll re-read this series when it gets fully published in English, maybe pick up some of the cues I sort of remapped in my head and see them for what they are. It's new territory for me. But thank you for everyone here in the comments who has helped make the meaning of the story more clear.

When I teach character development to my comics students, I emphasize treating characters as either contrasting opposites or as characters that harmonize and boost one another's signals. This might seem a superficial way to handle characters, except that most of the character development we see in fiction is based on the way we compare/contrast characters with one another. Yuri authors do this absolutely all the time; they have usually these two girls; contrasting them at first gives us their character dynamics, and the different ways they look at the world––so that the two girls become really clearly differentiated. Slowly, the yuri writer generally tries to bring the characters together, filing off the edges of their contrasts, shoring up the things they have in common, until the characters are harmonizing on a similar wavelength. But a pretty simple way to track character development through fiction is to look for how the author pairs characters, either contrasting or complementing one another, and looking for how the author uses those contrasts especially to tell us all about the characters.

The contrasting figure for Shiho in this story is, for most intents and purposes, Yori. Shiho is intensely committed to her goals, driven until they're painful and un-fun and a general drag on her life. Yori is so removed from most forms of commitment, it's been hard for the Sunny Spot members to get her to be in the band, even though she clearly doesn't have anything better to do. And plot-wise, Yori is very clearly Shiho's doppelganger; she fills in Shiho's place in the band, and she occupies the space in Mizuguchi's heart that Shiho wants. Shiho plays her music to be perfect, to win. Yori plays to express herself, even if she sucks. Shiho is committed in exactly the ways Yori isn't, but Yori is able to succeed with her more laid-back attitude, in a way that confounds Shiho.

Well, sort of. The problem is that this contrast between the two characters isn't very well-balanced. Yori has no intensity to match Shiho's, and she's getting no time on the page to express any alternative to Shiho's humorless misery and anger. At first, the author seemed to be using Himari as a wedge between the two contrasting figures, with the more time Himari was spending with Shiho bringing out Yori's jealousy. But that sort of competition between the characters has been largely dispelled, with Yori just kind of agreeing to ditch her angst and focus on songwriting, and with Shiho revealing that she isn't really interested in Himari romantically, but in Mizuguchi instead. Meanwhile, Yori and Shiho remain poised as opposites, as rivals––one of them will lead their band in the piece that "defeats" the other band at the concert. But the stakes in this game are so unequal, it's no wonder the focus of this for most of us readers is on what a wretch Shiho is behaving.

Thing is, if Yori had a stronger role in this story arc, I don't think most of us complaining about Shiho bringing things down. If her frustrated romantic passions were a more balanced contrast against Yori's own maybe more upbeat passions, it would make for more rewarding drama. But Shiho's story is so overweighted compared to Yori's own, it's getting ludicrous. Shiho needs to win the competition because her competitor/friend died, and her band came together to honor the dead friend/rival (I guess...all that seems like so long ago I'm not sure I have it all straight in my head); she's raging against this intense, unrequited love, vacillating between hating and loving Mizuguchi, letting that hate overflow onto Yori, who isn't even a willing participant in this triangle, venting it to Yori's girlfriend...What is Yori doing that makes a balance with this? She's writing her own song. She and her girlfriend are getting along. Things seem good. I think there needed to be a clearer contrast drawn between Shiho and Yori––one that kept Yori relevant to the story. The best way to have done that would have been to dial back Shiho's angst, because while we've seen Yori lovelorn, we haven't seen her act too neurotic, and Yori has nothing to match this. The second-best thing would have been to give Yori more skin in the game, more angst to come closer to matching Shiho's––either contriving something in the plot that creates problems for Yori and Himari's relationship (I could see that messing Yori up emotionally, making her more of a direct competitor with Shiho in terms of emotions and in terms of space on the page), or introducing some buried anxiety of Yori's that comes to the surface when Shiho's role in the plot develops. Then Yori has something large to overcome, some overwhelming insecurity, in parallel with the voluminous baggage Shiho has to surmount. This would make Yori more of the rival to Shiho which the author insists that she is, but which the author barely, barely backs up with anything.

Alternatively, make the Shiho/Mizuguchi story the side story that develops while Himari and Yori do their own thing––the way Anemone in Heat handles the secondary romance, or instance. As it is, the story here feels incredibly imbalanced, weighted towards this side-character, Shiho, because the main characters have not much of anything to counter her intensity and the way she commands attention. None of the rest of the cast is as intense as Shiho; none of them are in so much pain. So Shiho draws readers––and apparently the writer as well––away from the rest of the story; another way of saying it is that she sucks all the oxygen out of the room. How can all this angst get resolved by a battle of the bands, anyway? Do you think the author has set that up as a plausible solution to the Shiho dilemma? I don't think so. If you ask me, this character has gone out of the author's control, and is taking the whole venture towards at least a tonal derailment.

Donuts Under a Crescent Moon had a love triangle recently, which balanced the characters' attributes and contrasts far, far better than this. What balancing these characters better against one another does is maintain the consistency of the tone of the book, maintain the throughline of the book's themes, and keep the book feeling like the book you thought you were reading––which is usually a great benefit. There are some readers who can put up with the convulsions of an author letting a supporting character take over, but I think the firm majority of readers find it hard to take. It feels like a betrayal of the narrative I've been following; a betrayal with no clear benefit to us as we read it. The expression of that, in this case, can be summed up in general with some expression like "I hate Shiho," or "Shiho is just a drag." I think that when we say things like this, what most of us are expressing is the way in which Shiho seems to have hijacked the story we were reading, changing the tone and the narrative stakes in ways the rest of the comic isn't prepared to deliver on.

When I say Shiho's a drag, this is what I'm talking about. This girl who is ready to cut her friendships out like a tumor is driving the story into such a different mode than the story has been running in up until now. When Mizuguchi made her confession, and tried to get Himari to give up leading Yori on if she wasn't serious about her, things seemed serious, but nothing disrupted the sense of the book's identity. We felt how Mizuguchi contrasted Himari as a literary doppelganger; both of them were into Yori, but Mizuguchi came at it from a more mature, measured point of view, while Himari was all impulse and overwhelming enthusiasm. The conflict motivated Himari to change, and the result was that the main characters in the story advanced in plausible directions. Is that happening now with Shiho and Yori? I don't get that sense. The battle of the bands seems to be building to an unforetold apocalypse, the end of friendship (not a great friendship, anyway; being friends with the volatile Shiho seems like you're volunteering for a world of hurt). Anyway, that's where I come out on this. I don't see what the main characters can do to win back any audience attention from the Shiho show, which promises more fireworks than I came prepared to see. So that's my complaint about Shiho, hopefully made a little clearer.

last edited at Nov 27, 2022 10:31AM

I'm surprised this one hasn't been licensed in the U.S. by now––I mean, it's been going for a while without one, even though it seems like a shoe-in. But I thought for sure Can't Defy the Lonely Girl would have had an English-language release as well, and it hasn't got one. I feel like between Vampeerz, Catch These Hands, and Run Away With Me, Girl getting published in English, and these more cute, straight-down-the-middle titles not getting published, I can't predict what'll be translated and what won't.

The most effective element of the chapter for me was the transition when Himari moves from hanging out with Loreley, with their vibe of crushingly dour intensity, to hanging out with Sunny Spot. The gloom just lifted magically, and I felt, probably more than any other time in the series, how good the vibe of Sunny Spot was––in music, and in attitude, too. Of course, that only worked because of chapter after chapter of drudgery, us and Himari spending endless time with Shiho, lost in her BS. I don't really care whether Shiho's attitude is realistic, or whether her story has thematic resonance or not––it seems so to me, but it no more makes me want to read her material than if her role was implausible and meaningless––it's just that the tone of this storyline just brings the larger story of the book down. I can't remember the last time I was looking forward to reading a chapter of this; I'm mostly sticking with it to get past this storyline. I do hope there is something beyond this arc. I would like to read something with a little bit higher spirits. Hopefully Sunny Spot does great at the concert. I'm sure Shiho won't leave the story in disgrace if that's the case, but I can dream, can't I?

I do plan to re-read this from the top. It really seemed as if it came crashing down to a finish quite abruptly, like a vase of orchids suddenly tumbling off a shelf. I wonder if I'll feel the same way reading it again, or if I'll find more clarity and purpose in the plot extending only to this point. The first few chapters were particularly remarkable to me, and I think the manga as a whole is a huge advance on Flowerchild's previous manga, Hungry for You: Endo Yasuko Stalks the Night. I did not find the confrontation with Yoru to be anything much like a conclusion––and I read here somewhere that health or fatigue was a factor in ending the series where it ended? I hope Flowerchild's okay. I think she's a pretty unique writer of very eccentric––or at least, very personal––yuri stories. And the art is notably cool and distinctive, also. Really keen to see what I make of this on a re-read.

And ditto on recommending Milk Morinaga's "Girlfriends." One of the greats. Personally, I like Whispered Words a whole lot, too. Those are both series that really endeared me to the genre.

last edited at May 27, 2022 5:59AM

I really hope it doesn't end up being a harem of ogres all drinking and hanging out at Naori's place. I'd rather have this new ogre be a genuine antagonist than be a superficial antagonist who becomes pacified right away. I get intense "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid" vibes off this, so far.

Something that confused me was when Naori's friend Settsu was talking about financial aid. Settsu says, "they make scholarships sound nice and all, but in the end, it's still a loan." I guess maybe scholarships is a word standing in for financial aid in general? Going to college in California, scholarships were what we referred to as financial aid we didn't have to repay, and loans were denoted separately. Looking it up pretty superficially, it looks like scholarships of the kind I'm familiar with are part of financial aid in Japanese universities, but I wondered if anyone knew if there was a nuance I was missing here?

I agree with Ulcius; it would have been nice to see people's reaction to the movie. But it does seem like the whole series is arranged throughout so that it is always cutting away before we get closure on anything––and it seems like the author took that to the far extreme in the end, where we know, just as the girls both seem to know, that the confession is coming, but we aren't going to get to see it. As for the movie, it's very consistent that we don't get to see it being shown, or see people's reactions, or feel any sense of accomplishment when it's finished––that would be that emotional catharsis the author is so committed to keeping off-screen the entire time. But I think there was a chance to do something a little better here, where the emotional catharsis that comes with seeing the movie is actual a kind of overflowing of Hajime's emotions––if seeing Kei as the object of love on-screen might just provoke her to admit her own feelings to herself. It would violate the Ozu-like restraint of this story, but I think that I, like a lot of people here, wanted that catharsis somewhere. I wish we saw just a little more of the shooting of the movie, as well. It's not like they're doing something normal and wholly cliched, like having a sleepover or walking to the convenience store. I would have liked to see more of the details of what it was they were doing while they filmed the movie. That's the part of the anime Waiting in Summer that made it all work for me; in that anime the filming was comic, but here it might have just been more serious and interesting. Instead, they're always wrapping for the day, or talking on the phone after filming is over. But all in all the story was very beautiful and it had a nice feeling to it. The more I think about it, a confession would have been a little too on-the-nose for the series. It is nice to see their feelings reciprocated as the story draws to a close.