Milk MorinagaBesprekingen
Auteur van Girl Friends: The Complete Collection 1
Besprekingen
FOR REFERENCE:
Omnibus edition containing Girl Friends Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and the first half of Vol. 3.
Contents: Chapters 1-18 -- Extras [Afterwords for Vols. 1 and 2]
I'm curious to find out if this undercurrent is heading toward an explosion or a more internalized epiphany sort of thing.
I have one more on hand from the library, so I'll press on for now.
FOR REFERENCE:
Contents: Inari's Marriage / Hachi Ito -- The First Night Aftermath / Subaru Homura -- I Want to Get Dizzy with You / Izumi Kawanami -- Her Ring / Shimako Chiruda -- Night of the Loser Virgins / Yu Yoshidamaru -- Spare Key / Kiyoko Iwami -- At the Summer Retreat / Takashi keda -- Private Consideration / Jiang Sal -- A Story of the First and Last Night / Canno -- If It's You, Anything Goes / Milk Morinaga
The stand-out story is "Swallowtail Takes Flight," a fantasy piece about a wasp and a caterpillar. "That's What She Wants" and "A Passion for Your Work" were well done tales about affairs and manipulation.
FOR REFERENCE:
Contents: Call of the Mayflies / Izumi Kawanami -- Photography Addiction / Goumoto -- That Girl in the Library / Megumi Tsuji -- That's What She Wants / Canno -- A Passion for Your Work / Shuninta Amano -- The Left Leg Shackle / Hachi Ito -- My Little Sister's Ice Cream / Mako Takahashi -- The Fourth Woman / Natsumi Matsuzaki -- Swallowtail Takes Flight / Yu Yoshidamaru -- Slit / Takashi Ikeda -- At What Point? / Milk Morinaga
Still, despite the chaff, there are a few good stories in the middle. And I do like that the stories try to do different things instead of just pure romance or sex scenes. And the character types are all over the place with office ladies, strippers, teachers, porn stars, florists, and otakus.
So, while it's not a favorite anthology, it may have something to offer in future volumes, so I'm going to stick it out for a bit.
FOR REFERENCE:
Contents: [creator names are formatted family name/given name]
• Cover illustration / Fly
• One AM at the Laundromat / Yukiko
• Daily Smile (^ ^) / Kodama Naoko
• Coward Queen / Yoshimura Kana
• My Girl / Goumoto
• The Cram School Teachers / Mocchi_au_Lait
• Night Flight / Kawanami Izumi
• Promise / Shioya Teruko
• The Florist and the Wednesday Night Lady / Amano Shuninta
• The Abandoned Cat and the Lamp / Ohi Pikachi
• Mama x Mom / Yoshidamaru Yu
• Rose Quartz / Kurogane Kenn
• My Femme Fatale / Matsuzaki Natsumi
• First Grown-up Love / Ito Hachi
• Working with an Angel / Morinaga Milk
Also:
However, she's currently attending an all-girls school, so it's unlikely she'll meet her prince anytime in the near future. The person she meets instead: Fujiwara, a popular member of the volleyball club. When Miu witnesses Fujiwara accidentally break the principal's expensive vase, Fujiwara begs her not to tell, saying she'll do anything Miu wants. Miu sees this as an opportunity. She asks Fujiwara to go out with her, explaining that it would be good practice for when she finally meets her prince - she'd already know how to be a great girlfriend. Fujiwara agrees because the activities Miu says they'd be doing - walking home together, eating lunch together, texting each other good night, etc. - sound like exactly the kind of friendship activities she has always felt she's been missing out on, due to the way all the other student put her on a pedestal. But what happens when their fake relationship starts to feel real?
I went into this expecting ridiculous and adorable fluff and was a bit surprised when it got a little heavy at times (content warning:
I'm torn on this volume. Miu and Fujiwara were cute together, and I loved the way Miu struggled with her gradually shifting perception of her own sexuality after years of her mother's heteronormative pep talks. Her journey from viewing her and Fujiwara's relationship as practice for her eventual "real" relationship with a guy to realizing that she was in love with and attracted to Fujiwara, and that romance between two girls was real and valid too, was nice.
Unfortunately, there were too many details that I didn't think Morinaga properly dealt with. For example, I initially rolled my eyes at the premise, wondering why it didn't occur to Miu that her practice relationship might get her a reputation as a lesbian and hurt her chances at eventually getting a prince. Then there was the possibility of homophobic reactions from others. I figured that Morinaga was just going to ignore those possibilities, and I'd actually have been fine with that. Sometimes it's best if cute, fluffy fiction ignores uglier realities.
Homophobia came up, however, after Miu made her and Fujiwara's relationship public. At first it appeared to just be slight jealousy - Miu's friends viewed Fujiwara as an untouchable idol, and Miu was breaking unspoken rules by actually dating her. Eventually, though, it became clear that jealousy wasn't the only issue. Several of Miu's friends announced that they were no longer going to be Fujiwara's fans because, well, it was a bit weird now that she was publicly a lesbian (those weren't the words they used, but that was the implication - my guess was they were worried they'd be viewed as lesbians too). I'd have expected Miu to be hurt and taken aback, because their rejection of Fujiwara for being a lesbian also indicated, on some level, a rejection of her as well, even though they continued to speak to her and be friends with her. I found it odd that this implication was never addressed or dealt with.
There were a few other little annoying things that weren't really dealt with. For example, one of the maids at Fujiwara's house indicated that she'd been worried when Fujiwara announced that she was bringing a friend home. If the person had been a guy, she wouldn't have allowed him in, but Miu was fine. There was no indication that her view of Miu changed after Fujiwara and Miu went from being in a fake relationship to being in a real one and it made me wonder, a little, if the maid and possibly others were still viewing Miu and Fujiwara's relationship as something less real than a similar relationship between a boy and girl. There was also the implication, in another part of the volume, that romantic relationships didn't really count unless they included physical components, like kissing and sex.
I don't know. It was nice and sweet overall, but there was so much that I felt needed to be properly addressed that wasn't. I wish Morinaga hadn't brought some of that stuff up at all if she wasn't going to do anything with it.
Extras:
"After School Girl," a short manga about an all-girl chemistry club with one particular member who looks a bit like a stereotypical juvenile delinquent and doesn't seem to care about chemistry in the slightest. This isn't explicitly a yuri story, but it could be interpreted as the beginnings of one.
There's also a 2-page author afterword comic that includes a sweet little story from the author's time at an all-girls school.
(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
I am a huge Milk Morinaga fan. Ever since I read Girlfriends a couple years ago, I have been waiting for new books from her to be published in English. I preordered this as soon as possible, and read it as soon as I got it in the mail.
A sweet book, even if I was a little sad by the inclusion of a trope that is all too common in lgbt stories: the suicide in face of never being loved. It’s trite in the best of cases, but it feels inevitable in lgbt love stories. I wish it wasn’t, I’m tired of it. Tragedy needs to stop being so common in stories about marginalized orientations, gender alignments and intersex folks.
My friend would say, maybe that's how the story came to the author. Well, I don’t want to read stories like this anymore.
In sum, I am still a huge Morinaga fan, but I am very glad that this book, sweet and affirming as it is, is a one-off. I hope to see fewer storylines like this from the author.
*I was not compensated for this review in any way.
One of the problems with the f/f manga imported to English is that so much of it is that weird "onee-sama" fake lesbian thing - Maria Watches Over Us is probably the one that a lot of people know, or at least, it was when I first discovered Girl Friends many years ago. There's something about the f/f where the girls are sort of put on these pedestals of purity for male readers, I guess, and there's this feeling that their relationships are different than "real" relationships. Girl Friends avoids a lot of that - while Akko and Mari are in an all-girls' school like many of the other stories back in 2012, it's normal for the girls to have boyfriends or want boyfriends, not to have romantic relationships with each other.
I've read the series several times since I first discovered it in fan-translation, before the English licensing by Seven Seas, and even after I bought the official translation. The girls here are a little bit idealized, but they still feel like they could be real - just extra sweet/cute. It's almost funny the way Morinaga inserts brand names into the dialogue and art, and her inclusion of so much current fashion for 2008, or whenever the series was originally published. But that makes the girls feel more real to me, by grounding them in actual pop culture instead of some remote place.
This first omnibus volume covering chapters 1-18 is about Mari becoming friends with Akko, then realizing that she feels something different and more than friendship. The major dramatic turns include being overcome by a sleeping Akko's cuteness and kissing her; kissing an aware Akko who has just told Mari that she should confess to the boy she likes - and Mari crying that it's impossible; and after agreeing to go out with a boy who has liked her since 6th grade, the volume ends with an upset Mari telling Akko that they're the same now (ie: not virgins - a sad misunderstanding).
The plot/drama summary is that Mari is trying to figure out what separates a romantic relationship from best friends, and frankly that speaks to me on a high level, and I love reading this story and watching her resolve the problem. Also, all the girls are super cute.
Ever since she was young, Sasami Aoba has wanted to be a champion of justice, dreaming of crushing evil and helping the weak, and now she finally has her chance as an assistant police officer. Specifically, Sasami has been assigned to Hanagaki Girls' High School as one of its polizi--a young undercover cop sent to investigate issues at problem schools. The only thing is Hanagaki doesn't actually seem to have any problems. There's no bullying, the students and staff are all very pleasant, and even the school's newspaper has difficulty finding juicy material to report on. Hanagaki is actually the second assignment for Sasami's partner Sakuraba Midori. Before Sasami's arrival, and because the school is so peaceful, Sakuraba has had plenty of time on her hands, quite a bit of which she would spend distracting herself by drawing yaoi manga. But now with the less-experienced and overly eager Sasami constantly on the verge of blowing their cover as polizi, Sakuraba has more than enough to worry about.
Gakuen Polizi is kind of a strange mashup of genres. Since nothing much happens in the way of crime at Hanagaki, there's not much for Sasami and Sakuraba to be doing in regards to police work. The series is generally lighthearted and often silly, especially towards its beginning. At first the cases at the school are fairly inconsequential--a dog with a penchant for stealing things, small squabbles between classmates, and so on. The second half takes a more serious turn, dealing with gropers and stalkers, but even then the humor in Gakuen Polizi is a prominent feature. Most of the comedy revolves around Sasami. She is very enthusiastic and passionate, but somewhat lacking in common sense. Sakuraba, in stark contrast, is more serious and reserved. According to the afterword, readers should expect more romance-related drama to come in the series, but there is very little of that to be seen in the first volume of Gakuen Polizi, though a chemistry between Sasami and Sakuraba has begun to develop.
It is fairly obvious that Morinaga is personally having a lot of fun with Gakuen Polizi. I found the first volume to be entertaining, but readers approaching the manga hoping for a series similar to Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink or Girl Friends will most likely be disappointed. Though Gakuen Polizi has the potential for some drama and romance, so far the series tends towards the absurd and ridiculous. Morinaga's artwork and character designs are cute, with particularly dynamic facial expressions that add to the series' silliness. While I like the characters in Gakuen Polizi, I'm not attached to them in the same way that I was to the characters in Morinaga's other manga. I do find Sasami, Sakuraba, and their friends to be amusing though. Gakuen Polizi isn't meant to be taken too seriously. The emphasis is definitely more on the series' comedy than it is on its believability. Overall, Gakuen Poilizi, Volume 1 was largely an enjoyable, fluffy read. Although I may not be desperate for more, I do look forward to reading the next volume.
Experiments in Manga
Nana and Hitomi were best friends who grew up together and attended the same elementary and junior high schools. Nana was looking forward to becoming a student at Sakurakai Girls' High School, but that was when she thought Hitomi would be enrolling as well. However, Hitomi was accepted at Touhou Girls' High School. Finding it too painful to continue to suppress her love for Nana after being rejected, Hitomi chooses to attend Touhou instead. Despite how close the two of them used to be, Nana finds Hitomi drifting away and she misses her terribly. But recognizing her own feelings is only the first step in mending their relationship as is begins to evolve into something more than just friendship. Similarly, several of the other young women at Sakurakai and Touhou are faced with their own first loves and crushes on classmates. It isn't always easy to confess their feelings and falling in love with a person of the same gender often brings along challenges that other couples don't have to deal with.
The stories collected in Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink follow a vague chronological order, but many of them aren't directly related to one another. They share the same setting and to some extent the same characters, but only Nana and Hitomi are the focus of multiple stories in the volume. I actually really enjoyed Morinaga's structural approach to Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink. Nana and Hitomi's relationship provides a more developed, ongoing narrative, creating a framework which supports the supplementary side stories about their classmates and friends. Overall, I feel this gives the manga slightly more depth. Also included in Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink is a diagram that visually shows how all of the different stories and characters overlap and are connected to one another. Although they are interrelated and occasionally make references to previous developments and chapters, most of the stories do stand perfectly well on their own in addition to contributing to the manga as a whole.
Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink tends to be very cute, sweet, and romantic, which is not to say that every story is a happy one. I appreciated that some of the chapters in Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink have touches of angst, sadness, and bittersweetness to them. Nana and Hitomi's relationship, despite having its ups and downs, does have an ending that seems to tie everything up a little too easily and nicely, but I won't deny that it made me smile. Morinaga also addresses some very real issues and concerns, such as homophobia, that are encountered by same-gendered couples, but many of the feelings expressed are relevant for any romantic relationship. The manga may be a bit melodramatic at times, but it is emotionally resonant. Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink also incorporates a fair amount of humor. It's a highly enjoyable and charming collection of short manga with likeable characters, a generally optimistic outlook, and a satisfying amount of realism to go along with its sweetness.
Experiments in Manga
First of all, as evidenced by the lack of any furigana and any content that could or would be misconstrued as adult, I think this book is being mis-marketed as josei when it should be shoujo. If for no better reason than because there's no nudity and damnit, it's annoying that i can read everything but the kanji.
Now that that is out of the way, I liked this volume. Unlike other mangaka I can think of , Morinaga Milk has a keen sense of characterization. Mariko ungoes a transformation throughout the story, and this volume in particular highlights that quite nicely. Sadly... Akko's character is barely sketched out in this book (it's until when the audience gets a chapter or two from her perspective that we start to rationalize who she is).
In addition, the art is quite nice and would have been fabulous if they had printed in B4 size and left the colored pages colorized. As it is, they desaturated them, and if I thought that was annoying when seen in Tokyopop or Viz, it's doubly so as seen in a real tankoubon. But still, there are some panels that are attractive enough to be passable.
The story is... probably its biggest drawback. In addition to the almost outlandish use of product advertising (I know for a fact there are a plethora of Real Simple-wannabe mags in Japan where they'd be more appropriate), and the truly sad way in which Mari is incapable of thinking for herself, the pacing is also quite trying. It seems that for every step forward the protagonist makes toward independence and emotional maturity, there are between 2 and 4 steps back in self-esteem. Also, as it's introduced in this book, the audience is incapable of understanding what Akko sees in Mari, besides being a My-Size Barbie. I do like Sugi and Tamami and I think they bring a much needed comic relief to the story, but of course they don't get their own stories.
Now that that is out of the way, I liked this volume. Unlike other mangaka I can think of , Morinaga Milk has a keen sense of characterization. Mariko ungoes a transformation throughout the story, and this volume in particular highlights that quite nicely. Sadly... Akko's character is barely sketched out in this book (it's until when the audience gets a chapter or two from her perspective that we start to rationalize who she is).
In addition, the art is quite nice and would have been fabulous if they had printed in B4 size and left the colored pages colorized. As it is, they desaturated them, and if I thought that was annoying when seen in Tokyopop or Viz, it's doubly so as seen in a real tankoubon. But still, there are some panels that are attractive enough to be passable.
The story is... probably its biggest drawback. In addition to the almost outlandish use of product advertising (I know for a fact there are a plethora of Real Simple-wannabe mags in Japan where they'd be more appropriate), and the truly sad way in which Mari is incapable of thinking for herself, the pacing is also quite trying. It seems that for every step forward the protagonist makes toward independence and emotional maturity, there are between 2 and 4 steps back in self-esteem. Also, as it's introduced in this book, the audience is incapable of understanding what Akko sees in Mari, besides being a My-Size Barbie. I do like Sugi and Tamami and I think they bring a much needed comic relief to the story, but of course they don't get their own stories."
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FOR REFERENCE:
Omnibus edition containing the second half of Girl Friends Vol. 3, and all of Vols. 4 and 5.
Contents: Chapters 19-34 -- Final Chapter -- Extras [Extra Manga 1-9 -- Afterword for Vol. 3]