I’ve been sick and not able to comment on these before now, but @Goyavoyage has a really solid list of recommended yuri titles and is doing a great job of highlighting them.

How Do We Relationship? in particular I would easily put in the top three of yuri titles currently being serialized. And here’s something @Goyavoyage didn’t mention: if you live in the US or Canada and can afford $1.99 a month (in the US) for a Viz Manga subscription (not to be confused with a Shonen Jump subscription) then you can read new chapters of HDWR as soon as they’re published in Japan (currently up to chapter 114). (The Viz Manga site is missing chapters 84-93, corresponding to volume 10, so you’d have to buy that separately.)

Voyage (@Goyavoyage) - 2024-02-06 01:21

I wish you a quick recovery! Also– thank you. Your words mean a lot.

And you’re right! I learned of that simultaneous publication thing super recently when seeing people commenting chapters beyond vol. 10. I’m realizing just now that it’s North America-restricted though. Bummer. (Well, I have vol. 9 and 10 to catch up to anyway!)

[I originally published this post on Cohost as a follow-up to a Cohost post by @saralily, but I thought it was worth publishing on its own.]

I’ve read all of the ones @saralily recommends that have been released in English, except for A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, and agree with her comments. Here are some of my own recommendations, in no particular order:

Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels. This takes a character who was given somewhat short shrift in the main Bloom Into You manga, and tells her story in her own voice. It may be blasphemous of me, but I prefer this to the manga.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden. A story set in the late Victorian era that is realistic about the barriers society placed in the way of lesbian relationships.

Yuri Is My Job! Starts out as an affectionate parody of yuri schoolgirl tropes as exemplified by Maria Watches Over Us, but then gets increasingly serious (and lesbian) in later volumes. (Some people apparently hate this change; I think it’s great.)

How Do We Relationship? This reverses the usual course of yuri stories: the protagonists meet and sleep with each other, then figure out what to do after that.

I Can’t Believe I Slept with You! A dubious (consent) premise redeemed as the story evolves. (And now that I think of it, it also reverses the usual yuri plot sequence.)

She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons. This features a love triangle in which one of the vertices is a high-school boy, and some yuri fans may reject it for that reason. But it’s really well-done, and the way photography is woven into the story and the characters’ lives is quite interesting: it‘s so important to the two main protagonists that they take pictures of each other even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Otherside Picnic light novels. I’m not generally a fan of horror, but I love these. Like the Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels, they benefit tremendously from being told in the first-person. It’s worth noting that this is one of several works that trace their heritage back to the Strugatsky Brothers’ SF novel Roadside Picnic, a group that famously includes Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker as well as the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

After Hours. Another adult yuri work, about an interesting subject, namely DJing. (It even has a couple of panels that name-check contemporary Japanese bands and DJs.) Like How Do We Relationship? and I Can’t Believe I Slept with You!, it starts with sex and then moves on to more interesting things.