Preface to the Japanese Edition

After I initially self-published this book, I thought I was done with it and could turn to my next project. But, as sometimes happens in life, events didn’t work out that way. Thus I found myself not only revising and expanding this book but also introducing its Japanese translation.

In acknowledging the people who helped make this possible, I’ll begin by remembering Mark McLelland, whose passing in 2020 I learned of only after publishing the initial version of this book. Professor McLelland’s writing significantly influenced my thinking; I’ve referenced yet another of his papers in one of the new chapters of this book. His colleague James Welker pointed me to remembrances of his career and helped publicize this book by tweeting about it.

My thanks also go to Erica Friedman, who helped promote the book by linking to it in her weekly column on her blog Okazu. Her book By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga is a comprehensive and authoritative take on the history of yuri. Unfortunately, it came out too late to reference it in mine.

Blogger Jaime of Yuri Stargirl inspired me to expand this book. Her insightful comments on Takako Shimura’s works, including Sweet Blue Flowers, directly led to my writing one of the new chapters, while another of her comments motivated me to create a second new chapter.

Shimura herself tweeted about the book after I sent her a paperback copy. Besides leading to additional downloads, her tweets led directly to the creation of the Japanese edition, as blogger Konsuke of con-cats.hatenablog.com took advantage of the book’s permissive licensing to translate the book’s chapters into Japanese and publish them on his blog.

Konsuke also thoroughly proofread the English edition (which now benefits from his corrections), added more candidates for inclusion in the errata appendix, collected material for yet another appendix, and helped me prepare the Japanese translation for publication in book form. To him go my sincere thanks, and I hope the thanks of readers in Japan, for all the work he’s done to make the Japanese edition possible.