Preface to the English Edition

Between 2004 and 2013 the Japanese comic artist Takako Shimura published her manga Aoi hana (“Blue Flower[s]”) in the (now defunct) magazine Manga Erotics F. Aoi hana, a work in the “yuri” genre featuring romantic relationships between girls or women, depicted the high school years of two Japanese teenaged girls, Fumi and Akira, their renewal of a friendship forged in their childhood, Fumi’s coming out as a lesbian, her desire to be more than a friend to Akira, and Akira’s uncertain and halting response to that desire. Aoi hana was collected in a Japanese edition of eight volumes¹ and eventually released in English in a four-volume omnibus edition as Sweet Blue Flowers.²

As a relatively recent manga fan, I enjoyed reading Sweet Blue Flowers and found myself intrigued by it. It seemed to me that Shimura set out to create a work that was not just another simple tale of schoolgirls in love, but that—albeit often messily and imperfectly—was trying to say something about the yuri genre itself and about the Japanese society in which that genre arose and was popularized. This book is my own messy and imperfect attempt to explore what that something might be—or, at least, what I imagine it might be.

In writing these notes, I encountered three significant obstacles. First, I do not know Japanese and must rely on the English version. Any nuances that are “lost in translation” are lost on me.

Second, I am not young, not a woman, not queer, and not Japanese—in other words, I’m about as far away from directly identifying with the characters of this manga and their life experiences as it’s possible to be. I write as an outsider, with all the limitations that an outsider has in trying to interpret dialogue, events, and cultural and social contexts.

Finally, as mentioned above, I am a relatively recent reader of manga, and I have no education or experience as a critic of literature in general or manga in particular.

Therefore this book is best thought of as a collection of tentative and personal answers to idiosyncratic questions that came to me based on my limited perspective. I welcome comments and corrections that might improve my understanding and possible future editions of this book. (See the colophon for details.)

The plan of the book

In case anyone reading this book is at the same time reading through the four volumes of Sweet Blue Flowers, I’ve divided the book as follows:

The initial chapters contain minimal spoilers and are intended as background reading for the series. The chapters in the following four sections discuss the events of each volume and (with minor exceptions) contain spoilers for the series only through the end of that volume. Finally, the concluding chapters contain my final thoughts on the yuri genre and the place of Sweet Blue Flowers within it.

I have also included other material that may be of interest, including an index of characters, errata for the VIZ Media edition, a summary of previously-published reviews, and suggestions for further reading.

I discuss the official English release of Sweet Blue Flowers as published by VIZ Media in print and e-book form; all page references are to that edition. I do not discuss the anime adaptation except to compare it with the manga. When I do so, I assume that readers have seen all eleven episodes of the anime. There were also two previous authorized English e-book releases of volume 1 of the Japanese edition, one of which I discuss briefly concerning translation choices. Occasionally I go back to the Japanese edition to puzzle out the exact terms that Shimura used.

In discussing the characters, I follow the conventions used in the VIZ English release: Western order for given name and family name (Akira Okudaira, not Okudaira Akira) and simplified romanization (Manjome, not Manjoume or Manjōme). I follow Wikipedia’s conventions for Japanese names and terms outside the context of Sweet Blue Flowers.

I’ve included notes and a bibliography for those wishing to further explore works that I cite. However, in general I have not included citations for works available only in Japanese or for information that can be easily found in Wikipedia or similar online sources.

Finally, some parts of Sweet Blue Flowers touch on issues meriting a content note. I have included such notes when I discuss those issues.

Resources and inspirations

At this point most authors would acknowledge the contributions of those who helped them in the writing of their books. However, this book is a solo effort that I created as a private spare-time project. I can thus say more truly than most that any faults in it are mine and mine alone.

But although I cannot include a conventional list of acknowledgments, I would be remiss in not mentioning those without whom this book would not exist or would be a more amateurish affair than it already is.

First and foremost, I owe thanks to Takako Shimura, without whom there would be no Aoi hana or Sweet Blue Flowers for the world to read and for me to write about. Thanks also go to the team at VIZ Media who brought Aoi hana to us in English in complete and definitive form as Sweet Blue Flowers: translator John Werry, editor Pancha Diaz, Monalisa De Asis, who did touch-up art and lettering, and Yukiko Whitley, who did the design.

To try to remedy my complete lack of knowledge about gender and sexuality in the context of Japanese history, culture, and society, and how these are reflected in manga, anime, and other works, I took advantage of the extensive academic literature produced by scholars in these fields. Those whose books, papers, and other works I found particularly useful include (in alphabetical order) Sharon Chalmers, Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, Sarah Frederick, Mark McLelland, Verena Maser, Gregory Pflugfelder, Jennifer Robertson, Deborah Shamoon, Michiko Suzuki, and James Welker.

In writing at length about Sweet Blue Flowers I am following in the footsteps of the many Western fans writing online about manga and anime, especially those who review and critically analyze works in depth. I particularly single out those whose work I read early in my time as a manga and anime fan, and continue to read with pleasure today: the writers and editors of the Anime Feminist website (“Japanese pop culture through a feminist lens”),³ and Erica Friedman, creator and editor of the Okazu blog and Yuricon website covering and promoting all things yuri.⁴

Finally, in writing down my idiosyncratic views regarding Sweet Blue Flowers I took inspiration from Adam Mars-Jones and his book Noriko Smiling.⁵ Mars-Jones set himself against previous Western interpreters of the films of Yasujirō Ozu and proposed a different take on Ozu’s film Late Spring, analyzing its story of a woman in postwar Japan who did not want to get married and speculating freely as to why she might have felt that way. Whether his conclusions are objectively “correct” or not, I can’t help but admire his ambition and approach.

Takako Shimura is not as great an artist as Ozu, and I am not as good a writer as Mars-Jones. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to do something similar in this book, speculating at length about what to my mind Shimura might be saying in her own story of two twenty-first-century Japanese schoolgirls.