Introduction

I begin my consideration of Sweet Blue Flowers by looking at its author, her manga in general, and what I consider to be the main themes of Sweet Blue Flowers in particular.

Very little has been published about Takako Shimura in English. Her English Wikipedia entry has a scant seven sentences apart from the listing of her works. The Japanese Wikipedia entry is a bit longer but does not appear to have much more information about Shimura herself.

According to Wikipedia, Shimura was born on October 23, 1973, in Kanagawa prefecture. I could find no indication of where exactly in the prefecture Shimura was born. However, Kanagawa prefecture includes both the port of Yokohama and the popular tourist destination Kamakura, in which Sweet Blue Flowers is set.

Shimura’s first published work under that name was in February 1997, when she was twenty-three years old. Since then, she has published about two dozen works, depending on how you count them; some of these were one-shots, while others were serialized comics later published in book form.

Relatively few of Shimura’s works are available in licensed English translations. Of her works listed on Wikipedia, only four have had official releases in English at the time of writing: Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi hana), Happy-Go-Lucky Days¹ (Dōnika naru hibi), Wandering Son² (Hōrō musuko), and her more recent effort, Even Though We’re Adults (Otona ni natte mo).³

Of the three earlier works previously published, only Sweet Blue Flowers is still readily available in complete form. Even that occurred after multiple false starts: volume 1 of Aoi hana was translated into English and published as Sweet Blue Flowers by JManga and then by Digital Manga,⁴ but neither publisher released any further volumes. The manga was also adapted into an anime series of eleven episodes, subsequently released in a subtitled English version.⁵ (Plans for a second season were abandoned, apparently due to poor sales of the anime’s DVDs in Japan.)

Happy-Go-Lucky Days was published complete in two volumes (digital only), but is no longer available for sale in the US. However, an anime film featuring selected stories from the manga was released in 2020, including a version with English subtitles.⁶

Publication of Wandering Son, Shimura’s most well-known work, was halted after the release of eight hardcover volumes (of a total of fifteen). It is now out of print and is not available in digital format. It, too, received an incomplete anime adaptation, subsequently released with English subtitles for online streaming in the US and other countries.⁷

At least two long interviews of Shimura have been published but both remain untranslated into English. The afterwords in the various volumes of Sweet Blue Flowers and Wandering Son contain Shimura’s comments on various aspects of her life. However, these are mostly trivial and don’t shed much light on how she approaches her work in terms of favorite themes, opinions on social and cultural issues, and so on.⁸

To know more about Shimura as an artist, we need to therefore look at the works themselves, starting with where they were published.

Many of Shimura’s manga, including Wandering Son, were serialized in Comic Beam magazine. Both Happy-Go-Lucky Days and (as previously noted) Sweet Blue Flowers were serialized in Manga Erotics F magazine. Both of these magazines are (or were, in the case of Manga Erotics F) part of what’s been referred to as a “fifth column” of Japanese manga magazines: existing outside of the four main demographic-based categories of magazines (for boys, girls, men, and women) and featuring a wide variety of stories in various genres.⁹

Thus the first thing we can discern about Shimura is that although her manga, like Sweet Blue Flowers, may feature children from elementary to high school age, for the most part they were written for an all-genders adult audience, with all that implies in terms of both content (including sexual content) and the knowledge that she assumes on the part of her readers.

As far as I can tell, most if not all of Shimura’s manga are set in contemporary Japan: no historical fiction, and no fantasies set in other worlds—although supernatural elements are sometimes present, as in some of the stories in Happy-Go-Lucky Days. Shimura is also known for her focus on issues of sex and gender, and in particular for her stories about LGBTQ characters, including the transgender youth of Wandering Son and the lesbians of Sweet Blue Flowers. These are also set in present-day Japan and offer commentary (albeit often indirect) on contemporary Japanese society.

Keeping the above in mind, here are my tentative thoughts as to what Sweet Blue Flowers is about:

First, Sweet Blue Flowers pays homage to past works in Japanese dealing with romance between girls or women, including in particular the early twentieth-century “Class S” genre set in all-girls schools. Shimura assumes that readers are familiar with the tropes of this genre and makes mention of and alludes to the most well-known Class S author, Nobuko Yoshiya, and her most famous work, the Hana monogatari (Flower Tales) series of short stories (SBF, 1:6, 1:190).¹⁰

I believe that Sweet Blue Flowers is at the same time a consciously-intended critique of the Class S genre and (by implication) subsequent works in the genre that came to be known as “yuri.” This critique is directed not only at particular yuri tropes, such as the “girl prince,” but also at the assumptions embedded in many if not most yuri works, including in particular the idea of relationships between women structured according to a hierarchy of age and status.

In contrast, I see Sweet Blue Flowers as highlighting relationships between women who are equal to each other and meet each other as individuals, relationships that are (by implication) opposed to and (to the extent possible) exist outside of the hierarchically-structured patriarchal society of Japan. Although the manga does not fully engage with what such an opposition and existence would entail in practice, it is far more grounded in reality than yuri works that posit a “yuritopia” in which men do not exist.

The themes of Sweet Blue Flowers are embodied in its two main characters, Fumi Manjome and Akira Okudaira, and in their friend, Kyoko Ikumi, whose presence in the story is so large as to almost make her a third main character. The three girls together can be thought of as representing three different “eras” of yuri: Kyoko the Class S past of ephemeral relationships between schoolgirls ultimately destined for arranged marriages, Akira the “pure yuri” present of sexual innocence and shy and tentative romance, and Fumi the LGBTQ future of women who come to self-consciously identify as lesbians.

I believe that Takako Shimura would have expected her adult audience to bring to their reading of Sweet Blue Flowers at least a general familiarity with the history of the Class S and yuri genres and with key works in those genres. The following chapters discuss various aspects of that history that I think are useful for a deeper understanding of Sweet Blue Flowers and its place in the yuri genre.