Yuri After Sweet Blue Flowers

It’s now been eighteen years since Takako Shimura first began serialization of Aoi hana in Manga Erotics F in 2004, ten years since its first volume was released in English as Sweet Blue Flowers in 2012, and nine years since Shimura completed its serialization in 2013. In this chapter I look at how the yuri genre has evolved since that time and pronounce my final judgment on Sweet Blue Flowers.

The yuri genre is still relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, with yuri manga series making up a tiny percentage of the overall manga market. In comparison, the BL genre featuring relationships between men has several times more titles.¹ However, the years since Aoi hana ended serialization have seen a significant expansion of the yuri genre. More than nine out of ten yuri series began publication after the year Aoi hana began serialization, and more than half of them began publication after Aoi hana concluded.²

More and more of these yuri manga are being officially released in English translation. Anime-focused streaming services like Crunchyroll have expanded the audience for anime in the US and other countries outside Japan. That has driven up Western readership for manga, the source material for most anime, as the Western market for manga has rebounded from a sales crash in the late 2000s. Yuri manga, in particular, have also benefited from the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ individuals in popular culture and the increased popularity of e-books, which makes publishing manga with niche appeal a more attractive business proposition than traditional print publication.

At the time of writing, almost the entire spectrum of manga publishers is releasing yuri works in English. Such publishers include mainstream Japanese-owned companies like VIZ Media (publisher of Sweet Blue Flowers), independent US publishers like Seven Seas Entertainment for whom LGBTQ-themed works form a significant part of their output, and niche yuri-only imprints like Lilyka (part of Digital Manga) that specialize in self-published works (dōjinshi) that in the past would never have had an official English release.

Rather than attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the current yuri scene, I instead briefly discuss some representative works that illustrate various themes in the evolution of yuri.

First up is Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, which carries on the tradition of classic yuri tropes.³ Like many other works in this vein, it is set in a “yuritopia,” an all-girls school in a world where men are absent and every girl finds another girl (or, in one case, more than one) to pair up with.

Yuri is My Job! (the first yuri manga from mainstream publisher Kodansha USA) parodies yuri tropes while still following time-honored conventions.⁴ Its characters spend their time after school working in a yuri-themed café featuring the fictional Liebes Girls Academy, in which, as in Maria Watches Over Us, older girls pick younger girls to be their “schwestern” (the equivalent of Maria’s sœurs). In keeping with the works that it’s parodying, Yuri is My Job! teases the possibility of romantic relationships developing between the girls while they’re “off the clock,” without (as of the time of writing) committing to that being the case.

Next are two series that have broken out of the pack, achieved widespread popularity, and had well-regarded anime adaptations.

Bloom Into You, which began publication in Japan (as Yagate kimi ni naru) two years after Aoi hana ended its run, is in many ways a successor work to Sweet Blue Flowers.⁵ It shares with the earlier work common yuri tropes, including a pairing between a tall beauty with long black hair and a shorter girl with shorter and lighter-colored hair, who feels unable at first to experience love. Bloom Into You also features elements more unique to Sweet Blue Flowers, including a play used to shed light on the characters and their emotions and a lesbian teacher and her partner who mentor the main characters.

However, Bloom Into You perpetuates the hierarchical senpai-kōhai dynamic that (to my mind) Sweet Blue Flowers rejects as the basis for a relationship between women. It also relegates the one unequivocally lesbian girl (the closest equivalent to Fumi) to the role of a side character whose love for her classmate, one of the two main characters, goes unrequited. (Fortunately, that side character is given her due as the lead character in a spinoff series of light novels.)⁶

The two main characters in the Kase-san series (five volumes, beginning with Kase-san and Morning Glories⁷) differ in appearance and temperament, like Fumi and Akira, but also like Fumi and Akira, they meet each other as classmates and equals. The follow-on series Kase-san and Yamada goes beyond Sweet Blue Flowers to explore the main characters’ relationship beyond high school in more depth.⁸

All of the works discussed above are primarily focused on girls in high school, as the vast majority of yuri works have been. However, in recent years there have been a growing number of works featuring adult couples as the central characters. Many of these are now seeing official releases in English. One work worth noting is The Conditions of Paradise, a story collection originally published in 2006 by long-time yuri manga artist Akiko Morishima.⁹ It and its follow-up volumes contain stories from Comic Yuri Hime, the most prominent Japanese magazine devoted to the yuri genre.

Though they may focus on adults and not on teenagers, many adult yuri manga follow Bloom Into You, Kase-san, and other schoolgirl yuri manga in perpetuating the idea of yuri as “lesbian content without lesbian identity.”¹⁰ They feature women who have emotional and physical relationships with other women but do not apply the term “lesbian” to themselves. (In Sweet Blue Flowers Fumi never goes beyond describing herself circumspectly as “that type of girl,” but the word “lesbian” is used in conversation, albeit only by side characters (SBF, 1:307, 1:309, 3:357, 3:359).)

That is not true of the next two works I discuss, both of which escape the boundaries of the yuri genre entirely. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness puts the issue of identity front and center in its title. However, the “lesbian experience” as such forms just a part of the work, most of which focuses on the author’s struggles with her mental and physical health.¹¹ In their honest and often emotionally raw portrayal of the author’s life, the manga and its sequels resemble the autobiographical and semi-autobiographical comics created by women cartoonists in the West (some lesbian, some not), including works by Alison Bechdel, Julie Doucet, and Phoebe Gloeckner.

In contrast, issues of gender and sexual orientation are front and center in Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare, whose characters are variously gay, lesbian, transgender, nonbinary (or “X-gender,” to use the roughly equivalent Japanese term), asexual, aromantic, or unsure of their identity. Shimanami Tasogare also foregrounds the importance of finding and creating an LGBTQ community, something rare to nonexistent in yuri works.¹²

This lack is especially felt in many adult yuri works. They either recreate the unrealistic school-based “yuritopia” in work settings populated almost solely by lesbians, as in the Saturday series of dōjinshi,¹³ or find improbable ways to bring characters together in a relationship, as in I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up.¹⁴

Having found an audience in the West and publishers to serve that audience, what’s next for the yuri genre? I have no power of prophecy, so my best guess is a continuation of past and present trends relating to (sub)genre, audience, format, and creators.

I do not doubt that fluffy tales of schoolgirls in love will continue to be produced. But they will coexist with a growing number of adult yuri works (including “office yuri” featuring workplace romances), as well as yuri-flavored takes on isekai stories of fantasy worlds, science fiction stories, mysteries, thrillers, horror tales, and so on. They will likely be joined over time by more works based squarely in the LGBTQ experience, works which may not be yuri as such but will appeal to many readers in the all-genders audience driving yuri’s growing popularity.

Here Sweet Blue Flowers proved prophetic, not so much in its subject matter but in its publication in a magazine (Manga Erotics F) that explicitly targeted such an all-genders adult audience. It was an early indication that (as Nicki Bauman claims), “yuri is for everyone,” and that the present audience for yuri, both in Japan and elsewhere, contains people of all age groups, gender identities, and sexual orientations.¹⁵

In this regard, the example of Comic Yuri Hime is instructive. The magazine’s publisher attempted to split its audience in two by spinning off a separate magazine Comic Yuri Hime S targeted at men, only to end the experiment and fold it back into the main magazine three years later. However, this was not simply a reversion to the previous state. Instead, the language used to address readers of the “new” Comic Yuri Hime signified a more inclusionary approach by the editors, even when the nature of the content itself did not change.¹⁶

In terms of format, I doubt we will see many actual yuri anime, as opposed to anime in which yuri relationships are present only as subtext. Even with the low pay of animators, anime production is too expensive for works for which the potential audience is still relatively small. Instead, the action will be in formats for which both the costs of creation and the costs of distribution are relatively low: besides digital versions of manga, we are seeing yuri—and will see more—in the form of light novels, “super light” novels (designed to be easily read on smartphones), webcomics, and visual novels.

Finally, just as manga aesthetics and themes have influenced non-Japanese comic artists around the world, there is a growing body of yuri-influenced works—including webcomics, in particular—created outside Japan and marketed using the “GL” label. This is especially true in East Asia, with popular works created in South Korea, Thailand, China, and the Philippines.¹⁷

What is the place of Sweet Blue Flowers in all this? As I wrote in the introduction, I think it, like its characters, tries to span the past, present, and future of yuri in a single work. Straddling like this can be awkward, and sometimes Sweet Blue Flowers wobbles more than a bit.

For example, I think that the Class S-like environment of Fujigaya coexists uneasily with the more modern sensibility exemplified by Fumi and some other characters. I also believe the resolution of the relationship between Fumi and Akira (and the implication that since childhood they were fated to be together) works better as a symbolic reconciliation of two modes of yuri than it does as a picture of real-life individuals.

However, to me the virtues of Sweet Blue Flowers greatly outweigh its flaws. These virtues include the sensitive portrayal of its three main characters (not forgetting Kyoko here), the deftly-handled narrative of Fumi coming out as a lesbian, and the rejection of hierarchy and emphasis on equality in relationships that I see running as a thread throughout the entire series.

In the end, I’ll agree with Erica Friedman that Sweet Blue Flowers was “an important stepping stone to where we are now” and that “it’s time to move forward into a genre that has matured.”¹⁸ My journey with Sweet Blue Flowers ends here. But Takako Shimura is taking her next step (at least as far as readers in the West are concerned) with the release in English of her adult yuri manga Even Though We’re Adults. It marks a welcome return by Shimura to the genre that she helped bring into the twenty-first century.