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Maki and Midori dated for three years in high school, but Midori broke up with Maki in It’s the heartbeat when you announce on graduation day that dating a girl isn’t something you do after high school. Ten years later, they meet by chance when Midori walks into the office of the optometrist where Maki works. When Maki is forced to face the fact that she never forgot her first love, the truth about Midori’s current life with her fiancé begins to emerge. How does the expectation of heteronormativeness harm those who believe in it? Is it too late for Midori to flee her abuser?
| Run Away with Me, Girl |
Translated by Kevin Steinbach
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Maki and Midori have been dating for three years in high school, but Midori is in Maki is heartbroken when she announces on graduation day that dating girls is no longer post-high school. Ten years later, they meet by chance when Midori walks into the office of the optometrist where Maki works. When Maki is forced to face the fact that she never forgot her first love, the truth about Midori’s current life with her fiancé begins to emerge. How does the expectation of heteronormativeness harm those who believe in it? Is it too late for Midori to flee her abuser?
| Run Away with Me, Girl |
Translated by Kevin Steinbach
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| Review: |
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300 This is a tired old routine pe trotted through tons of yuri manga: in your all girl Dating other girls at sub-school is just training for you to enter the world of men after graduation. While yuri comics often try to refute this, Batan 299 very difficult in the other direction. Maki and Midori dated their entire three years of high school, a relationship that Maki thinks will last into their adult lives. That’s why on graduation day she’s so shocked and hurt, Midori tells her she’s looking forward to seeing which of them gets a boyfriend first, and declares that dating another girl is just something childish she did. She tore off the elastic from the braid and let her hair down, leaving the headband on the ground next to her ex-girlfriend, reinforcing Maki’s painful promise to find a man when she grew up. The two haven’t seen each other for ten years, and then one day, Midori shows up at the office of the optometrist where Maki works. Suddenly, everything comes flooding back—and not just for Maki, who has never managed to get Midori out of her mind.
At first, Midori seems to be living the life she claimed she wanted ten years ago: She has a male fiancé with whom she lives in a Very nice apartment and is expecting her first child. But when the story shifts from Maki’s first-person perspective to Midori’s, it becomes clear that things aren’t quite as rosy as Midori would like everyone to believe. It’s worth mentioning that the book comes with content warnings against domestic abuse, mostly emotional but with some physical issues as well. Midori’s fiancé, Tazane, is suspicious almost from his first appearance. His performance for Maki, who stayed for dinner, was almost perfect. But the more time we spend on Midori’s angle, the worse he starts to look – they got engaged only because Midori got pregnant, and the reason behind this is that he doesn’t want to wear a condom, and she’s scared he’s going to kill him if she brings up the issue. would leave her. He cheers her on, makes disgusting comments about how he hopes pregnancy doesn’t ruin her body, and abuses her in every way. We get one chapter from his point of view, but it doesn’t make him any more sympathetic. Yes, he’s a product of how he was treated as a kid, but that’s no excuse to grow up to be a deeply misogynistic jerk.
Reading this book was a bit like watching a wound open. At first, everything looks fine, but as the Band-Aid peels off, we get glimpses of raw wounds that haven’t healed over yet. Everyone is dealing with a different type of injury: Maki never recovered from Midori and is now starting to worry that her ex-girlfriend isn’t doing as well as she thought it would be, Tazane is venting his anger on women the guy closest to him, Midori begins to realize that the situation she’s in is completely untenable. Of all these cases, Midori’s situation is the most dangerous – she lives with her abuser, and it gets worse as the book goes on, and she has very plausible signs that Tazane Possibly ready to cheat on her with her partner-worker, who is actively pursuing him despite their engagement. While that sounds like the perfect excuse to get rid of him or have him dump her, his behavior throughout the rest of the book suggests that he’s unlikely to do so, or at least not cause her substantial harm in the process. This It’s every article in every newspaper you’ve ever read, about a guy who got stuck in an abusive relationship and couldn’t get out of it. She does offer her help in the form of Maki, but she has to be the one who asks, or the rescue never works.
In some respects, this book is about how Midori undermined Own. Whether she’s lesbian or bi isn’t even a question, because part of her problem is that it never occurs to her to question it or society’s expectations of women. The question for Maki is whether she can bring herself to be romantically involved with Midori again, but saving someone from the situation her ex-girlfriend found herself in might dispel any doubts she might have. I don’t think it’s going to be a feel-good story, or even one with a happy ending, although if it had one, we’d feel like we really put an effort into it. This volume is probably primarily set up for the next step in the series, and I suspect testing it in two volumes will be a good indication of whether it’s for you, provided the content warnings don’t make it an automatic no-no. But if that’s not a deal breaker for you, it’s worth checking out, just because it gives us hope that someday all wounds will heal.
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