By Your Side: The First Hundred Years of Yuri Anime and Manga by Erica Friedman

 

Release date: June 1, 2022

Subgenre: Manga/anime, Non-Fiction

 

 About By Your Side: The First Hundred Years of Yuri Anime and Manga:

The Untold Story of Lesbian Love in Japanese Anime and Comics 

 

Two decades in the making, By Your Side is a collection of essays, scholarly and approachable, by the Western Hemisphere’s authority on the subject. This landmark work should be in the library of any fan of anime, manga, lesbian relationships in media–or any combination of the three!

"By Your Side is the complete Yuri resource I only ever dreamed could exist. Decades in the making, this glorious collection surveys, analyzes, and contextualizes Yuri with unparalleled detail and enthusiasm. Friedman graces readers with illuminating insights as they follow her through a century of the genre’s evolution and revolution. By sharing her extraordinary knowledge, she provides inquirers, scholars, and aficionados alike with a deeper appreciation and understanding of lesbian anime and manga while galvanizing them towards the next era of Yuri."

-Nicki Bauman, Yurimother

"The first in-depth study of Yuri in English."

-James Welker, Professor of Cross-Cultural and Japanese Studies, Kanagawa University

Excerpt:

 

“Soba ni iru.” By your side. “Zutto issho ni.” We’ll be together forever.

For decades these words were, for fans of same-sex relationships in manga and anime, the stand-ins for what we really wanted to hear. A character would say, “I’ll be by your side” or “We’ll be together forever” and we would understand implicitly that they meant “I love you.” Or, we hoped so, at any rate. We were willing to settle for that, but we wanted more.

“I love you” is what we wanted to hear and needed to hear and, until very recently, could never hear spoken by one female character to another in a positive, receptive environment. Oh, sure, mentally unbalanced or predatory lesbian characters were allowed to confess to a girl, but only because we knew they’d be rejected. Or maybe a best friend, who spent a series watching the protagonist with eyes full of longing, might get to have her moment. “I love you,” she’d say, and the protagonist, heedless of the damage she was about to do, would smile brightly and say, “I love you too!” We—both the friend and the readers—all knew she meant something else completely. Then the best friend, her fears confirmed, would think what we all understood. Our love was different. Not that kind of love at all.

It was around 1997 or so that I encountered the Japanese animated series known colloquially as Sailor Moon. My wife told me that she was watching a cartoon she thought I’d enjoy. One day I left work a little early and made it home in time to see the iconic “Pretty Guardian” Sailor Moon and her friends save the hapless denizens of Tokyo from having their energy sucked away by Jadeite, a general from the Dark Kingdom.

 

As I have repeated many times since that day, about halfway through the cartoon, I turned to my wife and remarked, “We are watching two different cartoons. You’re watching a cartoon for prepubescent little girls, and I’m watching a cartoon with incredible lesbian subtext.” And, so, my interest in Sailor Moon was born. What followed was a quest to see the famous lesbian couple, two of the older characters, in a later season. Back in the day, that quest involved buying blank VHS tapes and sending them, along with postage, to a near-anonymous online acquaintance with the hope of receiving a VHS tape with an nth-generation copy of an anime. The VHS tapes arrived, miraculously, and I was introduced to the third season of the anime, “Sailor Moon S.” Sailors Uranus and Neptune were indeed a lovely lesbian couple and remain, to my mind, the Queens of Yuri.

Our next gateway anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena, hit fan communities at the end of the 20th century. By this time, I was extremely active on Usenet and had gathered around me a number of fans of lesbian-themed Japanese animation and comics. My interest in this niche-of-a-niche bore fruit as the centuries flipped, when I was hired to do some writing for the anime-focused magazine Animerica. By 2002, I had begun a blog, with an eye to doing an event around the content and characters with which I found myself obsessed. These works with lesbian content—and occasionally even lesbian characters—were a genre that was being referred to in some quarters as “Yuri,” in honor of gay magazine editor Itou Bungaku’s label for lesbians: Yurizoku, the “Lily Tribe.”

 

August 2022 will be the 20th anniversary of my blog, Okazu, and it seemed like long past time that I collected all the many thoughts I’ve had over the years about this genre; about the artists and characters, the plots, and the tropes that fill my days with entertainment (and admittedly, sometimes frustration). Here we are, more than two decades after my first encounter with Sailor Moon, and I’m still writing about it and still thinking about it, and still thinking about Yuri.

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About Erica Friedman:

Erica Friedman is the founder of Yuricon community, and was the first publisher of Yuri manga in English, with ALC Publishing. She holds a Masters Degree in Library Science and a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and is a full-time researcher for a Fortune 100 company.

She has lectured at dozens of conventions, presented at film festivals, and participated in academic lecture series in the United States in Japan. A Manga editor, she most recently worked on Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles.

Erica has written about Yuri for a host of prestigious Japanese and American outlets. She has written news and event reports, interviews Yuri creators and reviews Yuri anime, manga and related media on her blog Okazu since 2002. 

 

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