In my 27 years on God’s green earth, I have never encountered a more soul-crushing recreational experience than discovering a revolutionary manga, only to follow its wondrous narrative to the end of its rainbow and find no conclusion. I’m once bitten with the late, great Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, twice shy with Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, and irreparably fucked up from Ai Yazawa’s best-selling shojo manga, Nana, being suspended in an indefinite hiatus.
After years of resigning myself to a 'crab in a barrel' existence, plunging friends and strangers alike into the depths of Nana's devastating 15-year-long cliffhanger like a siren's call to a weary sailor, I've lucked upon novel escape from mutually assured destruction: putting folks onto Yen Press’ brand new “Green Yuri” manga. This manga not only stands as the closest spiritual successor to Nana, it also ventures where Ai Yazawa's masterpiece never tread: Letting its girls be in lesbians with each other.
Nana will break you (like a rose)
Nana's elevator pitch is pretty straightforward. It centers on two disparate women named Nana, who become roommates in Tokyo, develop a close friendship, and eventually drift apart as they chase their dreams. While the effervescent and naïve Nana Komatsu and the cynical punk rockstar vocalist Nana Osaki personify the black and pink houses meme, they both deeply long to be loved. While Komatsu pursues love through comfort from people—deserving or otherwise—Osaki safeguards attachments with a chosen few by confining them to her orbit. Despite inevitably winding up in hetero relationships, Osaki and Komatsu frequently reminisce about their platonic love.
Outside of the manga, Nana’s success spun off into an anime adaptation by Trigun and Death Note animation studio Madhouse and two criminally underappreciated (and hard to find by legal means) live action movie adaptations. Nana’s impact expands beyond anime and manga by having a cultural cache in the fashion world thanks to Yazawa kitting out its cast in Viviene Westwood’s lavish clothes and accessories. The Vivian Westwood Archives Instagram account constantly posts Nana anime screenshots and manga panels while chronicling the fashion icon’s legacy.
As many a Nana fan will protest, Yazawa’s magnum opus would have been shorter had the two hooked up. Lord knows them kissing, regularly sharing a bed and bathing together, fantasizing about the other doing the beast with two backs with other people, and admitting that they’d fall in love with the other “if they were a boy” doesn’t help fans' long-held exasperation with Nana. It also doesn’t help that it was nearly impossible to acquire legally until Sentai Filmworks, Hidive, and Hulu made it available in 2022 in the U.S.
That said, the problem with Nana now that it's available in America is that it's hard to recommend to people in good conscience knowing it's still going to ruin their lives forever. Both the manga and the anime end with Osaki and Komatsu not talking to each other for years. What’s more, the poignant narration from them throughout the series are letters the two wish they sent to each other as they recount their friendship. Forget boy’s comics or shonen, girl’s comics, also known as shojo, is where real heartbreaking storytelling resides. I’ve shed my fair share of tears thinking about the girls from apartment 707. Enter The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All.
Green Yuri will fix you
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All, by Sumiko Arai, might have the naming convention of sentence-long run-of-the-mill isekai anime, but contained within the covers is one of the most refreshing, feel-good queer manga on the market right now. TGSWIIWAGAA (we’re calling it Green Yuri for its Brat green cover from here on out) is a yuri manga, meaning it’s a romance between two women. Yuri, otherwise known as Girls Love, are shojo series that follow queer romances between women. While it isn’t as obscure as its Boys Love counterpart, Yaoi, titles like Bloom Into You, How Do We Relationship, and Whisper Me a Love Song have to fight for retail bookstore shelves against popular shonen battle manga like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia.
Like Nana, Green Yuri follows a stylish teenage girl named Aya Oosawa and a punk girl named Mitsuki Koga, who start crushing on each other after Oosawa stumbles into Koga’s record shop.
As its name implies, Aya initially believes she’s crushing on a cute emo clerk obscuring his visage behind a face mask—until she discovers she’s been macking on her dorky Clark Kent-looking classmate she sits beside. What follows is an unfolding romance where the two share their love for rock music just like Nana’s Osaki and Komatsu. Only, replace Nana’s affinity for punk bands like The Sex Pistols with Mitsuaya’s zoomer love for grunge and new-age rock bands like Nirvana, Weezer, My Chemical Romance, and Willow. Nana super fans have enjoyed the songs from that series’ fictional bands through the soundtracks and the movies. Taking that baton, Green Yuri’s referential songs can be enjoyed sonically through its official Spotify playlist, which updates with each chapter.
The similarities between Nana and Green Yuri are so uncanny that I often feel like Ratatouille’s Anton Ego or Leonardo Di Caprio’s Rick Dalton whenever I spot them. For one, both series include scenes where one of the girls refers to the other’s unflinching sense of loyalty and codependence to Japan’s best boy, Hachiko, a loyal shiba inu who waited for his master at the train station, even after his master’s death. The two also share an identical moment where Mitsuki and Osaki perform on stage for their muses, leading the more conventional girls to profess their undying love for their songstresses (in their heads, of course).
On a grander scale, what makes Green Yuri so special as a new-age shojo manga—a genre that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as its male-oriented counterpart, shonen—is its popularity. The series went from being an ongoing weekly Twitter series Arai would frequently update every Sunday in 2021—utilizing the platform’s four-image limit to create easy to follow chapters— to getting serialized in Pixiv Comic and published and printed by Kadokawa Shonten, to receiving an official English release by Yen Press on October 22. While much of its success is due to the raw artistic talent of Arai, it also owes its rise to prominence with its queer readership who propelled the series from being a word-of-mouth manga darling to an undeniable work of art to big money publishers.
Witnessing Green Yuri’s grassroots support from the girl’s love community who went from making scanlations of the series for folks to read it in their native language to having Green Yuri break into the mainstream with its artwork gracing the convention floors of pop culture events like New York Comic Con is an inspiring sight to behold. Especially for a manga subgenre that—like its queer readership—are regularly overlooked and constantly have to fight for their right to exist.
What’s more, the same readership who willed Green Yuri into the limelight have been paying it forward by rallying on Twitter to get the word out on other ambitious girl’s love series struggling to stave off cancelation like fellow Kadokawa writer and illustrator Inee and their series, Love Bullet. Through social media campaigns that stretched across Twitter and various yuri Reddit communities, Love Bullet’s first volume sold out worldwide across online retailers. Now the world will have a chance to read a manga about a queer girl who transforms into a gun-wielding cupid upon her untimely death who is tasked with helping her first love find happiness with someone else.
Just like Love Bullet, Green Yuri is a success story not only for queer manga, but for their passionate fandom. These series experienced continued success through the concerted effort of its readership willing it into the public consciousness by flooding social media with fantastic fan art and testimonials on them being a must-read. In the case of Love Bullet, the fandom is the only reason why the series continues to be published. Hopefully, these manga won’t have the same ignoble ending as Nana, whose two leads are still in stasis, longing for each other. If you’re still waiting for the two Nanas to kiss, then Green Yuri is here to pick up where they left off.
