CLAMP*NEWS

I finished watching the adaptation of Nikumaru's Bad Girl over the week-end and I loved every moment of it, having first encountered it during late autumn whilst it was still airing thanks to a pop-up shop promoting it in Onoden. Up the staircase from the first floor towards the Cospla store, the maid café I have never visited, and a handful of other concessions, there were numerous pictures of the characters and highlights from each episode; I bought a little acrylic stand of Ruru-senpai and went to Comic ZIN to buy the first volume of the manga. I find four koma manga a little difficult to read, but adaptations of such material always seem to win me over, she said, thinking specifically of Asobi Asobase. I was surprised to discover Bad Girl's adaptation was handled by Yonemura Shoji, possibly most famous for writing a lot of your least favourite Heisei Kamen Rider episodes but also Sh15uya, which was good. I was also surprised at how easily the show gets romantic. Despite main character Yuutani Yuu's obliviousness regarding the feelings of others around her, her admiration and adoration of her senpai, Mizutori Atori, is never not displayed as anything other than romantic. I wasn't expecting that. I thought this show was going to make me work, but instead it's incredibly open about the way it depicts its relationships. I'm kind of surprised at how often we're seeing this kind of thing, if I'm honest.

A month ago, I was caught unawares by the opening of Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana on youtube and it really had an impact on me. I tried to resist it because I thought it was trying to lead me astray, so I bullied Rei into watching it for me, and then I felt left out, so I started watching it too, and, like Bad Girl it really doesn't shy away from framing its relationships as more than friendships without forcing the issue, and again, I'm surprised. Previously, there's always been the accusation that introducing elements from yuri was solely to the benefit of a male audience. Relationships between women were oft referred to as "softer" or "gentler" during the '00s when we began to see a certain type of service in anime aimed at young males. I really am not a fan of "the yuri subplot," I think its dismissive of what the genre has to offer to reduce it to fanservice in shonen manga, but at the same time a lot of those depictions hit me in the heart when I didn't have anything else so I don't want to criticise them even if I believe we can do better now; what we're seeing in 2026, though... is this the year that yuri breaks fully into the mainstream? Despite the reality of being gay in Japan, it feels like more and more we're seeing shows that frame its relationships between women in a romantic fashion. In many ways, like the service of the moè boom, I benefit from these casual depictions, but I don't always feel good about that. Having said that, both Bad Girl and Kamiina Botan are pretty amazing, you guys.

Having reached the point where I am current with fansubbed releases of Wingman and having also watched all of the live action show—and surprisingly really enjoyed it!—I thought I'd return to another Katsura Masakazu adaptation, and whilst I didn't intend to, regardless, I found that I watched all six episodes of Video Girl Ai over the week-end.

There's a thread between Ai and Wingman. If anything, it could be said that the former is essentially the plot of the latter if you strip away all of the homages and references to tokusatsu; a boy with feelings for a girl is interrupted by the surprise introduction of a second girl intent on meddling in his love life. The situation is a little more complex in Video Girl Ai though, and there's a sense of realism that is leant into by Production IG's approach to the setting and surroundings of these moments between Ai, the heartbroken Moteuchi Yota, Hayakawa Moemi, the object of his affections, and Niimai Takashi, Yota's best friend and the boy whom Moemi is in love with—there's no threesoming their way out of this one as Wingman often seems to imply with its story. Video Girl Ai has a sort of sadness that feels real even in its more dream-like moments, and despite how forward and often crass Ai is, there is a genuine emotional root at the heart of the depictions of Yota, Moemi, and Takashi that reads far more like shoujo manga. I think this is testament to Katsura's versatility in telling stories.



Between Monday and now, I also read the first volume of the long out-of-print Tokyopop release of the FLCL novels by Enokido Yoji and was really hit by the things it makes explicit. The book covers the first two episodes, if I remember rightly, and it goes all in on the relationship between Naota and Mamimi in a way that is both tender and hurtful and real. I don't feel I need the subtext to be made explicit as to this, but at the same time, I'm also grateful for it. I think Enokido's prose handles the subject with sensitivity and delicacy, but also with honesty, which makes all the difference. "At times like this, young men glimpse, if dimly, how big the love they seal inside themselves can be," reads the narrative at one point, and I felt that, I could see myself in both these roles in the way Naota and Mamimi are trying to navigate adolescence and it really hammered home how FLCL is such a beautiful testament to the pain and the joy of being young. In the afterword, producer Sato Hiroki says that they were responding to the demands of otaku who wanted something "the old men who follow subcultures, all the Shibuya teen-agers, and the girls who read cute comics won't get." Instead, what FLCL is is a near universal experience. In its obtuseness, in its obliqueness, it is so emotionally honest that the surface details just wash over you and what you are left with is the impression of being young, of wanting to get out, wherever you, of falling in love for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, this is what to-day's entry seems to be about. This morning, around the corner from Earl's Court, I saw a brightly coloured Vespa parked in the dull sunlight of early morning.

I saw my lovely friend Katie for coffee on Friday after-noon and was delighted to discover Foyles on TCR now has a designated yuri bookcase. I had to stop myself from leaning against the counter whilst buying books and shouting, "Please let me curate your yuri section." I did make Katie take a photo of me by the bookcase in question however. It's such a narrow thing and it's just filled with whatever volumes they had in stock arranged by series and with very little care, but I'm so happy it exists. I would be remiss if I mentioned that Foyles hadn't introduced a yaoi bookcase as well but because my only interest in yaoi is narratives about pretty boys dressing as girls, I feel like I can't offer you a detailed report on this side of things.

It felt progressive when Foyles introduced specific bookcases for shoujo and shonen manga, but I've been spoilt by animate and HMV abroad, and whenever I've been in central, I've always found myself quietly yearning for some kind of collective space for yuri titles so I'm really, really happy and really, really grateful for this, and that sheer joy momentarily overrides my need to argue with everyone—especially Rebecca Silverstein—over what is and isn't yuri in my need to become the old-man-heading-towards-the-jukebox meme but for niche comic book genres.

Lately, I find myself really missing jelly sandals. Even though we've had a week of rain, I keep thinking about buying a new pair of jelly sandals, the type with a little wedge heel, the quintessential British summer shoe. I've also been reading the Higurashi missing scenes light novel, Kuradishi-hen, translated by 07th translations this week, which is full of small treasures. As well as this, I've been reading A White Rose in Bloom by Nakamura Asumiko, who I think is often more popular for her yaoi series. One of the things I like about this title is how it touches on traditions from English literature, the kind of books I read as a child—although this does make feel bitter anew about the fact I'm going to miss that Mallory Towers production!

Now that work is coming to a close, I'm pretty fired up about moving on and trying to get back into the swing of things. Like British summertime, however, that may change at any moment.

As hinted at by Tanaka Kohei, the composer of the series, there was a new announcement regarding Sakura Wars recently and it's a new stage play based on 2019's Playstation 4 game, Shin Sakura Wars, a game that Sega refused to port to Switch because they hate me. I'm really excited about it! Not only is former Team 8 member Oda Erina and 22/7's Kawase Uta in the cast, but it also features Chitose Machi, who previously played Glotta in Kamen Rider Gavv and continues to prove that her target audience is middle-aged women. I don't have as much attachment to the new game due to having only bought a copy immediately as my PS4 decided to die, but I do have a love of Sakura Wars that goes back years. Hiroi Oji, the creator of the original story, is again involved in the production, alongside Tanaka, and that gives me a lot of hope, and if you're curious about what it takes to put a Sega Saturn game on the stage, then again I want to recommend the fifth Sakura Wars musical, Kaijin Bessou, subbed by taisho_fansubs, and OSK Revue's The Sea God's Villa, subbed by nightless_castle as good places to start! Both were written by Hiroi, both explore the myth of Urashima Taro, and both are wonderful productions, enough to make you fall in love, I dare say!

I thought I should make an effort, having already written this month's Project R.O.S.E. entry, to start reading the plays of Taisho era writer, Izumi Kyouka, whose work of the same name originally inspired Hiroi's Kajin Bessou adaptations. I will keep you posted, friends, as I currently have more things to read than I have hours in the day to read them.

As I've been thinking about retreating into stories from a certain period of time or a formative period of life, I read about a new release via LINE of Higurashi that allows you to create your own character within the story. This fascinates me and horrifies me and makes me think of those time-travel narratives where there is a tourist industry that allows you to drop into the past. Higurashi is such a complex story and the balance of that story rests on such delicate moments that could so easily be disrupted that it feels like dropping in a new character—yourself, as you are now, or a character of your invention—could cause untold havoc to the narrative which... as a premise is a very Higurashi flavoured one. I think it would be interesting to make people feel a new kind of misery, people who, like me, have come to care for these characters so much that they want to spend all their time in game interacting with them at the expensive of the narrative whilst, all the while, the clock is ticking and said reader is forced to engage with the visceral horror in an entirely new and entirely novel fashion. I also think it's interesting to intrude on the story, I think that the large picture of Higurashi is absolutely built to accommodate that kind of descent into a small village near Gifu Prefecture in 1983 from places unknown. In an interview recently, the Butcher, Urobuchi Gen, mentioned that he felt "audiences nowadays aren’t looking for ‘poison.’ They’re probably craving an ‘antidote’ within fiction", but I think there is some comfort in the poison of Higurashi—certainly I've mentioned more than once that I feel there is a sort of nostalgia for works of horror.

I don't want to say I've given into nostalgia completely, but I recognise there are very specific "cut off points" in media for me—like watching older episodes from the Orange Islands arc of Pokémon and getting misty eyed whilst doing my level best to ignore everything about the franchise as it is now. Part of this is maybe because I mostly use youtube kids as my main viewing platform and that is the place where companies shovel any show older than 20 years in the hopes of generating ad revenue from people watching on the normal app or without ad blockers or views from children, so, in a way, the modern world has built this little bubble for me. Yester-day, based on what I was watching, I might as well have been tuned into Toonami in the early '00s.

I'm ten episodes or so into revisiting Gundam Wing—I'm allowed to! It's an anniversary year-ish!—and I'm obsessing over Relena's school friends from the early part of the show. Needless to say, the school setting part of Gundam Wing really captured my imagination when I first saw this show, and, apparently continues to do so.

There's a new adaptation of Mallory Towers happening this summer and it's exactly during the dates I will be away!