As far as I can tell the illustrator (@hamukukka on Twitter) never posted the cleaned version anywhere, but you can get both the cleaned morning and dusk version if you dig around a bit in inspect elements on evesou.jp.
Don’t see it talked about much in the English fandom, but I get the impression it’s fairly popular among the jp fandom. They held a vote a few years ago where the winning song would get a music video and yadorigi came first (the mv was a limited thing released on the zingai app, I bet you can still find it online somewhere if you search.)
Kono setsugen de Kimi ga zutto waratte irareru you ni (may this snowfield keep you smiling all the time). Main character was a “young carer” and is trying separate herself from her family. There’s romance too, which is quite cute
“Don’t call it mystery” by Yumi tamura
It’s a oneshot she wrote before she started strobe edge. Sometimes they’ll put a oneshot that an author wrote previously into the back of a volume of their serialised work. I read it just then and it is quite cute, but unfortunately the most I can find of people talking about it are jp tweets from 10 years ago.
Yes it’s technically a shounen (albeit one with high female readership) but I second TRC. Don’t be fooled by the lightheartedness in the first half; if you want angst and star-crossed, this is the one.
The second one is about the movie Look Back, which just came out in Japan. Something like “It goes without saying for the original work, but I’m grateful that I could see it animated by Oshiyama-san”.
Well I think it’s really good, so that’s 1-1!
Seconded. Usually standard Japanese but still has common slang, and also always has furigana.
Children of the whales
Natsume’s book of friends
My broken Mariko
“nqrse-chan, a girl who can rap” 😂😂 Thanks for sharing, what a nice story. It’s always interesting to hear all the details, glad to hear he had fun making it
FantasticYouth maybe? Singing feels a little similar
Not sure if I’d classify these as romance stories, but they all certainly have complex relationships:
Ashita, watashi wa dareka no kanojo
Requiem of the rose king
After school nightmare
There’s only one version, which will come with furigana. However, only the text in the bubbles will have furigana, while any handwritten text outside the bubbles won’t. If you’d like to take a look, you can do a free trial read. Just press the orange お試し読み button and you can read a bit for free.
Chapter 57 is the last chapter of volume 14. Volume 15 came out in April and hasn’t been translated yet. Seems like they generally take 4-5 months for the official digital translation to be released, so you can probably expect volume 15 in English around November.
As others have said, it’s been licensed in English and releases in November. It’s not a seinen at all though, it ran in shoujo magazine hana to yume so the jp version does have furigana.
Still ongoing, chapter 62 came out in April and it hasn’t updated since then. Doesn’t seem to be in the dessert issue that’s releasing tomorrow either, so it’s probably just taking a break.
May this snowfield keep you smiling all the time (Kono setsugen de kimi ga zutto waratteirareru you ni) is one I read recently and really liked! It’s primarily about the main character’s circumstances as a young carer and her struggle to free herself from that role. It’s heavy at times but the complexity of the main character’s family situation is portrayed very well, and there’s also romance (very cute, not the main focus now but there’s probably more to come later).
Like:
太陽よりも眩しい星/A Star Brighter Than The Sun: Only read the first volume so far but the title ties into both the ML’s name (光輝 light + shine) and the fact that
きみの横顔を見ていた/I See Your Face, Turned Away: This one’s a translation decision, but I like that they went with the current English title rather than the one that’s actually on the JP cover (Looking at your profile). I’ve seen some people that don’t like the change, but I think the “turned away” reflects the unrequited love theme of the story better than “profile”. Also just a more memorable title in general imo.
煙たい話/Kemutai Hanashi: Runs in a seinen magazine now but it used to run as a josei so I’m counting it. Kemutai can mean smoky/uncomfortable, hanashi can mean story/conversation/topic, and all the combinations of the meanings are relevant to the story. Makes it difficult to translate though lol.
One that I don’t necessarily dislike but do find interesting is My Love Mix-Up!, the English title of which is meant to match the artist’s other work My Love Story!! but is really different from the literal title translation (My Faded/Disappearing First Love).
I guess from an outsider’s perspective it’s a bit weird but I feel like this is a pretty good option for someone who wants to meet her fans while also protecting her privacy. Iirc chougakusei did something similar, so it’s not totally novel either.
Tears of Themis maybe? Since you’ve enjoyed Twisted Wonderland and Tale of Food, you could also try out some other joseimuke games. They’re mobile games targeted to women that aren’t explicitly romantic but have gacha, gameplay, and visual novel components. Downside is that most of them aren’t translated from Japanese except for the two above and enstars, but a lot of others have fan translations if you’re willing to subsist off those.
Interestingly enough, in this statement regarding the MV they actually say that they had concerns from the start that the apes could come off as discriminatory, but their intention was to depict “lives/existences from different time periods having a party” rather than likening the apes to humans. Evidently no one involved actually did anything about those concerns though.
Imo shoujo tend to have a heavy emphasis on the emotions/feelings of the characters, even if it’s not romance-focused (eg. Children of the whales, rotrk). Also compared to shounen the lack of glorified battle scenes. If there’s violence in a shoujo it’s pretty much always shown as a bad thing, at most a necessary evil.
What makes a shoujo feel like a shoujo?
shoujo