Akiko HigashimuraRecensioni

Actual Rating: 4.5
Aww, this was such a cute and funny start of a manga series! I love all the women in the Amar and seeing all their geeky passions. I've found it's difficult for me to find a nonfantasy manga that I enjoy but I'm sold on this one! The culture saturated throughout is completely fascinating and I'm looking forwards to reading more.

I'm not sure if it's because the characters are so amazingly written or because I can relate so much to them, but I love them so much. I wish I could live at Amamizukan with these awesome ladies! This story is full of humor and relatable content, with a dash of drama for flavor. When I read this manga, I honestly can't stop smiling, it's easily my favorite manga. No matter how bad I'm feeling or how upset I am, when I read Princess Jellyfish it makes me so happy and I forget about everything that's bothering me.

Honestly, I feel like there's something magical about this series. I've always been a tomboy and never, NEVER, wanted to be a princess as a child, but seeing Tsukimi and the others slowly blooming... it kinda makes me re-think that. I kinda wanna be a princess now lol damn it Kuranosuke. No matter what genres you're into, even if you don't like/don't read manga, I highly HIGHLY encourage you to at least try this series, I don't think you'll regret it.

The women at Amamizukan are all otakus in their own right;
Tsukimi, the main character, is obsessed with Jellyfish.
Chieko, the manager of Amamizukan, is obsessed with traditional clothing and Japanese dolls.
Mayaya is obsessed with records of the Three Kingdoms.
Banba is obsessed with all kinds of trains.
And Jiji-sama is obsessed with mature/old men.
There's also Mejiro, but not much is known about her due to her extreme social anxiety.

All of these women are loners and stick to themselves, and each other, constantly going on about their obsessions. They don't work, instead recieving monthly payments from their parents. This is largely due to their anxiety and inability to even be near regular folk or, even worse, stylish folk. They live their lives in relative ease, struggling between blowing their money on their obsessions and saving it for food.

Things start to shift when Tsukimi meats an outgoing stylist known as Kuranosuke! The wheels of fate are turning, and they soon find their lives flipped upside down! The real question is - will these lovely ladies buckle under the pressure? Or will they fight their own demons and come out on top?

If you watchd the 11 episode anime for Princess Jellyfish and started the manga just to get more out of this story and it's characters, volume 2 definitely won't disappoint BUT about half way through, it'll take a different direction from the anime. The anime was definitely standalone, and diverges from the manga's story to do that, so I highly recommend NOT skipping over the familiar content you watched in the anime, because the different direction it takes does require you to read what you already watched in order to get the most out this volume. Coming directly off the anime, it's definitely refreshing in it's own way, and the different path it takes works better for a 9 omnibous volume series - creating a lot of drama and hope for these characters in equal measure.

If you watched the 11 episode anime and kept yearning for more, only to discover that you had to pick up the manga to get more of the story, then you won't regret it. Starting the manga is amazing. Though for those who have watched the anime, volume 1 will cover a lot of familiar ground. It's skippable if you've watched the anime, but I still recommend reading it. Alternatively, if you don't have access to the anime via streaming or don't own it on DVD, this is definitely a great way to relive the start of the show.

While I am more than a decade removed from being a teenager, I have been interested in mental health in recent years, and this book was an accessible way into the subject.
It's divided up into a handful of categories of the types of "unhelpful thoughts" that easily get you stuck in a negative and debilitating cycle. Then it offers some mental exercises to help you challenge those thought patterns and develop a healthier perspective. It got a little repetitive by the end, since the formula for dealing with each type of negative thought is approximately the same, but the repetition probably helps cement the technique in your mind.
I think especially for a teenager or for anyone who isn't yet in the habit of analyzing their own thoughts, this would be a great introduction to the concept of mental health. It's important for everyone to realize that just because your thoughts and feelings tell you something, it doesn't mean it is so. Especially if those thoughts and feelings cause you to freeze up or give up.
If a book like this helps anyone to view mental health as a valid thing to spend time on, then it's doing its job.

Thanks to NetGalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for this digital review copy!

The girls where cringy and took sometime getting use to, but I warmed up to them. I liked the different otaku types as well. Loved the male character as he tries his best to get them to stop being complete shut ins.

I love the premise of this and this is a super wacky volume with the same type of comedy that I loved in Princess Jellyfish, but I read a review of the whole series & it looks like the series ends in a way that I know I would definitely not like so... Probably not gonna read the rest of this.

There's a lot to like about Princess Jellyfish. Fictional portrayals (that aren't insulting) of groups of female nerds are rare, and groups that aren't so much united by a single nerdy interest as by the fact that they all have a slightly obsessive enthusiasm for something are rarer still. The portrayal of this type of community in volume 1 of Princess Jellyfish felt authentic to me, showing both the positives (having people who support and understand you when the rest of society doesn't; being able to love what you love unapologetically and not worry about whether you're putting people off) and the negatives (insularity; while sometimes "there's nothing wrong with the way you are and those mundanes just don't understand" is true, sometimes you're just enabling each other's flaws/bad habits/refusal to learn social skills). The characters are at this point still a bit thin, but they're really likeable and I'm interested in seeing where they go (and how they do at fighting gentrification, which is something I can always get behind).

But.... I really was not prepared for how homophobic/transphobic this manga was going to be. They throw "okama" (a slur used for feminine gay men and trans women) around a lot, and the translator, in their notes, implies that this is because it wasn't offensive at the time, but my experience, as a queer person who lived in Japan at around the time these chapters were being published, was that it very much was. (I am not myself Japanese or AMAB, and of course opinions on terminology are varied within pretty much any queer community, so I'm not trying to say no one ever IDs this way or uses it in a positive sense within the community, but even if they do, its use by cis straight people--which is who's using it in this manga--was definitely understood as offensive/insulting IME.) The crossdressing male character goes on to insist that "[he's] not an okama, [he's] normal," which, I don't think I have to explain why that one's hurtful. One character makes a comment about "men who identify as gay" wanting to live in their women-only shared house, which, I totally understand how frustrating it is when you create a women-only space and men go "I'm a man but your space should include me anyway because of reasons," but it came out sounding pretty snide about their being gay as much as about their being men--though that one may be on the English translator. Something that definitely is on the translator is that they provide an endnote stating that "homo," as an English loan word in Japanese, is a pretty neutral term while the same term in English is more offensive, but... they still render the word as "homo" in the English dialogue, rather than substituting something that will actually read as pretty neutral to the Anglophone audience, such as, I don't know, gay. (Then again, this translator definitely leaves things untranslated more than I would--it's not quite "keikaku means plan," but at one point one character says of another, "She has hieshou, so her hands and feet get cold at night" and we are informed that "hieshou" means "susceptibility to cold due to bad circulation." Why not just say "She has bad circulation, so..."?) Although, this detour into my translation preferences aside, the context of the use of "homo" is the main male character (the one who crossdresses) going "what are you, a homo?" when his uncle walks in on him in the bath, so different terminology wouldn't really save that joke. And that's the other thing--leaving aside the whole question of what terminology is or isn't offensive, the manga is sort of persistently convinced that it's funny if one cis straight person thinks another cis straight person is, or accuses them of being, gay or trans. That sort of underlying sense of queer identities being jokes rather than something that anyone actually is (thus far there aren't any queer characters, which I kept feeling would help a little bit) is really Princess Jellyfish's biggest issue.

I'm also not sure how I feel about the makeover/"all girls secretly want to be princesses" angle. It's true, as male lead Kuranosuke says, that dressing well can be an important tool for being taken seriously in business/political situations such as the one the characters find themselves in, so it's clear there is in fact value in them learning more about fashion and grooming. But I hope at least some of them continue to see it as a tool, something that they'll employ strategically but never actually love or do daily, and it doesn't become the "really every woman is crazy about makeup and high heels, deep down, no matter what she says!" kind of message.

All this sounds pretty negative, but I did enjoy a lot of it, and I probably will keep reading. I'm pretty capable of putting up with various kinds and degrees of bigotry in fiction, even when it's directed at groups I'm part of; it's something you kind of have to learn how to do in a world where works of fiction are frequently made by people who never give a thought to the fact that their audience might contain people like you. I was just totally blindsided by it--the relatively progressive nerd circles I run in were super enthusiastic about this series before it ended (there was then a drop-off of interest, but that's pretty standard when a series ends) and no one ever so much as mentioned these problems. Maybe it gets better later, I don't know. But my hope is that this review, if anyone actually sees it, helps someone else to make an informed decision/be prepared for what they're going into in a way that I couldn't/wasn't.

We finally learn Key's backstory and not only is it upsetting and lowkey uncomfy/icky, but it also doesn't excuse his terrible behavior towards Rinko! Great, love that for them.

I love this manga. It's sweet and funny, and I love the characters and the friendships. However, I hate the uncle and his scenes are really off-putting. Overall, I would recommend to any manga fan, or someone looking to get into manga.

Hyper-realistic personal narrative. You should definitely never give this manga to a child who wants to become a mangaka. The trouble is, I feel like this was published in order for parents to steer kids away from drawing manga as a career choice. Extremely problematic.½

This is so entertaining. Even if it has some elements I really dislike the characters are developing. The humour is wack though but I am still enjoying it.

My status updates says it all I think. Somewhere I didn't expect it to like it as much as I did. It was a lot funnier than I imagined.
I can see some gags becoming tedious but for now I utterly enjoyed myself.

I did like this basing it off the fact that the plot is a bit different than most popular manga, and that the main character is a lot older than the norm. The story was funny and did have it's emotional moments! Some that I feel could be very relatable especially in terms of being stuck with your life and career.

My main problem with it was that I felt a lot of the same situations kept repeating themselves over and over again in each chapter. This made it a bit too predictable and kind of boring after a while, since you could kind of guess what Rinko would do after being faced with a new problem in her life. Things do change up a bit in the final chapter of this first volume, leaving you with a cliffhanger that does make me want to read the other volumes just to see how everything turns out.

I also did appreciate the author adding bonus content with a disclaimer to explain she doesn't feel like all women need is a husband to fulfill their lives. That this is at the end of the day something that was inspired by some friends in her own life. Although a lot of people may find issue with the main character's obsession with finding the right man, I am hoping to see a bit of character growth later on in the series.

I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Went to Barnes & Noble for coffee on my day off and bought this one ( part 3) to read... Finished it there :) Still happy with the series. They didn't have parts 4 & 5, so I might need to wait for those a bit...

So... I finished the Princess Jellyfish already as soon as I bought this. But the extra stuff took time. I really enjoyed that too. And I loved how PJ ended. Also there is a sneak peak of Tarareba Girls, which I'm now wondering if it exists in English. Might be even more my thing than PJ. But all in all, it was nice to find manga I actually like :)

I usually have a lot of problems with manga. I really want to like it and then something sets me off. I really like this one though. Definitely reading more of this.

A beautiful examination of the teacher/student relationship and how someone can be a huge influence on you -- shaping your entire life -- while simultaneously becoming a small part of your day-to-day existence, often going underappreciated until its too late to fully express your gratitude in person.

Higashimura career as a manga creator starts to take off. As she meets other professionals in the field (and there is some name dropping), she begins to break free from the orbit of the eccentric mentor who has guided her since high school.

Funny, yet with a realistic view of how hard it can be to make your dreams come true. The next volume is the final one and promises to be a dramatic turn.

I loved this series from beginning to end. Seeing her thoughts and regrets are all too relatable, and I enjoyed seeing her journey to who she is today. Just keep drawing!

Gosh, I love this series and her teacher! He’s hardcore, but he loves his students even more. ;__; The way the author wants to go back in time and slap some sense into her younger self makes me laugh, and I definitely sympathize with her regrets. Like her, my art teacher wanted me to become a painter just like him, and I never wanted to disappoint him but my heart wasn’t in painting either. I see why she wanted to write this story so much now.

I KNEW THIS WAS COMING, but it hit me all the same. I already had the idea her sensei died probably from old age but apparently it was terminal cancer instead ;___;

Delightful. I think I would be able to have a better appreciation for this story if I knew more about Japanese cultural understandings of gender and sexuality, though. To my western eye the members of Amars read as autistic or neurodivergent women who have found community together, which delighted me to no end. However, there are also likely cultural nuances there that I’m missing.

This series just keeps improving with each volume. Akiko struggles to find and assert herself after graduating college as her parents and old art teacher push her in career paths she is sure she does not want to take. Equal parts autobiography and tribute to the power of mentorship.