But their relationship isn’t an easy one. Her fascination becomes friendship and eventually love. But Kirishima eventually musters up the courage to finally talk to Endō. Because of that and her general attitude, many of the students at Hijiri find her difficult to approach. Endō was suspended from school the previous year. Kayako Kirishima, a senior at the Hijiri all-girls high school, is fascinated by her classmate Masami Endō, the young woman who sits directly in front of her. If those adornments of our youth held any color it would have been deep blue.” Thus begins Kiriko Nananan’s Blue. The school uniforms and our desperate awkwardness. “The sky that stretches out above the dark sea. The manga was also popular enough to receive a live-action film adaptation directed by Hiroshi Ando in 2002. Blue has also been translated into French and German.

Originally published in Japan in 1997, Fanfare/Ponent Mon published the English edition of the manga in 2006 after releasing a Spanish-language edition in 2004. She is particularly well-known for her short manga Blue is her only long-form manga to have been released in English. Nananan debuted in the avant-garde manga magazine Garo in 1993, which is one of the reasons her work is found in these “underground” collections.

Another of her short manga, “Kisses,” was collected in Sake Jock: Comics from Today’s Japanese Underground, an early English anthology of alternative Japanese manga. I was quite taken by the pieces and so was determined to find more of Nananan’s manga in English.

Two of her short manga-”Heartless Bitch” and “Painful Love”-were included in the volume. I first discovered Kiriko Nananan’s work while reading Secret Comics Japan: Underground Comics Now.

Blue kiriko nananan manga