lagoluna | Celebrating 60 Pages of Hadashi no May

It’s been about a year since I set out on creating a solo English translation of Fukuhara Hiroko’s Hadashi no May, and after many resets and frustrations (and a lot of learning) I’ve finally reached the 1/3 mark. It’s not a very impressive rate of progress but I feel a stronger desire to see it through to the end than ever before.

Hadashi no May is the first manga I purchased and read all the way through in Japanese and was an important part of my developing fascination with proto-yuri. It’s also a uniquely frustrating read, even among its contemporaries and other manga from the same author. The tantalizing spectacle of lesbian double suicide it invokes in its early pages is traded for worse than dull heterosexual romance. The growing attraction between Misaki Kayako, the emotionally wounded survivor of an attempted double suicide and adult doctor invested in fixing and transforming her, Touya Makoto is genuinely painful to read. But in a way I think it is because of these elements that Hadashi no May comes to represent the distilled appeal of the tragedy inherent to these works. Young girls may fall in love with each other and these loves will be intense and all-encompassing, but in a society that has no place for lesbian relationships lasting through adulthood, their only options are to either die as they are or to don the cocoon of the white wedding dress and emerge as proper young women, killing the lesbian inside themselves…