High school hasn’t been a very pleasant experience for Kazusa Onodera so far: her classmates seem to think about nothing but hookups, she can’t even look at her next door neighbor/childhood-friend-turned-hot Izumi Norimoto without jealous girls turning on her, and lately everything seems like a potential innuendo!
Fortunately she does have one place of solace in high school: the Literature Club, where she and her friends take turns reading aloud and discussing erotic scenes in novels.
While I meant to read O Maidens in Your Savage Season earlier, I come to this manga having already seen the entire anime adaptation and loving it to pieces. The anime adaption had a fantastic balance of humor and seriousness (including some stuff that needs a content warning: possibly a warning for Hitoha Hongo trying to get into their teacher’s pants and definitely a trigger warning for Niina Sugawara’s previous mentor who was clearly grooming her) so I’m curious to see how much of that came from the manga and how much of that was improvisation on the anime’s part. Mari Okada was the writer for both the anime and the manga, a rare thing which I suspect means the two versions will turn out to be quite similar. The anime also told what felt like a fairly complete story and the final volume of the manga was released in Japan soon after the anime finished airing so I’ll also be looking out for any scenes that didn’t get adapted or were just plain handled differently.
So far, this first volume will be familiar ground for any anime-viewers although I must say, the scene where Kazusa stumbles on Izumi masturbating in his room (yes it’s going to be that kind of series) and subsequently runs screeching through town trying to process that was even funnier in the anime. The content is the same, but the anime just had a few different framing choices (to fantastic effect) and had a wholly inappropriate musical accompaniment for the moment as well. I really sympathized with Kazusa in that moment; while I have (thankfully) never been in a similar situation, while Kazusa is running through town she suddenly realizes every sign, every advertisement in sight is loaded with potential double-meanings, and I too remember when I realized that the adult world was either filthy minded 100% of the time or utterly oblivious to what they were implying 90% of the time.
It was an exhausting realization and one that I wasn’t sure how to deal with; I ended up assuming that no, all of those instances really were meant to be dirty puns (since CLEARLY that was what other people were thinking all. the. time.) and ended up “over-compensating” for my (ace) lack of interest and to this day I’m often the most dirty-minded friend in my groups since I always notice these innuendos after years of feeling like I needed to. I know I wasn’t alone in that moment of realization but that’s the kind of un-romantic moment that romances don’t usually cover.
For Kazusa, her (much better) way of dealing with this sudden flood of dirty suggestions is to stick with her Literature Club friends who are in similar boats/mindsets. I wish I had these group of friends in addition to the ones I did have in high school; while I wasn’t secretly interested in the erotic scenes they’re reading (as seems to be the case for the Literature Club girls), I clearly remember being required to read Valley of Horses for (Catholic) high school biology class in the 9th grade and my tired numbness as I realized that each sex scene in my library copy went on for five or more pages. I could’ve used some friends to process what even I, the then unsuspecting ace girl, knew at the time was pretty poor porn AND to rant about the pretty historically-inaccurate setting! Perhaps these girls would have been more interested in Valley of Horses than I was since again, these girls aren’t pure maidens.
This is one thing I’ve come to enjoy about Mari Okada’s more recent works, as her characters are brimming with strong, messy emotions and her more recent works seem to be embracing the kinds of stories that are enhanced by this kind of characterization. These girls aren’t sex-repulsed, honestly they’re a little pervy themselves when they’re in situations that allow for it (like Hongo’s cybering adventures to get material for her novel) and, while that wasn’t my experience in high school, I think that it’s honestly more “faithful” than many other high school romance series. Many of the girls’ experiences and emotions in the anime came off as very real and I’m looking forward to going on this journey with the girls again.