Sakura Namiki

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The Rows of Cherry Trees is best described as "delicate". It's a small volume, one filled with an emotional yet elegant love story. In the ping-pong team of one all-girls' school, sweet Yukiko nurse admiration for her "onee-sama" Chikage even when their relationship is threatened. Like many early girls love (and boys love) titles, this isn't a story of romance as we tend to think of it -- full of confessions and dating and sex -- but rather the tale of a passionate love, one that may never bloom into an official relationship but stays strong just the same. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much in ... the way of characters to get attached to, and the story is quite simple, but that doesn't stop it from being a lovable little tale all the same.

Seeing as it's from the 1950s, the art style of this manga is quite different from what the modern reader is used to. The influential shoujo artist Makoto Takahashi's style is in full bloom here: character designs are all soft curves and wide eyes. Every detail of page of this series oozes a unique beauty, one full of flowers and careful poses and perfect backgrounds; I could stare at it forever. Perhaps thanks to the fact that artists such as Osamu Tezuka had not yet fully made their mark on manga when The Rows of Cherry Trees was written, page layouts don't have the flow that I expect from manga. The best way to describe it would be calling every individual panel a little masterpiece all on its own -- lovely, but sometimes alienating each image from the next. I would not want every manga series to look like this one, but considering it's the only English-translated manga of its time, it's an excellent look into the trends of the past and warrants a read just for that.

The typical manga reader is probably more interested in excitement and suspense, in new and unique ideas and characters. That manga reader probably won't have much to gain from The Rows of Cherry Trees; rather, it will seem quaint and silly, an old-fashioned story that later manga series told in a much better fashion. However, I am not that sort of reader, and if you aren't, either, this is a wonderful read. It's a rare look into very early shoujo (besides Princess Knight, it's the earliest shoujo title that has been translated into English) and the unique elegance that it had. Gorgeous and touching in its own way, The Rows of Cherry Trees is a different sort of masterpiece.

“The Rows of Cherry Trees'' is a sweet and delicate story of passion between female classmates that “balance[s] deliciously between Ukiyo-e prints and modern manga, with both narrated stills and panels with dialogue.” (Erica Friedman, okazu.yuricon.com). Though not quite the first manga, Shoujo, Class S work, or proto-Yuri, the book in many ways acts as a transitional piece and a significant influence on all the aforementioned mediums and genres, giving a unique window into how classic Japanese art helped develop more modern Japanese media styles of today. In the context of modern manga “The Rows of Cherry Trees” comes across as quite restrained, and ... perhaps even slow and uneventful. I am not meaning to communicate that “The Rows of Cherry Trees'' is a bad or uninteresting manga, but it is an artwork of its own accord meant to be consumed on its own terms, and when approached as such it does have the ability to be truly moving, if not just a delightful and fascinating look into manga history. This story predates Yuri as we are familiar with it today, but even for a lightly seasoned Yuri fan it is not hard to see how the intimate (likely) platonic relationships between girls in stories such as this helped develop and set the tone for more explicitly LGBT+ narratives for years to come. Personally I was very surprised by the power of one scene in particular in which Yukiko and Chikage see a ballet of a swan being hunted and killed, a ballet I couldn’t help but see as a metaphor for the inevitability of heteropatriarchal powers awaiting our adolescent characters once they should leave the supposed safety of emerging girl’s culture offered to them by schooling. Scenes such as this are not explicit in what they are communicating or why they were included beyond the apparent beauty of the artwork, but if you are familiar with the early Yuri works and the history surrounding them, you will have the chance to have emotional connections such as these.

I would not recommend this work to an early manga or Yuri initiate, and despite the beauty this will take a steeling of one’s nerves to continue paying attention, short as the manga is, but if you have any interest in the history of manga, Shoujo, Class S, or Yuri I would say this is a must read.