柚子森さん

YUZUMORI-SAN

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
5
RELEASE
March 26, 2018
CHAPTERS
43

DESCRIPTION

A pale, small, delicate, dignified elementary school girl and a timid high school girl. This story is about Yuzumori-san and Mimika, and their relationship with one another.

CAST

Yuzumori
Mimika Noma
Shiori Shima

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

jobax3i
70/100
A surprisingly nuanced look at a controversial subject.
It it okay to fall in love with a grade schooler?

That's the question that is asked when female highschool student Mimika falls in love at first sight with the 4th grade student Yuzumori-san.

To clear away some possible misconceptions, if you’re looking for loli porn this is the wrong manga to read. The characters keep their clothes are. There are no “ecchi scenes.” In fact no physical intimacy is depicted past the occasional hug or hand holding.

What you will find, if you’re willing to brave the controversial premise, is a worthwhile story of love and growth. You’ll see characters earnestly explore feelings of guilt, angst, and love to better understand what love and respect looks like. You'll also find a handful of heart-touching intimate scenes that shows that love and feeling can transcend age.

So what makes this story work?

First of all the two main characters:

Mimika is an earnest and genuine person. She wears her heart on her sleeve and looks out for those around her. When she discovers her unreasonable attraction to children, she tackles it head on. As their relationship progresses, Mimika finds the balance between respecting Yuzomori-san as a person with her own thoughts and feelings while also protecting her as a child who is especially vulnerable to adult abuse and neglect.

Yuzumori-san on the other hand is a courageous and precocious girl. Despite being so young, she rarely acts immature and has excellent emotional insight into the thoughts of those around her. Whereas Mimika is often shown as immature for her age, Yuzumori-sans comes off as more mature and insightful than even the highschool characters.

Second of all the artwork:

The characters and artwork are beautiful. Each character is attractively drawn and unique in both figure and mannerisms. The intimate and emotional scenes have impact. More than once did I find myself pausing for several minutes to admire a particularly beautiful panel. The artist, Ejima-sensei, is certainly very talented and I'm excited to read any of her future works.

Besides the premise, what are some other flaws to be aware of?

The drama can be a bit much at times. Jealousy and cattiness from classmates can be a bit contrived. The story, perhaps due to it’s brevity, isn’t particularly deep as I'd like

My score: 7/10

A worthwhile read into a controversial subject with some beautiful artwork.
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Illuminerosy
50/100
A flawed take on pedophilia, but worth reading nonetheless.
As a general rule, I tend to avoid placing too much importance on the messaging of a particular piece of media when I analyze it, and there are two reasons for this: 1. I have the media literacy of a rock, and thus messaging and themes tend to fly right over my head at supersonic speeds while my senses fail to even register the sonic boom they leave in their wake; and 2. It’s not central to my enjoyment of something—it’s why something like Strike Witches can be one of my favorites despite saying literally nothing at all. Despite this, I feel like an analysis of Yuzumori-san would be irresponsible if it focused on anything other than the messaging, because Yuzumori-san is decidedly a story attempting to humanize pedophiles. I tend to be pretty open-minded about things like this, in that I think it is important to view things through every lens imaginable, and I am more than happy to accept gray-space and nuance in things. Thus, I’m not against Yuzumori-san solely for its admittedly gross concept.
Yuzumori-san’s approach to pedophilia is entirely based around the morality of its main character: Mimika. Mimika is presented as a normal person, not the embodiment of grease and creep that pedophiles are typically presented as. Mimika falling for Yuzumori-san is treated essentially as an anomaly, as in it just kinda happened with no prior interest in children. Furthermore, Mimika has no interest in any child (or person, for that matter) other than Yuzumori-san. Mimika also wants to do what is best for Yuzumori-san and struggles to restrain herself throughout the entire story until ultimately promising that nothing about their relationship will change until Yuzumori becomes an adult. In this way, pedophiles are shown to be complex people who struggle in their own ways; which I think is mostly good because pedophiles, despite being disgusting in every sense of the word, are human beings with their own outlooks on life and understanding pedophiles is important to preventing, or at the very least lessening, the issue of pedophilia.
Yuzumori-san’s approach to this matter reminds me of the MAP, Minor Attracted People, movement from several years ago, and it functions in much the same way, just with a little less ambition. The MAP movement, for the uninformed, was a group of pedophiles who tried to finagle their way into public acceptance by fitting themselves into the LGBTQ+. The argument went that being attracted to children was essentially the same as being gay, thus should be acceptable. The movement got a lot of backlash, and the LGBTQ+ vehemently refused them allegiance. When I say Yuzumori-san functions the same way as the MAP movement, I mean that it attempts to gain acceptance by overlooking the inherent deviancy of being attracted to children. Mimika’s attraction and “Minor Attraction” both act to make pedophilia appear more innocent by relabeling pedophilia from sexual fetish to an attraction, with the idea being that an attraction prescribes motive other than sexual satisfaction. However, pedophilia is a sexual fetish. There is no motive behind pedophilia other than sexual satisfaction. The term “Minor Attraction” ironically outlines this perfectly, because it describes the object of attraction as being a minor. Pedophiles are not attracted to the personality of a person, as a gay person might be; they are attracted to the immaturity of children.
Yuzumori-san tries to address the sexual aspect of pedophilia by showing pedophilic urges as resistable with sufficient moral integrity and societal consequences. Mimika resists her urges mostly because she feels her feelings are wrong and doesn’t want to face the consequences of laying her hands on a child. However, reality sits in stark contrast to this, because if pedophilic sexual desires were resistable, we’d have a lot less child sex crime. No society views pedophilia as acceptable—I am aware conseqences aren’t very harsh in Japan, but I’m of the impression that it’s actually pretty frowned upon by most Japanese people and is not just “a part of their culture”, as many like to state—and many moral institutions and leaders have been outed countless times for child sex crimes—living in the United States, I feel obligated to nominate the Christian church for the position of the top moral institution with a long history of overlooking and defending child sex crimes. So, I think it is more than clear that morals and consequences don’t do anything to prevent pedophilia. If a pedophile is going to touch a child, they are going to touch a child; the only way to stop this is to identify pedophiles and instate preventative measures to protect children.
To finish this up, I do want to say that I don’t actually think the author meant to have these implications; the story is way too cutesy for that and in the end of volume sections where the author is directly addressing the reader as the author it seems she just liked the idea of an age-gap yuri, and this is the result. However, I think pedophilia is such a matter that any story involving it is saying something about it, and in the case of Yuzumori-san, whether the author intended it or not, the story is actively humanizing pedophiles. As stated earlier, I don’t hate Yuzumori-san for this, in fact, despite my pretty harsh critiques so far, I actually don’t hate Yuzumori-san at all. For me it is sufficiently enjoyable as a cutesy love story with just enough space from trying to appeal to pedophiles that it’s not outright disgusting. However, I think it is important to engage with the message of an artwork, and I think the message of this artwork is at best misguided and at worst disinformation. Still, I would argue that Yuzumori-san is worth reading solely because of its relatively unique take on pedophiles, and seeing different opinions on things is always a good way to develop your own opinion on a matter.
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