Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Translated <em>Yuri</em> Manga in Germany

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/mech.13.1.0159

2152-6648

Maser,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Translated Yuri Manga in Germany Verena Maser (bio) Commercially published manga became widely available in Germany in the 1980s, but it was only in the 1990s that they can be said to have begun to flourish, a condition that has lasted through the present day.1 In 2019 alone, more than 1,000 manga volumes were released by nine publishers. Among these, boys love (BL) manga account for 78 volumes, and yuri for 35.2 While BL manga are better known and have been sold in German-language editions for longer, beginning with Ozaki Minami's Zetsuai: 1989 (1990–91) in 2000, yuri represents an expanding market niche.3 While Sakurazawa Erica's Between the Sheets (Shītsu no sukima; 1996) was the first manga about female same-sex love published in German in 2005, the first manga widely described as a yuri manga in Japan to be commercially translated into German was Chi-Ran's 2006 work Shōjo bigaku (Aesthetics of Girls), released in German as Girls Love in 2008. These manga, like a majority of works translated into German, were given English titles, either because as requested by the Japanese publisher or because English is considered "catchier." Girls Love was the first of the small "first wave" of yuri manga in Germany comprised of ten individual titles, five of which were multivolume works. The four publishers releasing them all categorized them not as yuri but rather under the broad genre "romance," one of the seven principal genres—the others being "action," "comedy," "fantasy/SF," "mystery," "romance," and "special" (all written in English)—that German manga publishers had agreed on in 2009. Then in 2015 came the start of Tokyopop Germany's publication of Saburouta's Citrus (published in Japanese from 2013, in English from 2014), for which I myself was the translator. The manga has proven immensely popular among German readers, regularly topping Tokyopop's monthly top-ten lists as well as reaching number sixteen on the 2016 German manga bestseller list.4 Citrus thus kicked off a second wave of translated yuri manga, which in the past five years has seen the publication of eighteen individual titles, most of them comprised of more than one volume. All but one of the titles in this new wave have been published by Tokyopop, which was founded in 2004 and is one of the largest German manga publishers, and Altraverse, which was founded in 2018 by a former publishing director of Tokyopop Germany. [End Page 159] While, as noted above, yuri manga had previously been simply included under the category "romance," in 2019 the new category of "girls love" was introduced—though manga assigned to this category in Germany may fall under a different designation according to publishers and fans in Japan. Recently, for example, Yamada Daisy's Let's Play Friendship (2019; Tomodachi gokko [2016]) was put in the category "girls love" by Tokyopop, although in Japan it was labeled seinen, a category ostensibly targeting adult male readers. The publishers chose "girls love" over the term yuri to mirror the already existing label "boys love," and because they deemed an English term easier to understand. They also avoid a misunderstanding concerning the content of the manga they publish as "girls love," which is used in Japan alongside the term yuri. Many German readers have picked up English-language manga readers' habit of using a Japanese term meaning love by or for girls, shōjoai (often spelled "shoujo-ai" by fans), to indicate manga without any sexual content and yuri to indicate manga with mature content. It should be noted that this is a distinction that does not exist in Japan; moreover, shōjoai is a Japanese term associated with pedophilia. While German publishers are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to their licensing process, even with a manga translator such as myself, I have gathered a few general ideas from interviews and informal conversations over the years. When choosing new titles to license, virtually all publishers pay close attention to what readers want by keeping track of the requests they receive. They also maintain a list of old and new titles they feel will "fit their program." There...