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(3.75/5)An excellent drama and a unique transgender story, with just the right amount of romance.
The basic premise of Mimoza no Kokuhaku is simple, the main character's childhood friend Ushio is a transgender girl, and the story chronicles the fallout, both positive and negative, of her coming out to the school. While the premise is unique, and the way Ushio is portrayed as the beautiful, kind, and loveable heroine is nothing short of groundbreaking in the LGBT light novel space, that alone is not what makes this book special. Above all Mimoza no Kokuhaku is a tightly written drama with deft characterization, tight pacing, beautiful descriptions, and plots that stretch far beyond Ushio's transness to explore the thoughts and feelings of the surrounding cast.
This was my first full novel in Japanese, and I found the difficulty real but manageable. I don't have the experience to compare this to other books, but by way of very rough estimation I am at somewhere around an N3/N2 level and I was able to get through it at an entertaining but modest pace with frequent reference to a dictionary. Overall, I feel like this was a good novel to cut my teeth on with reading Japanese, but it is certainly much more difficult than the bits I have read of また、同じ夢を見ていた.
Tags: LGBTQ, School Life, Romance/Love triangle
Summary: Protagonist Sakuma's childhood friend Ushio comes out as trans. Focuses mainly on Sakuma making a new friend Natsuki, Sakuma and Ushio mending their broken relationship, and the reaction that Ushio coming out gets at school.
Review (light to moderate spoilers throughout): I really wanted to like this, and I did enjoy some elements, but it felt overall lackluster. I'll start with the negatives: The transphobia is relentless and is pretty much the theme of the entire first volume (amazon reviews suggest that volume 2 is less about this), which makes it an unpleasant read in places if you're a queer person. Sakuma is pretty passive and doesn't stand up for Ushio until well over halfway into the book, which (while understandable - it's difficult and scary to stand up against bullies, and this bystander effect could've been interesting if it wasn't drawn out this much) gets really frustrating to read. The final 20% was just boring to me and felt comparatively difficult to read. In his narration, Sakuma says a lot of things that whilst aren't hatred, are still transphobic, and these viewpoints at least by the end of the first volume don't really change.
As for the positives, I expected that one side of the love triangle would get more attention than the other, but this wasn't the case. I enjoyed seeing different sides of Sakuma through his interactions with Natsuki and Ushio, although I think he was more interesting when interacting with Natsuki about books. I think Natsuki, who had a crush on Ushio before she came out and comes to realise that she might still have that crush and therefore that she might like girls too, is really interesting. The parts that focused on Ushio's identity without the bullying were interesting, exploring first-person pronouns and honorifics.
The everyday life parts were cute enough that I'll consider picking up the second volume, which seems to be about their summer break, so I'd imagine it has a lot of the bits I enjoyed.
Strong start, then loses momentum
I think 汐 is a great character and the scenes where we got to know her and in which she shared her thoughts and feelings were the best. Sadly, the second half of the book focuses on some side character and some weird conflict regarding that. It is dragged out and we get almost no 汐 which makes the second half of the book, in my opinion, far less enjoyable and kind of a drag to get through.