As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
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.