草冠の姫

by Yumiko Ōshima, 大島弓子

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 1982

About the author

Yumiko Oshima (大島弓子) is a Japanese manga author.
She was born in Tochigi prefecture.
She is part of the Year 24 Group together with Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya and Ryoko Yamagishi..

Reviews

[beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Grass Crown Princess, another by Yumiko Ōshima, though unlike Banana Bread Pudding I didn’t like this one as much. The main female character Kiriko is recognised as an oddball by her peers at university, but I don’t really see much evidence of it (and I now know that she can write oddball female characters very well!). The twist in regards to her feelings of inferiority towards her older sister was compelling, but there was too little evidence of or development of that plot point within the story.

The male main character, a promiscuous bisexual man, I actively disliked, mostly because he was pretty boring, but also because he makes a worrying admission at one point that sleeping with someone isn’t as fun when they’re black out drunk… horror story sentence. There’s a joke later when Kiriko is ‘pregnant’, about how she must have conceived with him whilst asleep…

There was more humour that just doesn’t translate very well into the 21st century, but I wouldn’t have blamed it for that if it were funnier, but it wasn’t. I also didn’t find her art to be as interesting this time.

When this was released in 1978, the titular story was one of four, but I can’t find the other three short stories anywhere. A shame, because I would have read them otherwise.