[Februaryuri 2024 rerun] Otherside Picnic

24 Dec, 2024

(base post on Februaryuri here!)

(note that all that follows, unless mentioned explicitly or in the rerun section, was written in February 2024)

Otherside Picnic (Urasekai Picnic), by Iori Miyazawa (author) and Eita Mizuno (artist)

Publication

Ongoing (13 volumes)
Published in English (Square Enix), 11 volumes so far
Not published in French so far :(

Summary

Sorawo Kamikoshi is an asocial and introverted twenty-year-old college student in humanities, without ties or remaining relatives. She spent most of her childhood exploring ruins and places related to true ghosts stories, these mythological or Internet-related pieces of creepy, unexplained events. After all, she didn’t want to come back to her family’s house at that time, because… Well, anyway, true ghost stories! Fascinated by that subject even still in college, and exploring old buildings still being very much a hobby of hers, Sorawo someday discovers a door to an uncommon world in one of them. And that world… is the perfect place. I mean: whole grassy plains and derelict edifices, not a single human to bother you, and actual creatures that exist in true ghost stories living there?!

Sorawo names that world the Otherside, and starts exploring it… Until she very quickly stumbles onto a deadly encounter with one of the weird cryptids roaming around, and is unexpectedly saved by a beautiful blonde woman her age, Toriko Nishina. Though upset at first that other humans know about her own paradise, Sorawo slowly warms up to clingy, blunt and pretty Toriko… Or well, she’ll put up with her for some time, at least. After all, she may need a reliable partner to survive out there.
Also, Toriko is really pretty. This both does and doesn't register in Sorawo's brain.

Toriko, meanwhile, is exploring the Otherside looking for someone: Satsuki Uruma, her mentor, friend (and maybe more?), the mysterious woman who showed her this world and recently vanished.
And Toriko.
will bring.
her back.

And so the two girls awkwardly team up – after all, Toriko has someone who buys any Otherside artifact she may get back to the real world, and splitting the money would surely help Sorawo pay off her student debt. But as they keep exploring this strange new place and encountering more and more dangerous foes, questions start to pile up: what exactly is the world of the Otherside? Who pays for the items they bring back from it? What happened to Satsuki Uruma? And where is the growing bond between Sorawo and Toriko going?

Comment

(You want someone else to try and convince you to get into Otherside Picnic with a different approach? This old tumblr post by pikestaff may be to your liking. I find it extremely efficient. It says it all.)

I will be blunt: I love Otherside Picnic – its characters, its atmosphere, the way it is written. By being yuri and yet far from a lot of conventions of the genre, it is THE work that made me want to take a deep dive into what yuri usually was, and to measure for myself how much this work was so special indeed.

It starts, of course, with some common archetypes still: aloof and asocial brunette meets outgoing, clingy and pretty blonde; the core cast also includes a somewhat child-looking¹ grumpy scientist, Kozakura. And yet, the characters have heavy backstories and an extremely engaging dynamic that really make them much more that the templates they draw from. They're weirdos and loners with trauma and lots of social awkwardness, and they're all fascinatingly flawed and human.

Furthermore, Otherside Picnic is special in a lot of ways. Its main one is, obviously, that it is genre fiction - horror, with a slight sci-fi vibe - as much as it is yuri. The Otherside is mainly plains of tall grass and ruins of half-finished buildings, with a "human-like but not quite" vibe², where actual, living creatures and phenomena of Japanese folklore roam. Most of the story's arcs are focused on fighting a weird creature there and coming back alive, and slowly understanding the dreamlike logic of the titular Otherside. Truly, its uncanniness leaks and impacts the rest of the story, and it gives it all such an atmosphere.

But Otherside Picnic is also special because it handles its yuri element the way it would any other. It is in no rush to be a romance: it's a slow burn where the bond of the leads naturally grows as the story goes. It's not trying to be yuri: it just has gay characters baked into its narrative from the get-go, and their gayness unfolds when they're ripe.
And gosh, does it unfold. I won't say too much not to enter spoiler territory (including for people currently reading the manga, as the novel version (see Extra) is way ahead of it), but I just want to say that there's some very explicit, very much voiced romantic and sexual attraction in upcoming chapters (edit: we're truly entering this with the latest manga chapters as I am reposting this, and it's wonderful). And several sapphic relationships are mentioned or suspected by the characters themselves - not just between the two leads.

All this already makes this manga a rare beastie. It is even more when you take into account that the main characters are college students, something that is still rather uncommon in yuri³. It is even, even more when you realize that the protagonist is extremely autistic-coded⁴, canonically has PTSD and experiences some dissociative disorder, and has trouble recognizing her obvious pining(?) on Toriko and articulate her feelings in believable ways that are addressed head-on as she grows (and she grows so, so much).
She does start very strongly as a simple "wow, Toriko pretty" every time said Toriko is in the room; but it's also that her little brain (affectionate) doesn't really compute that you can even be gay. Maybe she's not used to, you know, having strong feelings for other people, and it may be linked to stuff that happened in her family and that made her find solace in exploring ruins instead of going back home, but heh maybe not why are we talking about that her past is normal and boring anyway Toriko is huh wow she's very frank and forward and she really seems to have dependency issues toward the missing Satsuki but she sure is pretty--

I could ramble about this manga for hours. It is, as previously mentioned, a novel series first and foremost, and I'll confess that part of my comment stems from that read too; but the manga form does deserve praise in and of itself. It transcribes really well the scary parts of the prose, which is not easy when you deal with otherworldly horror; it has some genuinely funny and striking panels; and it does some neat experimental stuff with the medium here or there as a way to transcribe how Otherside creatures warp cognition. It's an adaptation - but it truly is a great one. The only shame is that the official English translation of its text is distinct from the novels' one. I know I get cognitive dissonance from that.

Anyway: Otherside Picnic.
This is not just a story where a lesbian relationship exists in a vacuum. This is a story where marginalized and traumatized lesbians face unfathomable horrors, find each other, heal from trauma and form stronger bonds.
You just have to give the characters some time to get there.

Extra

Otherside Picnic is, at first, a novel series. As it is the (extremely engrossing) source material, I can't encourage you enough to read it in that form. It is divided into big chapters called Files, with usually 3-4 Files per volume. It's not that long in spite of its current length of eight volumes⁴, and it's great. Or, I'd say, it's intriguing in early Files, and then it gets really stellar with File 8 (the end of Volume 2/Omnibus 1), and after that it never really goes down again, though the end of Volume 4/Omnibus 2 and the latest Volumes are particularly striking and strong in terms of writing and culmination of gayness and plot at once.
As an addition to what the manga shows, Sorawo is the narrator there, and she has an inner monologue that may sound a bit over-the-top at first, but she really comes into her own with the volumes, and it gets really delightful. Of course, the manga remains an excellent adaptation, if you're more into that format; but it's also a slow one, which renders everything from the books in details and so takes lots of volumes for the same amount of story (the aforementioned File 8 starts with volume 8 of the manga!). This also means that the manga is severely lagging behind.

And then, there's the anime adaptation.
Well.
To be honest, the anime is what hooked me and got me into the rest⁵. It's nowhere near the manga or the novels in term of quality, though: it shuffled some of the Files and created plot holes, it allotted two-part episodes to the least interesting Files, it didn't adapt File 8 which would have made for an amazing finale... but, you know, it's a decent watch. It's lighter on the horror and goofier, and that makes for a funny, light-hearted, weird action-comedy show with two adult female leads (and a female-only main cast), forging a bond that is not yet love (the anime ends too early for that) but that canonically screams gay pining. It's monster of the day shenanigans with increasing lesbianism: the two leads have a good fright, try to come back alive and with a trinket, and in spite of it all, have fun as their relationship deepens.
A few reviews here, here and particularly here capture quite well how it's both disappointing when compared the other versions of Otherside Picnic, and how it's still fun in and of itself. At the very least, when watching I felt like the budding attraction between Sorawo and Toriko had something realistically gay, much more from what I expected; and this made me curious enough to dive into the other material. The rest is history.

All this is to say: you can watch some episodes before diving into the manga or novels, 1) to have a bit of the ambiance in animated form before reading (the reverse order works much less considering the print versions are so clearly the superior material), and 2) to start by dipping your toes in something that is not too scary, to see if it is to your liking. It's just that the novels (and the manga is getting there) bring everything from the anime to another level.

Three extras, before I stop writing this very long post:

• if you've read the volumes 1 to 7 of the novel version, or if you don't mind spoilers, here is an awesome piece on AnimeFeminist on how Otherside Picnic explores healing from trauma and abuse, including past abusive sapphic relationships. Gosh, I want to reread all the books now.
• Iori Miyazawa, the author of the series, is known for the parly memesque "yuri of absence", a notion that broadly describes how an empty scenery can be yuri just because two girls were there at some point and something of their presence can still be felt. This is almost verbatim in the original interview coining the term, and it can feel a bit preposterous and funny; but to Miyazawa's defence there's also more to it: the idea behind this is how an evocative scenery can complement a scene and tell a story too. And there's a reality to it, too, at least in the current way yuri is often written: there are high school yuri works with empty or almost empty shots of classrooms that frame some kind of longing⁶; and the trope of the aquarium date uses the vastness of the sea as a way to add to the romance in a similar way. And overall, there is a true quality to the way Otherside Picnic uses its settings brilliantly: this post by pikestaff and kinseijoshi explains it quite well.
• Finally, Miyazawa wrote other books! I haven't read most of them, but I did read Side-by-side Dreamers on ebook format, and though it is a bit inconclusive and too short, it's also interesting in the way it explores themes similar to Otherside Picnic: dreamlike logic, funny little elements of narration, awkward lesbian pining, and some ethereal atmosphere that also has this yuri of absence quality to it.

It was also pointed out to me when I first posted all this that I was forgetting one extra tidbit of info: Otherside Picnic draws its core inspiration from the 1972 Russian novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky⁷, that I have yet to read. It is about people exploring Zones, parts of Earth that some aliens visited for a few days before they left - and said extraterrestrials left behind random, unexplained artifacts, akin to what people could do during a picnic, with the Earth only a one-time stop. This apparently inspired both a movie and a videogame both called Stalker. I should dive into all this at some point.

Rerun section

Two additions, before I get sidetracked into a meta-commentary:

• The published version of the mangas contains short narrative chapters centered on tritagonist Kozakura at the end of each volume. I have yet to read them, but I am eager to do so, and this is a good incentive to buy the manga version.
• Japanese merch store Gamers (ゲーマーズ)'s Yuri Club seems to get bonus short Otherside Picnic stories with each volume; these have been kindly translated by hurpdurpburps on tumblr. You can read them here (or here if you don't have a tumblr account and it tries to block you). I also have yet to read them.

And now, for the meta-commentary: I had not read volume 8 of the novels yet when writing the review above, and it's striking to reread and repost it here now that I have⁸. I would change a few words here or there if I were to rewrite this now, but I will not - said briefly, it is simply interesting to see how elements of that volume deepened my understanding of Sorawo since then.
Overall, I was already in love with Otherside Picnic when I wrote all this; and yet volume 8 really did something to me, and it's incredible to see how it made this love reach new, uncharted levels. Heck, it is one of the reasons I made this blog, and it made me write an absurdly long essay (and some more stuff) that I am rather proud of. Overall, I truly think that Otherside Picnic brings something new to the yuri genre, and more generally to the romance genre.

I cannot say more. I just really, really, really encourage you to read the novels and not stop around the first two volumes.
I promise, there is so much to be found in these trips to the Otherside.

#cohost #februaryuri 2024 #otherside picnic #yuri