Normally, if someone said "you should read this manga about high school lesbians, it's the best thing", I'd assume it was full of pandering to the yuri fanboy audience with no real substance. But Shimura Takako's Sweet Blue Flowers (also known as Aoi Hana) is a wonderful manga with excellent characterisation, really well-written relationships, and absolutely no fanservice or anything of the sort. In other words - you should read this manga about high school lesbians, it's the best thing.
On her way to her first day of high school, Manjoume Fumi (the glasses-wearing girl in the page above) meets her childhood friend Okudaira Akira (the other one) for the first time in years, having moved back to the area where she grew up, and they become best friends again despite going to different (all-girl) schools. Yumi falls in love with an older girl at school, Sugimoto Yasuko, and their relationship pulls her into a web of drama, heartbreak, friendship and romance.
As you might expect of a romance manga, SBF's strength comes from the quality of its writing and how compelling the characters are. As the two main viewpoint characters, Fumi and Akira are easy to sympathise with, despite the fact that I am very much not a Japanese high school girl. Their friendship feels very real, and I found myself deep in their worries and joys very quickly. The rest of the cast is all likeable too, and even the relatively minor characters get their moments of focus that really flesh them out and help them feel like real people. In this respect I'd say SBF also does a very good job of being a slice-of-life manga, though the romance obviously takes the front-row seat.
I'd say one of the main themes of SBF is uncertainty. There's a lot of it around - being uncertain about whether the person you love loves you in the same way, being uncertain about how you should respond to someone's feelings, being uncertain about when to let go and whether you can at all... There's a lot of the feeling of the difficulty of understanding people in Sweet Blue Flowers, intensified by the questions raised by Yumi coming out and the inherent uncertainties of youth. It creates drama without falling into the classic "will-they-won't-they" trap that romance manga so easily end up in, and pushes the characters into lots of interesting development.
This brings me onto something else I like a lot about Sweet Blue Flowers. There aren't any characters in the story who can be called antagonists, even if you squint. The drama instead is internal to the characters' relationships, which makes it feel a lot more genuine. It's far easier to focus on the characters when all the issues are coming from their own concerns and questions, not someone else creating obstacles for them. Not that I think stories having antagonists is a bad thing, of course, but this works really well here.
Another plus for the manga is that doesn't just set up "here's your main couple, isn't it obvious" in chapter one and then make it all about those two getting together - characters come together, break up, and make friends in a very organic way and I found the way things developed to be somewhat surprising, though others may see it coming sooner.
I also like that even when the characters are going through a lot of troubles, Sweet Blue Flowers never feels depressing or too glum - there's always a way forward, but at the same time the characters still react believably to unfortunate turns rather than bouncing back by the end of the chapter whenever something doesn't go their way.
I really like the art too - there aren't really any pages or panels that stood out to me as saying "Wow, you should include this in your review, it's beautiful", but Shimura's character designs work really well for the story, and she really injects a lot of character into each panel. The watercolour art seen on the volume covers and character introduction pages is really nice too - if only the mangaka's time and money weren't an object, I'd love to see the whole manga like this.
The only point I can think of to complain about is that it's quite a slow burn. I'd say it's certainly worth it, but if you want instant payoff then Sweet Blue Flowers isn't for you. This also gives me reason to recommend reading the manga rather than watching the anime adaptation. It only got 11 episodes, and sold really badly so it's never going to get another season, and I just don't think it's worth it under those circumstances.
When it comes to content that might be objectionable or important to note, there are some (rare) scenes featuring nudity and sex, but it's all tasteful and happens as a natural growth of the characters rather than just to sell more manga. It only comes up in something like 3-ish chapters of the 47 translated, so it's certainly not a major thing and you shouldn't let it push you away from reading the series.
As if it wasn't obvious already, Sweet Blue Flowers is probably one of my favourite manga out of the whole medium. I don't think you have to be a big fan of romance or shoujo-ai (girl-love) manga to enjoy it - I'm quite new to romance manga myself, and terrible fanboy pandering has left me sceptical about most anime and manga that feature girl-girl relationships, but I love it and recommend it highly. Of course, if you don't like these genres then it's not going to be for you, but I'd implore people to give it a try even if you don't think it would be your thing. That's how I stumbled onto this stuff, and here I am enjoying it enough to evangelise about it to you.
Sweet Blue Flowers has been licensed by JManga for digital distribution - you can find it here. So far only the first volume has been released, but at 499 JManga points (equivalent to about £3 as I write, since 1000 points is $10 USD) it's a good deal.
There are fan translations up to chapter 47 (somewhere late in the 7th volume or early in the 8th), but only group that was translating scans dropped the series when it was licensed, so you'll just have to wait for official releases to catch up if you read ahead. I'd say it's certainly worth it; I'd have bought volume 1 on JManga if I hadn't just spent a lot of money around Christmas, and if it ever gets a physical English release I can guarantee I'll snap up every volume ASAP.
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