Earlier this week, Erica Friedman of ALC Publishing and Ozaku wrote a nice piece on the joys of talking manga on Twitter. I completely agree with her, and here’s an example: last night, as I was pondering this week’s license request, I knew I was in the mood for old-school shôjo, but which one? Fewer than 140 characters later, a wish-list ensued. There were plenty of perennial would-be favorites (like Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight and Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles), and lots that I’d never even heard of and now want, but one really caught my attention.
Wikipedia describes Paros no Ken (or The Sword of Paros) as a “yuri historical fantasy manga,” which is probably reason enough to want it in English. It was written by Kaoru Kurimoto, author of the Guin Saga novels (published in English by Vertical, along with one of its manga adaptations), and illustrated by Yumiko Igarashi, creator of the award-winning, lawsuit-triggering Candy Candy.
The plot involves royalty, destiny, warfare, feminism, upstairs-downstairs lesbian romance, and lots of other nifty-sounding stuff in a relatively short three volumes, originally serialized in Kadakowa Shoten’s Monthly Asuka. In a shocking turn of events, it does not seem to be available in French, so if someone hurries, we might be able to beat them to the punch. The series seems to be out of print, but here are entries for the three volumes on Amazon Japan.
I’d try to go into more depth on Paros no Ken, but I can’t let all of those heartfelt tweets go to waste, so here’s a list of all of the titles people suggested with whatever links I could find: