I have a weakness for PBS series about professionals living in small communities, from All Creatures Great and Small to Doc Martin. I also love manga about people’s work. I believe I’ve found a perfect fusion of these two pet entertainments.

It’s called Shimane no Bengoshi, written by Masahito Kagawa and illustrated by Tetsuo Aoki, and it’s currently running in Shueisha’s Business Jump. I must warn you that the cover image I’m about to display may shock you.

That’s probably the most modestly proportioned woman I’ve ever seen depicted on the cover of a Business Jump title. And she isn’t holding an automatic weapon or wearing lingerie, or both.

Her name is Mizuho Yamazaki, and she’s a hard-working and principled lawyer serving the underrepresented population of Shimane Prefecture. To do so, she travels around on her bicycle, presumably helping elderly couples write wills, settling contentious divorces, facilitating adoptions, and so on. I can’t quite see her mounting a defense in a highly charged murder case, but there isn’t a ton of information on this title. Still, it’s been described as “slice of life,” so I feel fairly certain that she deals more with the routine details of the legal profession rather than the high drama.

Kagawa is also writing a title with the legendary Shotaro Ishinomori , which is certainly a vote of confidence. Aoki seems to be no stranger to manga with a travelogue quality, and I’m quite intrigued by the idea of his Koufuki no Hito, which is about farms and food.

And, honestly, episodic manga about a bicycling lawyer just hits all my buttons. It’s been adapted into a live-action drama, and if the lawyer could talk to dead people, she’d already have a series on CBS. I doubt I’d watch that series, as it might involve an Arquette, but I’d absolutely read Shimane no Bengoshi.

As we approach the horror-tinged Manga Moveable Feast, I’m extremely happy that I can kill two license request birds with one stone: more Junji Ito, and more josei. I don’t know that publishers make a lot of money off of licensing Ito’s work, but they keep trying, bless them, so they must love his twisted, meticulous tales as much as I do.

When compiling The Josei Alphabet, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there’s a josei magazine that specializes in horror, Asahi Sonorama’s Nemuki. The fact that Ito has published a lot of stories in Nemuki made me like the idea even more. They’ve been collected in at least two volumes.

Yami no Koe came out in 2002. The mere fact that it has a story in it called “Blood-sucking Darkness” should be evidence enough of its merit, don’t you think?

Shin Yami no Koe – Kaidan started giving people nightmares in 2006. I suspect the highlights of this collection are probably provided by a horrible little boy with a mouth full of nails. French publisher Tonkam has published these stories as Le journal de Soïchi and Le journal maudit de Soïchi. For bonus points, this collection also seems to include a story about an accursed library.

I’m obviously not made of stone, and I would also love to read Ito’s comics about his cat and his one-volume look at Rasputin, but josei horror is just too enticing a prospect not to provide a starting point, you know?

Much as I’m enjoying The Favorites Alphabet, I do find myself missing the weekly immersion of The Josei Alphabet, so I’ve turned to that category for this week’s bit of begging. Specifically, I’ve turned to Shueisha’s Young You, and I’ve found slice of life.

Nanae Haruno’s Papa Told Me ran for 27 volumes, meaning it was a fixture in Young You for virtually the entire publication history of the magazine. It falls in a sub-category of manga (a single father raising a daughter) that has yielded some books I really enjoy (Bunny Drop and Yotsuba&! from Yen Press come to mind).

Chise, a little girl in elementary school, has lost her mother. She’s being raised by her father, a novelist, who works at home, which allows him to be an attentive parent to his bright and curious daughter. From what I can discern, Haruno focuses on everyday stuff in Chise’s life, events and activities which can be exciting for a kid and sweetly nostalgic for an adult. (The mono  no aware is strong in this one, unless I miss my guess.)

This kind of stuff is basically crack for me, and while the length is daunting, there is precedent for publishers offering a sampler. French house Kana put out three double-sized books that seem to pick highlights from the series, so an English-language house (say, oh, Viz) would just have to acquire the rights to those books. Then, of course, demand would be so high that Viz would have to publish the entire series. And I would get that battle unicorn I’ve always wanted.

The samples on Shueisha’s page look really sweet.

Work has been extremely busy lately, and yet my yearning to read more workplace manga only seems to increase. What’s that about? Whatever the psychology behind it, I find myself turning to Shueisha’s Business Jump for this week’s license request.

Now, among the professions I’ve considered over the course of my lifetime, I cannot say that “lingerie designer” has ever even hovered on the periphery. Would I want to do that for a living? No. Would I want to read a seinen manga about someone who does? Oh, yes, my friends. Hence, we arrive at Hikaru Yuzuki’s Amai Seikatsu.

Now, the likelihood of this being published in English seems extraordinarily slim, certainly slimmer than the models who work in the lingerie industry. If you click on “Enter” on the Shueisha page above, you should probably make sure you don’t do so at work, because here be nipples. So we’re definitely talking about a manga for legally adult males, which isn’t synonymous with it being a manga for a mature audience, but it looks like it might be amusing.

It’s about a young designer, Shinsuke Edo, who works with a lot of women at a lingerie company. Based on the little animations and sample panels, Shinsuke seems to find himself in the kind of wacky circumstances that come with being in a seinen comedy manga set in an at least partially clothing-optional milieu. He also seems to be surrounded by the usual mix of harridans, temptresses, and good girls, so we probably have a harem vibe in play. (I know. Duh.)

Honestly, this is more of a dare than a license request. I’ve often thought that there’s a fine line between American comics readers who like to read about women who appear to be wearing underwear and posing suggestively and American comics readers who like to read about women who actually are wearing underwear and pose suggestively. There’s generally a heroic narrative providing a veil of “I read it for the ass-kicking” respectability that Amai Seikatsu simply doesn’t seem to possess.

It’s also really, really long. In fact, it’s the longest-running series currently in Business Jump, having recently hit the 40-volume mark. So that limits the chances even more. But it never hurts to throw out a little reminder that seinen can be cheesy and smutty and ridiculous and possibly sweet and funny at the same time.

We’re in the midst of another season of Project Runway, one of my favorite reality competitions, even though I hate Josh C. M. to an absolutely unreasonable degree. So I thought I might take a look into the annals of fashion shôjo for today’s license request. (Note: We’re also into a new season of Top Chef: Just Desserts, but I’ve already requested a bunch of pastry manga, so I thought I’d branch out.) As is my way, I looked around for the oldest example I could find.

This led me to Tomoko Naka’s Fashion Fade, which debuted in Shogakukan’s Sho-Comi in 1977. Now, going by my history with the aforementioned rag-off, I’m not naturally inclined to like designers with stupid names (Suede, for example), but I also intensely dislike some designers with perfectly everyday monikers (like Gretchen). So perhaps I shouldn’t judge the heroine of this series too quickly, even though her name is, in fact, “Fade.”

Fade, it seems, grew up in Africa but ended up moving to France to live with her uncle. (Given that this is shôjo of a certain vintage, just about anything could have led to this development. My money is on a car accident that took place while rushing an important serum to a remote village, but my secret heart hopes a pride of lions were involved.) Fade and her uncle don’t hit it off. (Perhaps he prejudges her based on her name.) But she manages by becoming involved in the fashion industry, making friends, and building a career.

It ran for eight volumes originally and was subsequently republished in four thicker volumes. I honestly don’t know if it’s any good, as Naka seems to still be relatively off the radar of English-language readers. She doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, even though she’s worked steadily since the 1970s. She hasn’t even been published in French. But the covers are pretty in a “Who would ever wear that?” way, aren’t they? The covers have sort of an Erté vibe to them.

This week’s radio programming has me curious about the work of a relatively unknown-to-me member of the Year 24 Group, Yumiko Ôshima, so let’s take a look at some of her works!

It seems like her best-known is The Star of Cottonland, which ran for seven volumes in Hakusensha’s LaLa. It’s about a kitten who falls in love with the human who cares for her and assumes that she’ll grow up into a human at some point so they can be together. When this dream is derailed, she hears of Cottonland, a place where dreams come true, and she sets off to find it. It’s credited with popularizing the cat-girl aesthetic (the kitten is rendered as a human with cat-ears), and it won the Kodansha Award. It was also adapted into an animated motion picture. My limited experience with manga pets falling in love with their owners has left me a bit unenthusiastic about that particular trope, but it’s a classic, and it’s from a Year 24 Group member, so I must support its eventual publication in English and hope for the best.

The title alone is enough to make me want someone to publish Banana Bread no Pudding, which ran for one volume in Shueisha’s Monthly Seventeen. Who doesn’t like banana bread? And pudding? This one’s about a young woman who feels adrift as her beloved older sister plans to marry. The younger sister becomes involved with an older, closeted gay man. I don’t need to tell you that this isn’t the solution for anything, except possibly a deportation threat, but I’d still read about it.

Ôshima seems to pack a lot into one volume with Tanjou!, which ran in Shueisha’s Margaret. A high-school girl gets pregnant to escape her strict home life, which (and I cannot stress this enough) isn’t the solution for anything, but props to Ôshima for addressing it way back in 1970. The pregnancy ends up being the least of the girl’s woes, or it at least seems to trigger a whole bunch of new woes, which is certainly more realistic than Teen Mom seems to be.

We’re back to cats, though in a vastly different context, with Guuguu Datte Neko de Aru, an autobiographical series that’s running in Kadokawa Shoten’s Hon no Tabibito. It’s about the loss of Ôshima’s beloved cat, subsequent writers block and illness, and the healing power of the new kitten she welcomes into her life. I think I must have something in my eye. Excuse me.