The Mimosa Confessions Vol III
Normally, I try to avoid reading books on my computer. I already spend most of my day going between looking at the bad (objective) screen (work) and the bad for me screen (basically everything else in the house) so spending time with an actual book like in ye olden times is a nice change of pace. However, when I got a ping over on Bluesky that the third volume of Mei Hachimoku’s The Mimosa Confessions had released early on digital, I knew sacrifices would need to be made and I ended up binging it over the course of a few hours and a cup of tea. My only regret is that now my wait for the fourth is going to feel one month longer. Why could have possibly foreseen this? Not I…not I
-SPOILER WARNING-
I started reading the series in the Spring of the Year of Luigi (2024) upon the release of the first volume and both the story and Kukka’s remarkable greyscale insert artwork have been bouncing around in the back of my mind since. The story revolves around Ushio Tsukinoki, a teenage transgirl, navigating coming out and the early phases of her transition while attending high school in rural Japan. Even though Ushio sits at the center of the story like the sun in our universe, our perspective is anchored to that of her well-intentioned and often painfully light novel dude™-coded childhood, Sakuma Kamiki.
Over the course of the first two volumes of the story, events have predominantly focused on how Ushio’s transition has impacted the people around her. The prince of the high school suddenly coming out as transgender landed like a rock in a still pond sending ripples throughout the shrinking rural community the story is set in. With conflict at home and at school, we readers see a range of responses from gushing acceptance to equally vitriolic hostility. There are enough layers to each of the ensuing situations to make an ogre and/or onion seem straightforward. However, Ushio herself is mostly a passive actor in these scenarios. Things happen to her and her reservation with expressing her own thoughts and desires makes things complicated for even her best intentioned friends. She also rarely talks about herself without couching it in something self-deprecating enough to make my Vine-addled millennial mind stop and think “HaHaHa, I do that.”
The third volume of the series marks a turning point for both her character and for the series as a whole. By and large, the ripples spreading from her transition have settled. The third volume even opens with a scene of Ushio playing volleyball with the other girls in her class as part of an Intramural game. As someone who has been researching for an upcoming video on the cultural history of testosterone and it’s ongoing role in women’s athletics over on my youtube channel, I was ready for this to be the jumping off point for a story arc about other girls feeling uncomfortable competing alongside and against Ushio. It almost writes itself. Someone complains and Ushio weighs how her transition might keep her from competing in sports from now. It’s low-hanging fruit even.
To my pleasant surprise, nothing happened. In the eyes of the girls on both teams, Ushio is just another girl: a very athletic girl but still just another girl. It’s actually really refreshing to see a story where a trans character is allowed to be strong and also still unquestionably a woman. After the game, she’s even invited out to girl talk: a secret ritual often puzzled over by teenage boys and the writers of 90’s cartoons that made it look way more exciting than it actually is. In fact, practically everyone at school now sees Ushio as just another girl. She might even be more popular as a princess than she ever was as a prince.
That newfound sense of inclusion is also reflected in Kukka’s artwork for the series. In prior volumes, Ushio is ethereal. Whether she’s at a distance, out of focus or out of step with the other elements of the composition. There was always this sense that she somehow didn’t belong or would melt if you got too close to her like a snowflake. In this volume, she’s more “solid.” She’s interacting with other characters, centered in-frame and completely present with whatever is going on. It’s really something special to see an author and artist so synchronized across their different mediums.
It’s also worth noting the effort that has gone into Ushio’s character design in comparison to the other girls in the series. Her hair is shorter, her body less curved, shoulders broader, etc but again those features are never weighed against her femininity. If they’re even commented on, it’s complimentary. A great deal of thought must have gone into portraying her and it’s always welcome to see a trans character that is visually depicted with this level of care as opposed to drawing another femme character and leaving the elaboration to the narrative.
Unfortunately, there are a handful of characters that remain steadfast in their refusal to accept Ushio for who she is. Hence, the drama of this third volume pivots into parallel plotlines centered around two different characters. Fusuke Noi is an old track teammate of Ushio’s who still vocally opposes her transition. Arisa Nishizono is a classmate who now finds herself ostracized by other students and the target of someone else's harassment. Different as these characters are, they’re both cases of characters who try to control the behaviors of the people around them to preserve their own comfort and end up damaging those same relationships. I have to applaud how this series goes beyond having antagonists that are one-dimensionally transphobic. Instead, their motivations and subsequent failings are multi-faceted, pitiably and distinctly human.
Of the two, Noi’s arc was the more compelling to me. There was a time he might have called Ushio his closest friend and rival although unbeknownst to him that feeling was not mutual. For him to accept Ushio as she is, he has to let go of the person he thought he knew, the relationship he thought they shared and who he thought he was to her. Doing even one of those, nevermind all three is simply a bridge too far. In his own mind, that Ushio had this entire side of herself that he knew nothing about is impossible. He knows who she really is better than anyone; even Ushio herself. When she tells Noi herself that she switched from sprinting to distance running not so they could run together but because she didn’t want her legs to get too muscular, Noi cannot get his head around it.
His desperate solution is to challenge Ushio to a race. If he wins, she has to rejoin the men’s track team. To the novel’s credit, no one involved seems to actually think this is anything but an asinine proposal. That self-awareness in the writing makes Noi’s character even more pitiable. There’s a line in one of the rare chapters switching to another character’s perspective where Noi admits that he probably wouldn’t have a problem accepting the transition of anyone else. He’s not flatley transphobic; at least in his own mind. Noi even goes as far as calling Ushio a traitor. So what could she possibly have betrayed? The rest of the team is fine with her quitting. Heck, some of them even consider asking her out. No, this betrayal is more personal. She has committed the high crime of making him personally uncomfortable and the only way Noi can be made whole is for Ushio to go back to acting like the person he wants her to be strictly for his own sake. His refusal to let go of a person that never existed tragically shuts him out of any kind of relationship with the actual person standing in front of him.
It’s not something unfamiliar to me which helped drive the point home. There was a period where my parents and I were not on speaking terms. Instead, I would periodically get these long letters from my mother questioning my mental health and using anecdotes from my childhood as examples of how she knows who I am better than I do. Did you know that liking dinosaurs when you were a kid means you must be a boy? Apparently, my mother had never heard the truth universally acknowledged, that any child who watches Jurassic Park a little too young must be in want of dinosaurs. Eventually, I had to shut the door on my parents until they were ready to let go of their idea of who I was as a person. Honestly, it was a little painful seeing that dynamic and conclusion reflected in the narrative here and I’m sure I’m not the only reader with a personal story about this same kind of dynamic.
Dinosaurs simply transend gender
In comparison, I didn’t find Arisa’s narrative as compelling. Increasingly ostracized by her peers following the events of the preceding novels, Arisa finds herself faced with the possibility that one of her friends shared that Arisa had a crush on Ushio prior to her transition after a bully makes it public knowledge at their school. Like Noi, Arisa finds herself lashing out and calling the few friends she has left “traitors” for threatening her perception of herself and her relationships with the people around her. It’s not that the allegation is untrue but the fact that it is true and someone she trusted would break her confidence that makes her so reactive. That shared thread connecting Arisa and Noi, prioritizing their comfort over anything else, is such a tragically human failing. I’ve already used the word but pitiable really is the best way I can think to describe them.
There is another, thankfully more positive, theme threaded throughout the third volume as well that I’d be remiss not to touch on. During the preceding two volumes of the series, Ushio has mostly been a character that things happen to but rarely an active participant. Since Sakuma found her crying on a bench in the first volume, she has been posting more W’s than the ‘95 Chicago Bulls. Toward the end of the second volume we started to see sparks of confidence from Ushio but those have definitively caught as of the third installment. However, it remains to be seen how controlled that burn actually is.
Graphic design is my passion
Throughout the story, other characters have described Ushio as cool-headed, collected and maybe even gasp mature for her age. It’s the gifted kid trifecta. As a reader, to me, it’s easier for me to read her as repressed. You know, like a gifted kid. Keeping the closet door closed takes active effort. Eventually it becomes automatic and it takes time to unlearn all those habits. As she gets more confident, she wants to express herself more. As she expresses herself more, it becomes more obvious that she doesn’t have a strong grasp on her emotions. She even seems uncomfortable when Sakuma starts talking about his own feelings more openly, chiding him for “taking it too far.”
There’s a trend in queer fiction to write characters that are overly saccharine. Thankfully, it doesn’t hold true here. Ushio can be impulsive, angry, jealous and even manipulative when she gets caught up in what professionals are apt to call an “estradiol moment.” Even the whole asinine race situation with Noi is partially her own fault. His ribbing gets under her skin and Ushio agrees to his terms only to kick herself for doing so not even a full chapter later. She’s no longer a character that things happen to but an active participant ‐‐ sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
It’s both a compelling and realistic way for this character to develop. It’s a deep spoiler but I don’t think there’s a better example than in the last scene of the story. As things are coming to a close, Ushio and Sakuma are trying to decide how to celebrate her ever expanding collection of W’s. When Ushio suggests going to Sakuma’s house. Our poor oblivious protagonist starts mentally planning a party for sometime in the future except Ushio meant heading over there right now with the flimsy pretense of wanting to say hello to Sakuma’s sister. Turns out she’s not home but they can still hangout in Sakuma’s bedroom until she gets back. What a huge bummer! Totally unforeseeable!
At this point, you can probably guess where this is going. Once they’re alone, Ushio asks for a hug. Sakuma’s internal narration makes it abundantly clear that a hug from someone in their respective positions is a fairly intimate romantic gesture. Ushio is half-russian though so it’s also possible that she’s just European. I’m not joking. This is actually Sakuma’s line of thinking. Either way. he agrees to the hug when rapid onset clumsiness causes Ushio to trip him onto the bed. Who could have possibly foreseen this?
Turns out all those overtures about wanting to come over and asking for a hug were just the thinnest possible pretext for making a very aggressive, and dubiously consensual, sexual advance on a guy who had turned her down before. Before realizing how manipulative she’s being and stopping herself, Ushio tells Sakuma that another student had asked her out the other day. It was someone from the track team that knew her before her transition. Despite turning him down, the exchange left her overflowing with the unassailable notion that she is, in fact, that bitch™.
Years ago, I got a message out of the blue via facebook from a guy I had gone to high school with. He hadn’t made the connection yet and decided to slide into my DMs like the sound of thunder. I sat there not knowing how to break it to him that we had gone to an all-boys high school together for what felt like an eternity before he messaged back with the most audible “OOOOOOOOOOOOH” even put to inaudible text. I was expecting to be called a slur but instead we ended up chatting. He came out to me as bi, told me how happy he was for me and I felt like I could lift an entire gym. So yeah, I speak from experience when I say that I know how getting that kind of affirmation from someone who knew you before your transition is like grabbing the third rail of confidence.
In my prior entry about this series I mentioned that I was starting to wonder if Ushio might suck as a person. Now, I believe the appropriate scientific term is “messy bitch.” As an adult reading the exchange, it felt like watching a car crash. However, I was a teenager once and could easily see myself having ended up on either side of this situation when I was that age. Whomst amongst us has not wrecked themselves having failed to check themselves? Certainly not I.
Mei Hachimoku has done something quite exceptional and written characters that feel not just like people I could have known but even people I could have been. That this series allows its characters to be imperfect and make these kinds of consequential choices that will follow them is what keeps me thinking about it. Now I begin my long wait for the fourth volume and the next chapter of Ushio’s hot mess arc. I am waiting warmly.
Until next entry. Be nice to yourself.