Yuri is a branch of manga that deals with girl romance. The genre was originally targeted toward girls, but there is a male-targeted branch as well.
Yuri (which literally translates to “lily”) encompasses everything from hardcore sex to school girl crushes where hand-holding is as far as it goes. The genre traces its roots to the early 1900s with the works of Yoshiya Nobuko. Nobuko wrote the first Japanese lesbian literature just as interest in same-sex attraction began being studied in Japan. At the same time, the first all-girls school was founded. One event brought same-sex female relationships to Japanese attention: in 1911 two Niigata Prefecture school girls killed themselves because their love for each other was forbidden. It was the first recorded case of lesbian love suicide in Japan. Five years later, Nobuko wrote her best selling girls fiction, Flower Tales, that focused on girl romance.
The first manga to feature ...
