花と砂糖と君が好き by 乙女サバ

花と砂糖と君が好き (I love flowers and sugar) by 乙女サバ is  actually not a single dōjinshi, but a series of six that I've been trying to hunt down in its entirety for the past year or so: I managed to get 1, 4, and 6 so far, as the series has concluded a while ago and, as often happens with dōjinshi, back catalog is tight.

While the first volume was one of my many, many impulse purchases, it also proved to be a fortuitous one: Otome Saba's ongoing series about the misadventures of high school students Sayuu and her friend / foil Kanae is not only charming and very well drawn, with a rough yet peculiarly kawaii art style: it's also fairly simple linguistically, as it uses very little slang, so I've been using it for Japanese practice.

The story is a typical slice of life / fantastic realism piece. Sayuu, a cheerful but perennially dieting high schooler, has a tendency to get lost in daydreaming; while her classmate Kanae is a silent beauty whose gruff demeanor belies her great maturity. In each volume, Sayuu get excessively excited or nervous about something, be it her excessive weight, her plans for the future, or whether she is friendly enough to those around her. Sayuu's hyperactivity then crashes against Kanae's blasé attitude to pretty much everything, sending poor Sayuu into a spiral of self-reflection which takes the form of a daydream sequence - she might find herself climbing an endless staircase when faced with questions about her career choice, and so on. Through the insights of these 'fantastic realist' situations she then understand what needs to be done to overcome her own fears, and usually move a step forward in her more than slightly yuri relationship with Kanae.

The dōjinshi themselves are b&w, but feature very distinctly colored covers with a kind of cout-out lacy border that really adds a touch of charm. Saba's tract is somewhat sketchy, with a few anatomical difficulties here and there, but overall a very good balance between almost chibi cuteness and actual anthropomorphic proportions. There is a vague ongoing story but, overall, each volume can be taken as a stand-alone, as there are really only a handful of characters and their relationships are fairly stereotypical (a few of the volumes feature two of Kane and Sayuu's teachers, as well as a couple of their classmates).

The additional good news is that, on Saba's Pixiv, you can actually read all of the series in its entirety! Which really underlines what a fantastic thing Pixiv is for people like me, always on the hunt for that circle's web site or that dōjinka's long lost works. If then, you want to see more of her work, you can also check out her web 1.0-tastic page.