#subtitles from furritsubs

[deliriousblue]

— Even though I've just been doing what I love so far, people would say I'm such a family-oriented person, or that I'd be a great mom, and everything else. They assume that I'm doing it all for the sake of a man. And I really hated that. I'm really happy I met you, Kasuga! — I feel the same way too. — I guess you're hungry. Shall we eat?

TSUKURITAI ONNA TO TABETAI ONNA | EPISODE 6

[lurkingshan]

A love letter to TsukuTabe

I loved the first season of this drama, but this second season (really more of a straightforward continuation of the first season narrative, which ended unfinished) is a remarkable glow up for an already strong show. These creators did not come to play, and they had a lot to say about the experiences of women living in patriarchal cultures.

This drama tackled so many experiences that afab people go through as they try to build a life for themselves under pressure to conform to societal norms. We have so many different lived experiences of women in this show, all of whom are queer by way of falling outside the lines of what is expected of them:

Nomoto, who experiences a queer awakening, wrestles with the specifics of her sexual identity, and bravely forges ahead despite feeling pressure from her family to marry a man and procreate

Kasuga, who breaks with her family's expectations that she be a caretaker and insists on living her own life, even if she knows the culture she lives in will sometimes make it hard

Yako, who owns her asexual and lesbian identities, proudly forges a life for herself, builds community for herself and others, and advocates for that community both publicly and privately

Nagumo, who struggles to connect with others because of her eating disorder and mental health struggles and lives a solitary existence as a result, but through building bonds with other women finds the strength to begin healing

Sayama, who pushes herself to date around because she feels pressure to live up to expectations to marry, before reconsidering whether that is a goal she actually has for her life and realizing she is happy being unmarried

Fujita, who struggles through years of an unhappy marriage in which she is subjugated to her husband's family before breaking free and pursuing a divorce so she can live happily on her own

It means a lot to me to see a show that cares so deeply about these women and their stories, that gives them so much space to explore and think and communicate their feelings. And they do it all so naturally, by allowing them to form bonds with one another and figure out who they are and what they want through their relationships with each other. This story is all about how we can grow through kindness and compassion from others, and how important it is to pay that support back in kind. It's such a beautiful and unique and desperately needed message in the current media landscape.

And there's more story yet to tell! I have no idea if they will get a third season, but I will be seated for as much of this story as the creators want to make. I would love to see them tackle Nomoto and Kasuga's life as a committed couple, their coming out to their families, and the ongoing lives of the community of queer women around them, which will only continue to broaden and deepen. Like What Did You Eat Yesterday? this show could go on and on forever, and I hope it does. I have so much gratitude for all the people involved in making this show, and to @furritsubs for translating the English subtitles so that international fans could also enjoy it. And if you're seeing this and haven't watched it yet, I am telling you, it is so worth your time.

[atesan]

But still, what is it about these people? What do they get out from bothering others?

TSUKURITAI ONNA TO TABETAI ONNA SHE LOVES TO COOK AND SHE LOVES TO EAT

Subtitles by Furritsubs

[funarisjournal]

It has arrived!!

Wow! It did NOT take long to get a hold of this...but here it is~ This is Season 1 of "Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna," or "She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat," on DVD. This isn't a review, per se, just some introspection alongside posting what came with this set. Read below the cut!

I got into this story via the comic first, and only late last year, so when the announcement of S2 was starting soon, I eventually found out 1) there was a drama to begin with (and they look so close to the actual characters??) and 2) someone had fansubbed the first season already (thanks Furritsubs!). I fell in love with the drama, fell in love with the story all over again, and caught up just in time for S2 to start airing and the fansubs to come out every weekend~ I was there for Episode 30, live lol

Here we are, 6 months later, and S2 is getting a DVD set as well, and I pre-ordered so fast lol. That alone, however, also got me pumped into actually buying S1 in the meantime. This is my first overseas proxy purchase, and I'm very satisfied with the whole process. I've done regular business with cdjapan before, but that was long...long... ago. More recently, I had used them to directly (not proxy) buy that Sailor Moon Raisonné book, and that also came in great condition. But not as fast as this! No damages, it came here from Japan in literally 2 days...it's new (though I did say I was okay with secondhand). It's just so beautiful.

I can't watch it yet, unfortunately, as I don't have a region-free player at this time. I mean, I know what to expect - slightly lower quality video and no subtitles (not even Japanese), but there IS a bonus video in here. Gonna taunt me for a while. While I am sad this show isn't considered for selling in Bluray, I'm happy to have an official product in my hands, and I always have the fansub files to watch and take screenshots of, which have the quality of the raw tv broadcast.

For now, though, enjoy these preliminary photos of the inside, reversible cover, and some pages from the bonus booklet. There's an interview in there with the scriptwriter that I'll have to work on later for you all to enjoy, if you're into behind-the-scenes stuff!

[fluent-in-lesbianism]

How are you watching she loves to cook & she loves to eat? I can’t find it 😭

You can stream the first season with English subs here.

S2 requires a bit more work to watch. Furritsubs has all the episodes and Eng subtitles available to download here.

Download VLC to play the videos and use the subtitles. Once you've downloaded both the videos and subtitle files from Furritsubs, you can use VLC to play the video and insert the subs into the video. The video will play as normal with English subs.

Keep in mind that you'll have to individually download each episode AND sub file, then match the correct episode with the correct sub file. There are 22 episodes total for S2 so it requires a lot of downloading. Furritsubs has a page here to show you how to download and insert the subs.

If you have any trouble or get confused, just message me again and I'll walk you through it using screenshots.

[becausegoodbye]

Lesbian Inflorescence

For the longest time, I was so cautious and ashamed about reading lesbian stuff. I felt unerringly drawn to it, but I had such a powerful internal prohibition against being an intruder in that space – a shameful interloper sullying it for everyone else – that I mostly avoided it. It's only now, well into my second year of transition, that I feel like those old walls are fully breached, and I'm finally free to read all the deranged lesbian novels and sappy yuri and horny dyke poetry I want.

The amount I want, it turns out, is kind of a lot. Here are some recent favourites.

*

Monique Wittig - The Lesbian Body

This experimental French novel from 1973 hits a high watermark of sapphic insanity that I'm not sure has ever been equalled. Most of it is the narrator and her lover performing surreal erotic surgeries on each other: digging through the viscera and loving each other from the inside out. Long past the point where an ordinary person would be expected to have died, these women endure: grinning and licking each other's brains, spooling small intestines in their hands, always finding more of each other to love. Absolute engulfment.

Sakaomi Yuzaki – She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat

On the other end of the spectrum entirely: the sweetest manga imaginable about two neighbours slowly wending their way into becoming each other's most important person, through the central mechanism of cooking and eating together. Page upon page is devoted to the wordless erotics of Kasuga methodically eating large amounts of food while Nomoto grins at her starry-eyed. They make a refuge for each other from the world, and everything they need is already there. It's so fucking great.

Bonus treat: there's a live-action TV show that's also a complete delight. I watched it through with my girlfriend (always over breakfast, the rule delightfully became), and while it's even slower to build than the comic, it also has gorgeous performances from both leads. You can find video files and fan-made subtitles for season one and season two here, provided by the lovely Furritsubs.

Beautiful Barbarians: Lesbian Feminist Poetry

I'm obsessed with this collection. Published by Onlywomen Press in the UK in 1986, each author is given a photo-bio and at least four poems, and they come to you like a series of sit-down conversations with older wiser women handing you earthenware mugs of tea and instructing you how to pay attention. There are a variety of styles and concerns, but the connecting thread is the aliveness, the nearness, the groundedness. There is breath in all of these lungs, and in yours.

Takashi Ikeda – The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This

Another lovely, quiet, slice-of-life yuri manga, with delicate attention to the relationship dynamic between its two leads (already in a relationship and living together), and a lot of lived-in insights into their work as a voice actor and romance writer respectively. I love the way Wako and Sakuma are always touching in this: lovingly flopping over each other, encouragingly patting a head, lazily stroking a thigh. I sent a genuinely ridiculous number of panels from this manga to my girlfriend, all giddily captioned "us!!!" It's gorgeous.

There's one fact about this manga that's kind of odd, and that is that it is – putatively – written by a man, Takashi Ikeda. I've generally avoided yuri written by men (for obvious reasons), but this one struck me immediately as an exception. It was only once I got to Volume 4 that it became clarified for me why. In that book, a new character is introduced: a highschool baseball player who also lives in their building, and who's very nearly the first male character of the entire series. (Whatever others there are are all extremely minor and incidental.) This kid sees Wako and Sakuma out together, mistakenly believing that tall, deep-voiced Sakuma is a trans woman – and not just any trans woman, but one who's pulling it off amazingly, with a cute girlfriend and a loose comfy style and an enviable ease about her – and immediately understands, "Oh God, I want that."

The kid has a bunch of normal egg doubts ("It's not like I hate my body ... and I'm aware that I won't look good in women's clothes ... and there's no way I can be the ace of a weak baseball team if I have a woman's body ..."), but the force of the revelation is obvious. She's a young gay trans woman, and seeing Sakuma and Wako together clarified the vision of that for her. It also, at the same time, clarified for me why this series is able to be so good.

Takashi Ikeda, you can take hormones! If you want to be a woman, you can literally be one! It's a messy process, but it really does work!

I know there are different schools of thought about how rude it is to draw these kinds of inferences about others, but honestly: it just makes so much sense of the whole series. I suspected even before the transfeminine storyline in Volume 4, just because of how lovingly observed Sakuma and Wako's dynamic was and how utterly peripheral men are to their world. (More precisely: I voiced to my girlfriend my suspicion that the author was a closeted trans woman or a cis lesbian using a masculine pen name. Either way, a straight man was off the table!) The introduction of the transfeminine highschooler – and that one devastating page especially: the scrunched-up face in the bath, the lurching memory of that want, the flash of a different body – was just the cherry on top. Politely, babygirl: no cis guy is writing and drawing that. Not like that.

It's silly, but I desperately want to tell this mangaka that I have never met: I promise it's possible. You can have this kind of relationship. You can look at your body with actual affection and pride, because you chose to make it more what you want it to be. I know it seems unfeasible now, when the obstacles are so much nearer and more clarified than the rewards, but once you start: all you'll be able to regret is not having started earlier. You don't even need to go through doctors if you don't want! DIY hormones are available with just a bit of intrepid Googling. Wanting it is the only requirement. This can happen for you.

And I don't say this from the position of someone who's transitioned flawlessly and completely, who's had a panoply of surgeries and is read as a woman in 100% of social situations. I'm in a much clumsier middleground than that. The world at large doesn't quite get it, and likely never will. But where it matters most – that is: in being loved by my girlfriend as a woman, having her experience my body top-to-bottom as a feminine body, and finally living as a lesbian in a way that it's just laughable for anyone to deny – I'm already there. I thought it would take so much longer, but I'm already there. And it honestly makes all that other stuff, all the other difficulties, pale in comparison.

(Drawing of us by Sardonic Tuna, commissioned by my girlfriend and sent to me literally while I was putting the finishing touches on this blog post. Lou I love you so much 😭)

[bubblegeon]

Just for a little while. Can we stay this way?

[ahneunjin]

"Now you have someone to rely on. I'm happy for you." UCHIDA RIO as Hanno Tomoko and SUZUKI NOBOYUKI as Takahashi Ryohei Jitenshaya-san no Takahashi-kun自転車屋さんの高橋くん (2022)

[lurkingshan]

Hey Shan!!

So, while starting my exploring indian queer media project, I'm also currently working on catching upto several of the japanese qls I've missed out on in the past 3-4 months or so (a list you have indirectly heavily contributed to). But, I'm completely lost as to which shows I should start with, and I also don't have the time to watch them all. So, you're picking them for me instead!

Could you choose any 4 of the shows from your Japanese QL corner for me? I will watch what you tell me to, no further questions asked, I trust your judgement fully.

Thank you!!!

It would be my pleasure, bestie! Of the shows I've been tracking in JQL Corner since late January, here are the four I think are most worth watching (completed shows only):

She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat. Run, do not walk! I'm not sure if you've seen season 1, but if not definitely start there. Don't be intimidated by the episode count, they are only 15 mins each, so the whole show across both seasons is only 7.5 hours. You can access the files here with excellent subtitles from @furritsubs.

Perfect Propose. A simple story about childhood friends who reunite while one of them is suffering intense burnout and exhaustion due to a toxic work environment. This one is a short and sweet six episodes and you can access it on Gaga.

Ossan's Love Returns. It's a sequel but you don't have to watch the earlier seasons, it gives you all the info you need to follow the story. This show is fucking hilarious, has an amazing cast, some interesting and thought-provoking storylines, and one of my favorite drama couples. You can watch it on Gaga or, preferably, using these files with much better subs from @isaksbestpillow.

Love is Better the Second Time Around. Another six episode shortie, this time a second chance romance between adults who meet again after a bad ending in their teen years. Great characters in this one and a more mature than usual approach to intimacy. You can watch it on Gaga.

[bubblegeon]

You already turned 30. You're the only one out there dating a guy with blonde bangs, who's got piercings, and watches "Noraemon."

Despite how he looks, he's really a nice guy. 🚲 JITENSHAYA-SAN NO TAKAHASHI-KUN (2022)

[bubblegeon]

I finally found a place where I belong.

[bubblegeon]

Our love story has just begun. 🚲 JITENSHAYA-SAN NO TAKAHASHI-KUN (2022)

[ahneunjin]

Jitenshaya-san no Takahashi-kun 自転車屋さんの高橋くん | episode 8

[bubblegeon]

To be honest, I think I might actually swing the other way too. 👠 GOUKON NI ITTARA ONNA GA INAKATTA HANASHI (2022)

[bubblegeon]

Quite rare to see you bring a woman with you. 🚲 JITENSHAYA-SAN NO TAKAHASHI-KUN [1.02]