Kei Ichikawa's A Long & Short Love Story Arrives in English Print
The release gives English readers their first physical edition of a Kei Ichikawa title, a creator whose best-known BL series Blue Sky Complex has no current English print availability.
Reporting from 2 sources: Anime UK News, Yatta-Tachi.
Yen Press released the first English physical edition of Kei Ichikawa's boys' love manga A Long & Short Love Story. The volume collects twenty short chapters that follow childhood friends and neighbors Ibuki and Kippei through high school and beyond. The story begins when Ibuki kisses Kippei, a moment that shifts their friendship into something tentative and new. The chapters are brief vignettes, each preceded by a full-page color illustration. Seasonal markers such as fireworks, the school cultural festival, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and New Year track the passage of time. Katelyn Smith translated the work and Aila Nagamine handled lettering. The original project ran in the magazine Ciel and was planned as a one-year series but stretched to three. Ichikawa's earlier series Stray Bullet Baby has been available digitally from Kodansha since 2018, but this is her first print release in English. The volume uses high-quality paper and spot color inside the black-and-white panels to emphasize small details like winter-chilled noses or a splash of blue sky. The last chapter closes the relationship arc without melodrama, and an illustrated afterword explains the unusual format.
The volume uses high-quality paper, which Anime UK News notes helps the colors "sing." Spot color inside the black-and-white panels picks out small details: red nose-tips in winter, the glossy pink of a tulip, a sudden splash of blue sky.
The Yatta-Tachi reviewer read a digital copy and found the spot color pages "really strange, but not too distracting." The same reviewer notes that the short chapters leave little room to understand the chemistry between Ibuki and Kippei. "A lot of the characterization hinges on the short conversations, so it's hard to get a good grasp of what makes the two characters similar or different from each other."
Both outlets describe the afterword. Ichikawa explains that the project was conceived as a series of short stories with color covers for Ciel magazine, which produced the unusual format. What was planned as a one-year run stretched to three.
Anime UK News calls the volume "slice of life par excellence" and says it is "almost an art book" because of the number of full-page color illustrations. The review also notes that Blue Sky Complex, Ichikawa's best-known BL series, is no longer available on the now-defunct futekiya and Manga Planet services.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.