First up ~ it’s only a coincidence that all of my reviews so far are published by Seven Seas.

Second ~ I was planning on this being a full series post, but as I reread v1 and started writing, I think the series deserves a full volume by volume review. So, hang tight for the next two volume reviews over the course of the coming month.

Let’s get started! Goodbye, My Rose Garden by Dr. Pepperco is another Manga I came into blind. Saw it on the shelf at my local comic shop, read an overview online, and decided to pick it up. While this is a short series (only three volumes) I’m slightly hopeful we’ll have an opportunity to revisit this world in the future. Dr. Pepperco stated in the afterward of v3 that they’d like to revisit and tell the ‘what happens next’ and some of the ‘what happened to…’ stories, should the opportunity present itself. It would be awesome if, like Saburouta did with Citrus+, we get the extension / continuation at some point.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden is so many things, and surprisingly, does many of them well. It’s a Yuri story, a period piece, a book about books, a chance to draw cute maid outfits, and an exploration of societal / familial expectations and weighing those against individual wants / needs.

Characters: Our two MCs are Hanako, a young Japanese woman who is an aspiring author and Lady Alice Douglas, an English Noble who invites Hanako into her home, offers her employment, and an opportunity to meet the elusive novelist Victor Franks ~ whom Hanako has traveled to England to try to meet. Lady Alice’s sole condition for the introduction: Hanako must agree to kill Lady Alice.

As the story progresses, we meet others that play fairly significant roles to keep the plot moving forward, but other than Lord Edward and a brief mention of Eliza (we’ll meet them shortly), I’m going to leave out any additional introductions for this review.

The Art: The gowns, clothing, and setting are all drawn beautifully. I often found myself staring at the outfits and imagining them as a cosplay before being smacked back to reality with the complexity of this era’s clothing (~1900 England). The settings have such painstaking detail ~ such as the drawings of Lady Alice’s library or rose garden ~ that they evoke the sense of being very real places that you can travel to England to visit and see with your own eyes.

Story Impressions: As it’s a pretty standard Yuri story, there’s a number of common plot points and tropes explored:

• Mutual longing
• Both parties afraid to act based on fear that their confessions would be rejected / taken poorly
  • Which leads to inaction and silent suffering and pain
• (So many) glances and touches that the reader just KNOWS mean so much more than the casualness the characters play them off with
• A sense that those around them feel that being a lesbian is something that is temporary / outgrown
• The hiding of secrets (in addition to their feelings / crushes) from the other
• A story line including a ‘traditional’ path of a heterosexual relationship
  • Parents and others close to the characters that push for that path
• Feelings of conflict / inner turmoil balancing individual wants and needs in their life against the expectations others have for them

There’s also a couple of somewhat predictable twists in the series ~ none rising to the M. Night Shyamalan level of “What a Twist!!!” but they’re there. That said, I was pleasantly surprise that right until the end of the series, I really didn’t know what pathway(s) Lady Alice would choose.

I chose this spread for a couple reasons. First up ~ Lady Alice’s nature towards her staff is really highlighted in her kindness. She invited Hanako to London to look at fashions ostensibly to help her learn to select appropriate accessories for Lady Alice and to provide Hanako a skill for when she’s gone, but ends up having Hanako try on the various pieces under the guise of educating her in a topic essential for her journey as a novelist. Second, the details in the setting, their hats, dresses, and accessories are stunning. Third: Violet Evergarden parallel anyone?

Additionally, this scene mimics an earlier one where the pair are evaluating two accessories for Lady Alice to wear ~ one, a sapphire, that Hanako says matches Alice’s eyes, the other a Heliolite, also called a Sunstone, (as an aside, while Sunstone is not a manga, it is a graphic novel series that might be worth some discussion) which Alice says “Your eyes are the same color. Perhaps the Sun is caught within you as well.”

All of this sweet yuri was too good to last though. A bit more than halfway through (around page 100), we meet Lord Edward ~ Lady Alice’s betrothed. Outwardly, he seems like ‘A Good Guy™’ but there’s something about him that I just don’t like… Let’s take a look at a meeting he has with Hanako following the dinner he shared with Lady Alice and a subsequent conversation with a friend of his:

I really debated between these pages and the next two, in the end, I settled on this one as his face in the final panel really captures something about my unease with him. To Tarantino here, there’ve been some hints, allegations, and things left unsaid about Lady Alice’s orientation and ‘proclivities’ by various characters up until now, but it wasn’t until a few pages before this that it was clearly laid out by Edward’s friend and spurred his course of action to confront Hanako.

Hanako’s expression in the top panel of the left page gives us some indication that she hasn’t picked up on the teasing and hints tossed around by other staff and this is likely the first time she’s confronted with the sense that Lady Alice might be a lesbian. Fortunately, Hanako is strong in her conviction that people should be free to love how they want and, even though their relationship is purely platonic up to this point, she pushes back against Lord Edward to defend both, her relationship with Lady Alice and Lady Alice’s right to love how she chooses.

Hanako reports this conversation to Lady Alice, which gives us an opportunity for a little exposition. Using Oscar Wilde’s death and disgrace as an example, Lady Alice parallels his family’s shame to the damage her family’s honor would suffer should she be outed. Clearly, this is the thing she fears above all else, to the point that it was the driving force to ask Hanako to kill her, rather than try to accept her sapphic tendencies.

Although their relationship is platonic to this point, there has been some hinting through Alice’s inner monologues that she is attracted to Hanako in the same way she was to a previous woman, which; in turn sparks her desire to push her away to ‘protect her’ from the rumors that she herself is subject to, especially after Lord Edward’s accusation.

An item I picked up in my second read-through as part of writing the review are the subtle references to Eliza ~ Lady Alice’s former Governess, whom she is rumored to have fallen in love with. As a result, Eliza was sent away and ends up teaching women in Japan. We briefly see that Eliza was also a contemporary of Hanako’s in Nagasaki in 1899, and was the one who taught her English and English customs. Initially, I missed this until the characters put it together in a later volume, though through the reread, it’s actually pretty obvious that these Elizas are one in the same.

So ~ with that at the end of v1, we have most of the pieces of the puzzle on the table for us already. Now we get to start putting those pieces together to see what the final picture will be!

Rating Time! On the strength of the art and Hanako’s personality (and the potential I see in Lady Alice) ~ Goodbye, My Rose Garden v1 gets an 8/10.

• Strengths
  • The clothing, the maid uniforms, the backgrounds, and the settings ~ the art
  • Both of our MCs are adult women
  • Both MCs hold strong convictions and are are as fierce as they are intelligent
• Weaknesses
  • Some of the motivations behind the character actions come across a little two-dimensionally (we don’t see Lord Edward as a fully developed character, more of a foil to Lady Alice and Hanako’s relationship)
  • The twists are somewhat predictable
  • Three volumes is a little short to fully dive into the full background of Lady Alice and Hanako
  • We also could benefit from further exploration into the relationship both women had with Eliza

I encourage you to support the author and purchase from your Local Comic Shop or an authorized retailer for Seven Seas Entertainment. (Official Seven Seas series page HERE.)