Lilies Blooming in 100 Days Review • Anime UK News

Muromaki is a romance/yuri mangaka who’s been active since 2020, and this is their first release in English. Originally titled as ‘100 Days of Yuri Challenge’, Lilies Blooming in 100 Days is a collection of yuri snippets and scenarios, centred on two girls falling in love, ranging in scenery from workplace to school grounds, and couple types from age gaps to cousins.

The main USP is that the whole book is full colour, and glossily printed. There’s no denying that the cover and feel of the book is gorgeous, both in terms of quality of the print and the art style. There are luscious colours, pretty framing and a variety of scenes to enjoy. If you are an artist, with a love for yuri, I would recommend getting this book as a mini art book as it were, as aside from a few manga panels, there’s a lot of whole-page spreads that I’m sure many artists would feel inspired by.

As in the title, in total there are 100 days of yuri, but they’re broken up into sections (‘one-sided love’ and ‘everyday life’ for example) with a small panel opening and ending each section, and there’s even a mini manga that opens the book, so you’ll get more than just 100 days’ worth. Each day is also a variety of content; sometimes you’ll get a single-page spread, or at times the author fits in multiple panels to tell a mini story. Regardless, each day has a title and some text to set the scene of each day, which is nice to see.

As much as I enjoyed a lot of the days, and the look of them, I wish there were more variety. First of all, there are a lot of school scenes, which often look the same and therefore start to blend into each other. The same goes for the office-based ones, since they don’t have time/space to set up each ‘company’ as it were, the offices the women end up in, or the closets they hide in, also all look the same. I ended up enjoying the days where they broke away from those visual cues the most, such as the one fantasy (knight and princess) day and one where they are in kimonos.

The same can be said for the pairings and even the faces; it seems that Muromaki has only a handful of faces and hairstyles up their sleeves, so a few days look like they feature the same cast over and over, rather than different girls falling in love across the book. This isn’t helped that we have multiples of the same set-up, such as four Honour Students x Trendy Girl scenarios and multiple cousin days too, just named differently. I think this idea/book would have benefitted from multiple mangaka pitching together, so that not only would it have allowed for different art styles to prevent the copy and paste of the same face designs, but also allowed for unique ideas, or at least unique interpretations of the same idea, as one mangaka’s concept of a student x teacher relationship won’t be the same as another’s. I’m not saying that Muromaki isn’t talented, but that the book gets repetitive fast, and might have benefitted from more cooks in the kitchen this time round.

Jenny McKeon translated the book and it’s an easy read; there are no translation notes but didn’t feel it was necessary. However if you have a habit of reading manga in the dark, or at least in poor lighting (for whatever reason) this book isn’t great for that, as a lot of the text is quite small, and some of the colour of the headings also blended into the background, making it hard to read.

Lilies Blooming in 100 Days is a fun book in small bursts, to get a bit of yuri love here and there, maybe even inspire your creative works. It looks lovely on the shelf, but it’s not ideal to read one sitting as a lot of the scenarios blur together after a while.