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Our story begins on Akira Okudaira’s first day of high school. She’s excited to commute to school by train for the first time, but she’s also uncharacteristically anxious. Luckily she meets a nice girl named Fumi Manjome on the train and together they stand as allies against the travails of rush hour train travel.

But as it turns out, this isn’t the first time the girls have met. They were actually best friends in kindergarten until the Manjome family moved away and they lost touch with each other. Now Fumi is back in town and their mothers hold a surprise reunion for the girls!

And Akira’s sudden appearance in Fumi’s life couldn’t have come at a better time. Fumi recently broke up with her first love, her cousin Chizu, an older girl who is getting married to a man.

But when she meets the charismatic Yasuko, Fumi discovers a potential cure for a broken heart, and the two start going out. But the joy of new love isn’t enough to distract Fumi from the worry about how Akira will react to her dating a girl.

Meanwhile, Akira wonders if there’s something wrong with her for not reacting negatively to Fumi’s news. She just wants to support her friend. Is that really a problem?

Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana) is a story about young women discovering who they are and who they love, with much of the action taking place in two neighboring girls’ high schools. And that matters more than you might think. Both schools are rich with histories of assertive, interesting women and of girls who love other girls. And these aren’t just ancient stories, but an ongoing tradition all the students are aware of. And it allows the young women who are queer or questioning a degree of comfort they might not otherwise have. They aren’t alone, they aren’t weird for feeling the way they do, and they have understanding friends to stand by them while they figure things out.

You can learn more about the Yuri genre here.