So I’ve started re-reading Samurai Shortstop.
While I do highly encourage everyone read it, it does NOT pass the Bechedel test due to the First Higher School actively prohibiting the students interact with women. Be it the girls at the all-girls school or even their own moms. For the main character, that’s not really a problem since he doesn’t seem to have any lady friends at all and his mom is dead, but still, wtf.
And the very first sentence gives you all the content warning you need: the first chapter is a detailed description of the act of seppuku, and the entire rest of the book is about Toyo dealing with his uncle’s suicide, the claim that his father will soon join him (also suicide), and trying to find his place at school and how the Western world and his Western interests fit into what he does want to be a Japanese experience, life, and honor.
It takes place in 1890, so it’s about nine years before the events of DGS (for all you Ace Attorney fans).
Their First Higher School uniform is actually described nearly exactly like Ryuunosuke’s and Asougi’s school uniform--all black with a hat that has their school insignia on it. So that’s cool.
And now that I’ve finished college, which talked a lot of shit about having an honor code, and reading the second chapter, where the principal/headmaster was giving all the new students a review of what’s expected of them, it sounded . . . familiar.
Long story short, the lives of these sixteen-year-olds are gonna be a lot more fucked up than I remember it being, and I’m going to be making associations with certain scenes that I hadn’t before.
That’s going to be very . . . interesting.
