Before I get to the actual review, I'd like to introduce myself. Hi, I am Ashe, and I am a non-binary trans boy. My experience with gender has been rough occasionally, but I can say that being trans, to me, has not been a punishment nor a blessing. Being trans only means that the gender you were assigned at birth doesn’t match your actual gender. It doesn’t imply misery or sorrow, it doesn’t have to.
And that’s why I enjoyed this manga so much. Our main character, Yuzu, is a trans boy in school. The manga is mainly narrated from the perspective of Ichigo, his best friend, who doesn’t know much about trans people and is very surprised after Yuzu’s coming out.
Every chapter here is composed by one page, in which we can see part of Yuzu's and Ichigo's life in school, mainly adressing the boy's social transition. I won’t go into much detail about what they talk about, since it’s a really short manga and it’s worth the reading, but I’d like to mention some things that may or may not contain spoilers. If you’d like to go in blind, I advise you to stop reading here and I hope you enjoy it!
That being said, I’m going to comment now on Ichigo. We’re being told the story from her perspective, which I find a good opportunity to connect with the readers, since most of the people who are going to read the manga may not know much about trans people. She is quite respectful, even though she doesn’t understand, and I think that is very important. The only thing that bugged me about her is that she often uses she/her pronouns while talking to herself about Yuzu but changes to he/him while talking out loud. I don’t really know if that’s a translation mistake or she’s meant to do so, but it maybe shows that she doesn’t actually see Yuzu as a boy until the very last pages, which, one could argue, takes part in the development of her character.
Talking about gender, there’s also one downside to Yuzu no Koto. I may be asking too much from a manga that comes from a society that forces trans people to go through surgery in order to change their legal documents, but I find that there are some missed opportunities in explaining and educating about trans people in a fun interesting way for the reader. For instance, the use of “the transgerders” as a noun is quite pathologizing, but Ichigo uses it sometimes. The trans community usually prefers transgender or just trans as an adjective. It’s not polite to refer to a minoritized group of people saying things like “the blacks'', if those adjectives are not meant to be nouns. Ichigo also says things like “used to be a girl” or “a boy in a girl’s body”. I understand where that comes from, I just wish there was some explanation behind why that’s not actually like that.
Again, I know this is just a short cute manga that doesn’t go into much detail about being trans, it talks more about the social part of it, which is actually very important. We can see through some comedic scenes how Yuzu acts and, more importantly, how people react to him being “the other”. Although we don’t see a lot of the relationship between Yuzu and Ichigo, we know she supports him. We may be given some hints about whether they are romantically attracted to each other or not, but romance doesn’t play a huge role in the manga, and that’s okay. I love that it is up to the interpretations of the reader as to whether Yuzu is bi, straight or even gay. As a gay trans dude, I hate it when people just assume that I “became” a man because I wanted to be with women. Trans people are not trans because they want to be something else or want to be with someone of another gender, and that the manga manages to address that point in a certainly well-explained way.
To sum it up, I enjoyed a lot this manga. It doesn't picture being trans as something horrible and indesirable, it's just something that happens, something you are born with and everyone should accept. We don't see any bullying or malicious intentions from anyone, instead we see the confusion and excitement that comes from change, as well as the fear of change itself, occasionally. ​It is really wholesome. We are not shown the difficulties of being trans, it doesn’t talk about the murders or hate crimes, the fewer oportunities and all the discrimination, but that’s okay. We are surrounded by those kinds of stories everyday. We already know how difficult it is to go against everything we’ve been taught. But here we see that being trans AND happy is possible. That people around you can and should accept you, that you don’t have to be “normal” to fit it. That you can be a girly boy, or a boyish girl, and still be trans. That your gender doesn’t determine the things you enjoy and you should never settle for something that doesn’t sit right with you. And that's something that we don't often get to see in the little trans representation we have. You can really tell the author is trans, that they care about the story. We need more people writing about themselves and their communities, we need to hear more voices. This story is needed, it’s just the beginning, and I hope to see many many more like this.

Thank you for reading.