Iguana Girl

Iguana Girl (イグアナの娘) is a manga by Moto Hagio published in Flowers. It was adapted into a television drama in 1996.

It is about a young girl, Rika, whose mother views her as being ugly, and favours her other daughter, Mami. Rika thinks of herself as ugly and as an iguana, but after her mother's death, realises that her mother was also an ugly iguana.

Iguana Girl reflects Hagio's own relationship with her mother, and it took her "years to write this story". Hagio saw an iguana in a documentary on television and identified with it, feeling it was "lamenting its failure to become a human, just like me".

Manga
This story was first published in the November 1991 issue of Shogakukan Josei mangazine Petit Flower. Shogakukan delivered the tankōbon release not until 1994, and it benefited a re-edition in 2000. It will be translated into English as part of the Moto Hagio anthology A Drunken Dream and other stories by Fantagraphics in 2010.

Television drama
The screenplay was by Kazue Okada, and the episodes were directed by Kazuhisa Imai and Shinjo Takehiko. The cast included Miho Kanno, Yoshinori Okada, Rena Komine, Hitomi Sato, Koji Yamaguchi, Miyuki Komatsu, Takeshi Izawa, Kanako Enomoto, Naomi Kawashima and Masao Kusakari. The theme tune to the series is Elton John's "Your Song". The television drama was released on DVD in 2001.