renaissance poisson

i don't really have words right now but i wanted to write this down before i go to sleep.

i am a wreck. i thought my heart was gonna break. what a fantastic roller-coaster. it's complex, honest, tough, stubborn, witty, boyish, aggressive, silly, unpredictable, erotic, deeply emotional, and completely original. i don't cry easily, but i'm sitting here with tears streaming down my face, and i can't stop. was this really just 3 volumes? these people became my friends. i sat in that abandoned building with them, and i bled with them. i don't want to leave. i might just read it again right away. or go to sleep in the hopes i'll dream about it.

on a scale of 1 to 10 this is an 11. this is a story that is everything i read BL for and find so very rarely. i will buy several copies and give them to my friends, even the ones who don't usually read BL. and i'll write my first ever fan letter to a mangaka.

darn, i wish i remembered how i found this manga -- it was through one of mangaupdates' algorithm to show you manga in some way related to a manga you had read, but i can't recall now with what i started out... hm. kimi no todoke, i think? anyway...

this was a fantastic find! i downloaded the first volume to taste test it, and when i was done, i grabbed not only the other 5 scanlated volumes but also hunted down the remaining raws. the manga has been licensed by viz, but they're way behind, and i hope the scanlators won't drop it; the scanlation is good.

before 16-yr old orphan kurebayashi teru's older brother souichiro dies of cancer, he gives her a cellphone and tells her that if she needs any help, to use it to contact a mysterious man who goes by the pseudonym of DAISY. she soon finds solace in the messages she exchanges with DAISY, he is kind and thoughtful, and he always there to encourage her when she is down. while teru is determined to make her own way despite her poverty and being bullied in school, that support is her lifeline, because whenever she is lonely, DAISY will send her email. in stark contrast to the comfortable relationship with DAISY, teru is working off a debt to the rude, inconsiderate, and obnoxious school janitor kurosaki tasuku. aside from those lovely traits, kurosaki is also lazy, a bit of a pervert, has a lousy temper, and is quick to use his fists -- but even though he makes teru do most of his own work, he also always seems to show up whenever teru needs help (being quick to use his fists is a bonus in that case). and help she needs, because not only does she get bullied, but some nefarious people are starting to hang around for reasons unknown.( read why this is great, no spoilers; graphics )



highly, highly recommended. i'll now go and seek out motomi's other works.

picked it for kame. what can i say. i have no excuse. the love is still strong; after nobuta no produce i forgive him and yamapi any sin.

actually, that's not really fair to kame -- i think he's one of the better actors of the JE boyband troup; at least as far as i have seen so far (ninomiya is my current fave). unfortunately kame, or whoever picks roles for him, has no taste, so one must be prepared for some pain. but hey, "life is pain", sez westley.

suppli is based on the josei manga by okazaki mari (not scanlated, licensed by tokyopop), which i haven't read. it's mostly a workplace love story, taking place in an ad agency. the title does not stand for the italian snack, but is short for "vitamin supplements" -- don't ask me. i've given up trying to discern rhyme or reason behind japanese titling.

minami fujii (ito misaki) is a dedicated and successful copy writer in her late twenties who's basically married to her job -- in the first episode we see that her boyfriend has had enough of that, and breaks up with her. outwardly she is is cool and put-together, but inside she's a hopeless romantic, asking herself whether there isn't something more. enter ishida yuuya (kamenashi kazuya), a young, dissheveled slacker, who gets hired as a part-time gopher by the agency. he and fujii have a "fated" encounter the morning of ishida's first day at work wherein she finds his cell phone (hot pink! with the cutest little amigurumi vampire dangling from it -- i swear kame is an otomen), and they end up both standing at an intersection watching an ad in which a puppy runs through the rain, which has them all introspective. but they don't actually meet until later. ishida pretty much falls for fujii right away, and is spurred on by his admiration for her to get more involved in actual work than he's been before, where he discovers his creative side. but fujii has only eyes for ogiwara satoshi (eita), who is the opposite of ishida -- professional, successful, and suave (unfortunately also somewhat unscrupulous). ogiwara flirts with fujii, but he is still hung up on his on again / off again mistress tanaka mizuho (ryo), who is married. yup, she also works in the ad agency, that hotbed of amorous undercurrents.

summary opinion: meh. ( read more; mildly spoilerific )

there's no overacting here (yay), the setting is interesting, and the process of developing ads, deadline pressures, and cut throat competition feel realistic to me. the production values are good. this could have been fun, but as it is i think i'd only recommend this to kame completists. or, you know, if you're really bored, or want to practice your japanese listening skills. that's something japanese TV dramas are definitely good for, because of their short runs (usually just one season of 9-12 episodes), and the fact that the modern ones use relatively simple, common japanese.

ps: koike teppei sounds even happy when he sings; it just shines through his voice. awww.

this is one of those strange occurrences where i got sucked into something i would never think i'd be attracted to. i only watched the anime because i am following two of its seiyuu around; suzumura ken'ichi and konishi katsuyuki, and that led me to find the manga and then the first live action series, and now the second -- i haven't previously touched live action adaptation of manga at all.

the manga is josei (marketed at young women), and it has a strong female lead, which is always a good thing to see -- i am still amazed how japan with all of its gender inequality creates so much fiction with competent female characters who can handle themselves and don't need any guy to rescue them from distress. now, that would of course interest me, but it's also comedy, and i am very careful with japanese comedy because 95% of it misses for me. and indeed i am glad i didn't see the live action first, because it would not have had the same effect as the anime had; i doubt i would have checked out the manga and the anime.
( click for in-depth notes; images; spoiler alert )

and speaking of crushes, fujiwara motoo is still god. bump of chicken can make me happy even if i am down. i should order the new CD.

i've just not been up to it, or even up to taking pictures. but it seems that i am finally over what turned out to be horrid side effects of the wellbutrin. i can't say that it's doing much for my depression, but i want to give it another month without miserable side effects, since those make it hard to assess how i am really feeling. hopefully this journal will provide some content again. happy new year, y'all!

i've mostly been hermitting, and been keeping myself busy with reading; i'm back into mysteries (mostly oldies like ngaio marsh and andre garve), and i've also dusted off my BL manga collection. which means i am studying japanese again, yay. i missed that, but it became too hard to concentrate.

found out that some japanese publishers now write cease and desist letters to scanlation groups, some of whom have apparently slunk off into their own gated communities with demands about not sharing their scans outside -- which i don't get. i mean, they're not all THAT gated (3000 of your closest friends!), so they're not actually safe from "spies", and demanding limited distribution on the internet never ever works. me, i'd change my name, sever all connection with past sites, and distribute randomly through a variety of channels, letting those who're attentive enough to grab the scans do the rest of the distribution.

and japanese publishers kid themselves if they think those letters actually halt, or even diminish scanlation for more than a few weeks. there is a solid fan base, there is ongoing demand, they are not filling it (english licenses are few, only of already-famous mangaka, often years behind the original, and mostly inferior quality, plus people from countries where BL is censored or forbidden often rely on scanlations), ergo there will always be people who jump to fill that demand, and the net makes it so much easier now to cooperate across large distances, and yet to remain anonymous if needed. and i keep thinking that they're not losing anything much from english scanlation, but are possibly even gaining customers -- i bought no manga at all before i found out about scanlation; now i do, heck: i started buying japanese originals before i could read any japanese, just to hold those little treasures in my own hands, and to support the mangaka i really like. without scanlation i wouldn't know about 70% of the mangaka out there, and i certainly wouldn't know about up-and-coming ones who most need the support, because they are first published in the japanese "phone book" magazines which are hard to get here (though i am getting to the point where i will probably buy those from japan, even though the shipping costs are formidable). i am by far not unique; lots of other BL fanciers do the same thing.

to me scanlation and general book sharing over the net is no different from libraries and used bookstores; it allows me a preview before buying my own, and it's more convenient; not tied to store hours, inventory, or location, which means i read more and across a wider range of authors. good writers have nothing to worry about from that; i find more of them, and buy more of their works than i used to; my spending on new ebooks has really gone up quite considerably, while my spending on print books has gone down, and i buy few used books anymore -- the latter used to be the vast majority of my book budget, and it's not like authors and publishers benefitted much from that.

i grant that mediocre and bad writers might be losing out; at least in my case. i no longer buy as many random authors on impulse as i used to, and i don't buy crappy books i've read. then again, i also give mediocre authors more of a chance now -- i used to not buy ever again if i didn't like my first purchase. nowadays i read further works because it costs me nothing, and that additional exposure might just change my opinion and put the author back on my "buy" list. i'm really curious how that shakes out; maybe i'll keep better track of it for a year to see whether my impressions are correct, and how much that comes to in monetary terms.

ah, enough rantage -- i need to go buy a hard drive enclosure so i can clone my mac boot disk in order to move to a new machine. my first SATA drive (not even eSATA) -- wow, am i ever behind the curve in computer hardware now. need more POWER, *arrrrr*!

photos soon!

somebody posted about having read >75 books this year, and the *poing* generally tries to shoot for 100. i used to be right in that range, 90-110 a year. it's been dropping (fucking depression), but a couple of years ago it was still over 50.

this is the first year in my active memory that i've not read at the very least 50 books. that realization felt weird. depressing. i was headed down slump road, when i had to hit myself over the head. hard.

because i have read so much manga that i don't even know how much manga i've read. and since most of it is in electronic format, i can't just count shelf space (though that's been growing quite nicely as well), or go back to my log (since i started it, but didn't keep it up). the reading of it also feels different, and i don't have kinesthetic memory of picking up books, looking at covers, and turning pages to help the subconscious keep track.

statistics to the rescue. having a well-organized filesystem helps. i counted the files, or rather, let unix count them (find . -type f | grep -v DS_Store | wc -l): 25160. most of those are individual chapters, the average chapter has about 31 pages. that's 780,208 pages, which, at roughly 200 pages a manga comes to ~3900 volumes (*eyes bug out*). now, i have not read them all; there are a fair number of raws (~1500 found with another grep) and while i've paged through most of those, "read" isn't the word i'd use for that. but i _have_ read almost all of the remaining ~2300. ergo it appears that i have read about 6 entire manga every day, for the last 11 months (the obsession started with hikaru no go and it is all bookshop's fault).

OMG. that is insane. no wonder i am a wandering BL encyclopedia. and completely no surprise now that i've hardly read any regular books during this past year. i mean, i knew i was reading a lot of manga, but ...

warning: yaoi|boys love|gay|men x men manga. do not read review if that sort of thing offends.

japanese title: どうせ、めろめろ (douse, meromero), english title: melted love;
1 volume 8 chapters (complete), not scanlated. published by kaiousha under GUSH COMICS, licensed in english by DMP, juné imprint, translated by sachiko sato.

japanese ISBN4-87724-475-1
english ISBN-10: 156970760X, ISBN-13: 978-1569707609

single-author anthology. about the title -- oy. "melted love"? the original title means (literally) either something like "anyhow, madly in love" or "after all, falling down drunk". um, yeah. not a great start, but couldn't it have become at least "melting love"?

but onward. this is the first english BL manga for which i hadn't seen a scanlation or japanese raws first. and it wasn't a terrible buy, even though i am not all that much into short manga. there's quite the range of stories here.
( description and commentary )
( art sample; no sex )

cause while i was asleep, zie went to our postal drop BY BIKE to pick up my latest book order from chapters, all 6 kg of it.

taeko KAMIDA	the handbook of japanese adjectives and adverbs (lang)
sue a. KAWASHIMA	a dictionary of japanese particles (lang)
hinako TAKANAGA	challengers v2 (manga, BL)
hinako TAKANAGA	challengers v3 (manga, BL)
hinako TAKANAGA	challengers v4 (manga, BL)
fumi YOSHINAGA	ichigenme... the first class is cicil law v2 (manga, yaoi)
HOMERUN ken	clan of the nakagamis (manga, BL)
shoko HIDAKA	not enough time (manga, BL)
chigusa KAWAI	la esperança v6 (manga, BL)
chigusa KAWAI	la esperança v7 (manga, BL)
i bought these a couple of weeks ago locally:
yuki URUSHIBARA	mushishi v1 (manga, seinen)
hitoshi IWAAKI	parasyte v1 (manga, seinen)
fuyumi SOURYO	ES - eternal sabbath v1 (manga, seinen)
fuyumi SOURYO	ES - eternal sabbath v2 (manga, seinen)

everybody uses a different system of romanization, which bites. i can understand why they reverse the normal japanese name order (familyname first, given/personal name last) to adjust to the west, but apparently they don't always reverse it ("homerun ken" is written the same way as it would be in japan (ホームラン・拳), and no, it has nothing to do with baseball; it's pronounced hoe-MEH-roon. though maybe it has to do with baseball, since the author writes it in katakana, and BL mangaka often use pseudonyms, some of which are weird. ok, this might be a special case). but they also drop out lengthening indicators, as in "shoko", which should really be spelled "shohko" to get around the wrong pronunciation english speakers would give to a romanized "shooko" (日高ショーコ). ah well. nobody but me cares. except maybe other people who catalogue their books on computers.

these are the first english manga i've bought in 3 or 4 years, and quality-wise they are quite nice. the dramaqueen editions have lovely separate colour covers, colour inserts, and good quality paper -- they really look like japanese editions, so pretty! the juné editions are slightly larger, which i appreciate (larger graphics are a good thing). they also have separate colour covers, but no colour inserts, and the paper isn't quite as good. del rey doesn't have separate covers (though mushishi fakes it by using really thick paper and flaps), and no colour inserts. dramaqueen uses japanese honorifics (and seems to presume readers know what those are), the first juné book i opened uses "mr." -- *blech*. i have come to hate that because it loses so much nuance, and it now actively sounds wrong to my ears. del rey also uses japanese honorifics, plus a page to explain them -- that's ideal IMO; it teaches english readers just a little bit about a foreign culture, and it preserves the detail that comes with the honorifics.

hey, i can legally buy manga in a bookstore that could get me permanently suspended from livejournal were i to post the smex from it (cause some of the boys are not yet 18). isn't that special.

warning: yaoi|boys love|gay|men x men manga. do not read review if that sort of thing offends.

japanese title: 夢の子供
english title: children's dreams
6 volumes (complete), scanlated up to v5 ch5 by essence of purity. not licensed in english, originally published by biblos.

v1: ISBN4-88271-306-3, v2: ISBN4-88271-307-1, v3: ISBN4-88271-561-9, v4: ISBN4-88271-760-3, v5: ISBN4-8352-1109-X, v6: ISBN4-8352-1275-4

takashima youji is a high school student who lives with his older sister senko. he's got a bit of a "sister complex" towards her (the japanese as per manga wisdom, frequently have such "complexes", a love that goes above and beyond the call of kinship, albeit not quite to the extent of oedipus. well, mostly not to that extent. not here, in any case.). one day senko introduces youji to one of her old university friends, akishima ren. she hopes they will get along, but things don't go as expected; youji notices the warm familiarity between ren and senko, and takes an instant dislike to ren, suspecting that they are lovers and that he wants to marry her. and then senko reveals that she's leaving for NYC to advance her career, and that she intends to leave youji in ren's care. ren is not thrilled, but agrees to the arrangement because it's senko asking him, and senko is important to him -- but youji just about goes through the roof.

however, he has no choice, and starts living with ren. it doesn't go well; when ren isn't cold and distant, he treats youji like the brat that he is, but worse, even when youji isn't a brat, ren makes light of the things he cares about -- such as his favourite author whose books mean a lot to youji. only when youji tears up and runs off does ren realize that maybe he's gone too far; and when he follows him and they talk, youji breaks down and talks about his sister and what she means to him. since she means a lot to ren as well, they make peace with that in mind, however uneasy. since youji has decided to make the best of things, he starts watching ren -- who doesn't take very good care of himself, and forgets to eat and sleep properly when he works, and youji decides that he should make himself useful by taking care of the household. then one day he sees ren arguing with a man whose name he later finds out is hirose, a name towards which ren acts with extraordinary coldness when other people mention it. and when cleaning up, youji finds several floppy disks that seem to have something to do with his favourite author. the plot thickens. :)

( commentary; download )
( art samples; no sex )

i just got notice from BK1 that they have gokujou no koibito in stock. and yay, now there are finally cover pictures, and pretty ones at that:

http://www.bk1.co.jp/product/2789064
http://www.bk1.co.jp/product/2789065

IIRC it's already longer than all of minase masara's other work, and the serialization is on chapter 14 and ongoing. that makes me very happy, since i find most of her work sadly too short, and i hope a successful triple tank series (or so) will encourage her to write a bit longer stories in general.

in other news, i can now manage to order from an all-japanese book or CD store, no english help provided. yay!

*slips back into japanese-study hermit mode*.