Off the Cliff

Whenever I'm in Bookoff I check for Kawasou Masumis. She's a prolific mangaka with a couple of very long series, like Karin and Sardinaasia and Touring Express and spinoffs of the spinoffs of that last, and then something completely different, like China in the time of Sun Yatsen. And usually the random volumes are nice enough but don't grab. Kurotsubaki (Black Camellia) grabbed me but hard, though I seem to recall my first stab at it in '05 bounced off the Kyoto-ben but hard as well. No matter. The series has slipped into my Faves of all time list and holds up well against all comers.

I'm also a fan of Lots. Last time I was in NY I bought the last three volumes of Kurotsubaki-- and no, don't ask me why I hadn't got them online as is my spendthrift fashion. Maybe because I was waiting until I had Lots, given that the last one I read-- fall of '09-- was well enough but largely set in Tokyo with, I think, a look-in from some Touring Express side characters, and could have used another volume to balance it. Then I saved them for my Christmas vacation, and oh what a happy week I spent with those three volumes.
( Another world )

November reading

English
The Chinese Emperor

Japanese
Kohri no Mamono 6-17
Yakumo Tatsu 1-17

which is almost a manga a day. And if Kohri is fluff, and repetitive fluff, Yakumo is wordy and occasionally obscure. Reading four volumes online with those blownup kanji obviously helped. But also it's a well-plotted dokidoki story with enough twists and turns and character development to satisfy, and enough local atmosphere and stangeness to satisfy me. (Whatever really happened in Kojiki days, the Japanese way of remembering what happened ie the Kojiki itself, has an unplaceable weirdness to this westerner's mind, far beyond anything Ima Ichiko has come up with. Usually starting with the names dear god the names. How did they do names back then? It feels like they just took a bunch of syllables and attached kanji to them regardless of the kanji's meaning. Unless there really was someone called Downward Dog.)

It also addresses something that most shoujo BFF/ soft-BL/ call it what you will manga don't: the fact that the non-sexual but overwhelming connection between these BFFs has social repurcussions, at least in RL scenarios. Fine for Blood and Ishuca, but Japanese young men? Mh. Now mostly one likes one's happy homosocial friendships to remain gloriously problem-free, but it's interesting to see the problem addressed. Even if there's the out of Kuraki's chronic 'noli me tangere for kami's I am.'

Two more volumes to go. But I really want to get hard copies of vol 17 at least, because that's a stunner.

(The pixel problem is of course IE alone's. But Foxfire has much more serious font problems ie never the same size two pages running. My lj, too small, enlarge. Go to friendslist, argh enormous, reduce. Click on link in FL, argh miniscule, enlarge. IE's font remains whatever I set it at everywhere; FF doesn't; no one else find this a problem.) (And it looks like IE may be back to normal. Fingers crossed.) (No, not. The preview pane is normal. Nothing else.)

Something that hadn't occurred to me. Reading manga scans is easier than reading the tankoubon. At least with Yakumo, each scanned page is four times the size of a paper page. Usually for Hana to Yume manga I need reading glasses, strong light, and periodically a magnifying glass as well. This is just so much less work, it's unbelievable. I may read the volumes I do have this way as well, just because.

(Wide-han is not a problem, which may be why I read so much in wide-han and flinch at the thought of the usual size. And bunko are just Not On, at least until I have the cataracts removed.)

Why am I reading Yakumo Tatsu? Or rather, why am I reading it again? And why does it still take me two days to read volume 1 when I've already read it twice? And why was it so much easier to read six years ago post-surgery than any time since? (Have concluded I was high on something back then, because I recall it as a fast fun read when it ought to have put me out every five pages from sheer exhaustion.) And why am I reading Yakumo Tatsu when I *know* it has a dweeb of a kewl oyaji who steals the manga from the cool hero in a way that always makes me scream (which is, cool sardonic character suddenly becomes tongue-tied and at-a-loss and incapable of framing the simplest comeback to the kewl oyaji's adolescent snideries because the mangaka has decided the oyaji is just that kewl.)

Above all, why am I reading Yakumo Tatsu when I lack four volumes in the middle of the series, and bought duplicate copies of the volumes I do have last time I was in New York?

The answer, I think, is so that I can say I finished it and I'm done with it and yay go me.

Also because it's not quite as brainless as Bingo.

I continue to be puzzled at bk1's total lack of Sugiura Shiho. They have nothing of hers at all. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Meanwhile Kohri is out in bunko and Silver Diamond has reached the 20s, but as far as jp1 is concerned she doesn't exist.

While I of course discover that the vol 20 of Kohri I have is neither vol 20 nor the end of the series. It's vol 23, so I lack 18-22 and 24. *Always* check one's manga before going to New York. But now what to do? Buying the two last bunko from amazon will cost me $80 CDN, which is ridiculous, quite apart from being bunko. Yesasia and fujisan and kinokuniya seem never to have heard of Kohri. Why, jp1, why you do this to me?
( ETA why is under the cut )

Haven't listened to my music since I got the new computer 20 months ago, because I can't turn the sounds off on Addiction solitaire, which is what I play now instead of Yukon solitaire. (Resolutions, you know-- this beast is too big for Yukon, alas.) Missed it; listening to music and playing Yukon solitaire got me through many a writer's block. Have it on now. Fast trip to a mental place I'd forgotten almost completely. Had forgotten also The White House Burned:

The loser was America,
The winner was ourselves,
So join right in and gloat about the War of 1812.

Oh... we... fired our guns, but the Yankees kept-a coming,
There wasn’t quite as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and the Yankees started running,
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, oh, oh....
They ran through the snow and they ran through the forest,
They ran through the bushes where the beavers wouldn’t go.
They ran so fast, they forgot to take their culture,
Back to America, and Gulf and Texaco

Otherwise, September stats are The Far Side of the World in English and Yume no Kodomo 1-3 in Japanese. Have no idea why so little; I wasn't studying much, I certainly wasn't writing; was probably sitting around thinking 'I can't see out of my right eye' and playing Addiction Solitaire.

There's an exhilarating sense of well-being that comes with waking on a two-(summer)-duvet morning with cool air blowing in from the window fan and one's pillows, bean-bags, bolsters, hwb, and terrycloth sheets forming a little furry animal's nest around you. All's well with the world, roll to the other side and slide back to sleep.

The cool air turns out to be not so cool as all that-- 20C or so, high 60sF-- which is doubly exhilarating. Because not so long ago the same scenario would have been 'So hot so muggy get these things off of me-- oh no, air is blowing on my arms!! so cold so clammy must cover my arms with the muggy fibre-fill duvet AKKK air is blowing on my **head** must cover my poor poor ears before they drop off ohh so hot so muggy' lather rinse repeat.

So I may hope that I'm finally into 'reboot system' following 'uninstall female program', and the world has gone back to being a rational place. Physically, at least; because otherwise it's full of people being wrong on the internet and Tantei Aoneko 5 which is... dear god, if that's her notion of story-telling (and it is: see Dog Style and SSAE) then a good thing she dropped it.

English

The Truth
Madara 1, 4&5

Japanese

Madara Blue 2
Moon Shadow, Shadow Ocean 1&2

I mean, it's 700 pages of Japanese plus various forays into other 12K novels, but it still doesn't feel like much.

Ok. This is complicated. Pay close attention.

Back in November '05 I bought a comic from Bookoff called Madara (青). The 青 is actually surrounded by angle brackets but I can't be arsed to look up the code for them, and in fact I didn't even notice that detail until last night. It was also vol 2. I tried reading it in summer '06-- the manga has grey moistness and Temeraire as its associated images in my head-- and gave up. Too much katakana, too much back story from presumably vol 1, couldn't follow it. Started again just recently and have been hacking through it ever since.

We begin a flashback to our hero, Kaos, abandoning Jamila, the mother of his children, to go off with his pal Yudaia in search of someone or something called Madara; an event which apparently happened several milennia ago, because now Jamila is Zenobia and immortal, having sold her soul to a demon. And off we go.

Who is Madara? Whoever he is, Kaos says he'll drop whatever he's doing to go off with him once he-- or his incarnation-- is found again. At which point I start having flashbacks to that White Hart novel series last fall with much the same premise. From in-manga flashbacks Madara looks like yer average genki spiky-haired shounen hero, yawn, but his current avatars, of which there are two, are much more interesting in their smooth villainy and high-handed diplomacy. Lotsa hints of plots and counterplots and betrayals lurking in the shadows; fascinating reading.
( And then it gets complicated )

My 'Japanese that the Japanese don't know 2' arrived yesterday. Informs me that there's a French word, tatamiser, defined by wictionary as 'S’imprégner de culture japonaise.'
( Thoughts on acculturation )

Evidently I didn't realize, when I was reading Kohri no Mamono two years back, that vol 5 left me on a cliff-hanger. I went happily into vol 10, and all the problems had been solved, to the point that I didn't remember afterwards that a problem had existed. However I got vol 6 in NY, and did a fast reread of 5 last night, and now am ready to discover how we get out of our hole.

I am doing this to avoid writing Mushishi fic because surely, *surely*, everyone who writes Mushishi-- or does djs, more like-- works off the same trope: for Adashino, that aficionado of mushi-related artifacts, the most precious mushi artifact has to be Ginko himself. Whereupon we cut at once to the sex scene.

Week passes unremarked while I battle with mice (or possibly mouse) and read a chapter of Mushishi 5 a day. Could draw parallels between mushi and mice, but won't.

Then went and looked up qwerty's Mushishi fic, and was puzzled. Who are these people? Who's Tanyu? Track her back to vol 2 (read in translation, so I'm intensely bothered by not knowing is it Tan'yu or Ta'nyu.) I've heard of this Adashino but have I ever met him? Mh yes, back in 4, not named, in an unmarked scene shift inserted between unmarked flashbacks. Ginko doesn't remark him specially so neither did I. The paleness of the human relations may owe to English reading: the emotional distance of the narration is trebled by the oddness of the English translation. (Note that the translator and editor were the same guy, which I only approve of when the translator is a good writer; and it still didn't stop the lettering guys from breaking up the Japanese names wrong.)
( Long view to the white clouds' rim )

Being now in possession of Saiyuki Reload 9, I commence a reread of that sprawling saga cum trip down Memory Lane, Even a Worm. (Japanese mangaka, repositories of forgotten English. The old saying is 'even a worm will turn', which I had forgotten in favour of whoever's 'it's a long worm that has no turning.' Google would have me believe it's from Beau Geste. Google steals author's rights, their argument is invalid.)

And for the first half of vol 4 (fast skim through the later Burial arc) I was convinced I'd forgotten how to read shounen manga, because I was flailing about trying to make sense of the dialogue. Then I found my feet and zipped along at a happy clip, Kyoto-ben or no Kyoto-ben. Shounen really does read faster than shoujo, on account of half of any dialogue bubble is male noise empty of intellectual (as opposed to emotional) content (and what're the technical terms for those two things anyway?) There are few dispensable parts to female Japanese dialogue, at least not when one reads Ima Ichiko. BL may be different.
( Cut for necessary moral observations )