(no subject)
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.)
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.)