something to talk about
L asks about the works of Noriko Satou, and -- after reading slash-kun's description of Dark & Angel at Manga Bonbons -- I realize that the first story from that volume was translated as "Professor Peach" at Aestheticism. But more interesting is the realization that Dark & Angel probably reflects the artist's obsession with Furikaereba Yatsu Ga Iru, a Japanese drama series from 1993 contrasting two doctors in an urban hospital: Ishikawa, kind and caring but fatally ill, and Shiba, a shady and extremely skilled surgeon. The dynamic is implicit in the title, and the drama may be referenced in the characters' names from "Professor Peach": Ishikawa, the "good" teacher, and Shinobu (the first kanji is the same as Shiba's), the "wild" student.

But now I'm debating whether to chance buying the "Dark & Angel" doujinshi from the Cybershoppe (currently priced at $13.20). Will that story be in there?

posted at 6:57 PM

 
Another bk1 order. Let's call it "the rest of February" order:

1. Gobanchou Boys (Hikaru no Go doujinshi anthology)
2. Zainin no Kiss by Shin Mizuki
3. Aijin Ichiman-en by Dr. Ten
4. Nudist 1 by Kazuna Uchida
5. Juuni Kokki 1 by Fuyumi Ono
6. Juuni Kokki 6 by Fuyumi Ono

Meanwhile, it turns out that Bronze's "final chapter" is 14+ chapters long...so far.
posted at 6:09 PM

 
Is it possible that the 2/20 issue of Margaret really includes the end of Bronze?
posted at 11:44 PM

 
Juuni Kokki and visitors with Japanese pronunciation
Thanks to A, I've seen Juuni Kokki through episode 22, and I can't get the universe out of my head. First, because they've left me with a puzzle: why is Taiki back in Japan with his despicable family? And where is his master? Next, because the fantasy world of the 12 countries is perfectly set up for borrowing. There's an established paradigm that will be repeated again and again in all twelve countries. The kirin is born into the care of a nyoukai, will be raised at Mt. Hou, and will eventually choose a ruler who will be gifted with (conditional) immortality. Add the possibility of one or both of the pair being swept off to Wa (Japan). We've seen selfish rulers poison their kirin, and become mad with jealousy over their kirin. We know that "no kirin dislikes being near its king, and no kirin isn't sad to be parted from its king." With that structure in place, there are hundreds of stories to tell.

A visit from A is also a reminder that I mispronounce everything Japanese, even "anime." (ah-nee-may)

posted at 9:25 PM

 
A passing reference to art books on AMLA makes me wonder what BL art books are out there. I've waxed analytic on some of the books I do have: Kazuma Kodaka, Mamiya Oki, Shiuko Kano, Youka Nitta, Sanami Matoh. Then there's the SuperWorks poster collections from Tosuisha -- do they count? If not, then what about the Motto!! books? Art + character profiles = too much information?

One of the spiciest and least appealing art books I own is the collection for Okane ga nai, featuring the art of Tohru Kousaka. I will never like the uke in that series, or his pathetic dynamic with the seme, who is easily twice his age and size. Still, some of the illustrations are attractive, whimsical (love the Shinsengumi poses) and imaginative.

Among the books I don't have is Aoi & Kurenai's Kairakushugi. Under the names Sano and Watanabe, they've also published Edge.

posted at 7:20 PM

 
Things I want today

• a complete G-Defend translation
• a page (romaji) linking the webpages of djka who do mail order
• my copy of Kizuna 9

posted at 4:34 PM

 
Can you inadvertently march for peace?

The box turned out to be my latest order from Amazon (domestic).

posted at 6:13 PM

 
box waiting
I'm not expecting anything, but there's a parcel-sized box waiting for me at MBE. Excitement and dread.

Thursday's dream has far to go
I was a pampered daughter being shown around a magnificent post-modern skyscraper owned by my incredibly wealthy absent parent. (Why Larry Cooperman was the one showing me around...?) The building was blue and silver, steel and glass and chrome, constructed on spot where the student union is. The lower levels were shopping and fine dining -- we walked through a magnificent restaurant where a bride a new was celebrating her wedding with a small group of family and friends -- then we took a magnificent roller-coaster elevator ride to the top floors, where the penthouse apartments were. There seemed to be four apartments (one for each corner of the building) and a separate elevator had to be taken to access each. But the elevators didn't need a key, which meant that anyone could reach them. This point concerned me, since one of the apartments, still in the process of being decoratated, was to be mine. The elevator didn't open onto a lobby or living room, but what looked to be a utility corridor.

posted at 9:42 AM

 
More manga from bk1 arrived today. (I need to order on a weekly basis, so there's less of a gap between deliveries.) This time, the package did not include a bk1 bag. I'm disappointed that it's not a regular bonus, since I'm sure I would have found a use for them.
posted at 11:25 PM

 
Excerpted from AMLA:

I recently got DSL got more agressive with my downloading Manga, I must've gotten about a gig of Manga downloads in the past couple of weeks.

P.S. I'd love to get steered to more manga, especialy Yaoi, to download.

P.P.S. Now all I need is someone who has contacts with Japanese Manga publishers and can act as translator/go between to help me get my comic artwork published as manga. I have Yaoi stories and layouts that I wish I could interest a publisher in staking me to doing as full art. (comic art is helaciously labor intensive, you need to work full time on it to produce or almost not at all)

I wonder if there could be some kind of direct relationship between publishers selling books and artists getting paid?

posted at 7:43 PM

 
Ordered from bk1 this afternoon:

1. Uchi ni Oide yo by Yuri Ebihara
2. Kairaku Han'i by Kirico Higashizato
3. Kizuna 9 by Kazuma Kodaka
4. Ai ga Areba Toshi no Sa nante by Mieko Koide
5. Haru o Daite Ita 7 by Youka Nitta
6. Aniparo to Yaoi by Mari Nishimura

Yes, the last is a book about yaoi. In Japanese. Because if I put it under my pillow, the knowledge will seep into my head. (The "to" means "and." This isn't a progression.)

I've got a number of books with "4-15 days" order status piled up in my "waiting to be ordered" list. I'm working up the nerve to place an order that may involve actually communicating with bk1.

posted at 6:34 PM

 
Motto!! G Defend arrived today. 9 pages of "character pick-up." I have no idea what the term means, but one thing it definitely doesn't mean is "character profile." Out of 38 characters, only four had character data included. The rest are pictures and names (in kanji and romaji - yea!) plus a brief blurb under the heading sakusha kara hitokoto (a word from the author).The layout reminds me of the doujinshi reviews in my back issues of Comic Box Jr. Each of the two main characters gets a whole page, the next two get half a page, then a quarter of a page, then an eighth of a page... I'm hoping this will help me learn to tell some of the minor characters (read: anyone who hasn't had their own featured romance) apart and start to care more about their interactions.

Oh, and I skipped class to sleep. Don't tell anyone.

posted at 7:40 PM

 
In dreams, Ben Affleck buys me cars
Go figure. I was driving down the same road that Gillian Anderson had been walking down with the shopping cart, except this time the lakes were back. I drove my snazzy red car into a swampy area and it began to sink. The Ben Affleckish guy who had been a passenger was now urging me from the bank to get out. I did, and surprisingly, the car seemed to effortlessly be removed from the water as well. But it needed to be replaced, so Ben-alike gets on his cell phone and orders me a new one.

This is what happens when I'm not awake to prevent movie hype (Daredevil) and my reluctance to shop for a car from taking over my brain.

Good enough for government research
This week, I ran a poll that conclusively proved yaoi fans prefer to buy pretty doujinshi featuring sex between characters they like from a series they know rather than ugly doujinshi containing no sex based on a series they don't like.

Seriously, the results did indicate that fans care more about the quality of art in their doujinshi than the quantity of sex. I would have preferred a larger response group, but I have long since stopped being surprised by the general antipathy toward research. Because the questions were doujinshi-only, I can't make the next leap that's bouncing around in my brain: based on the general significance of genre (19%) and pairing (25%), I hypothesize that this group would prefer to read a doujinshi without sex to BL manga with sex.

posted at 6:38 AM

 
desktop anthropology
Ever wonder what your browser history would reveal about you? I'm sure most of my surfing behavior is pretty consistent -- BL and L's blog and news sites and Japanese language and hundreds of thousands of Google searches -- but sometimes a segue (really a bit of ADD multi(non)tasking) makes me stop and wonder what page A and page B are doing open on the same desktop at the same time. Today, it was Dave Barry's blog and a Biblos page for a Spring book fair (postcard gifts for people buying Biblos publications at select Japanese bookstores in March).
posted at 4:22 AM

 
My first bk1 order (from 1/12) arrived today. Interesting filler - a pressed syrofoam-type material with a woven look to it. Smells like peanuts (the shelled kind, not the packing kind). And they included a plastic bag...just in case I wanted to open the package at the post office and carry my books home?

The end of Love Mode made me cry. Though I'm glad they lived "happily ever after" and I'm pleased it included Shougo's fate, I still wish the focus had been Aoe x Naoya. Thankfully, that's not why I cried.

posted at 7:52 PM

 
open to interpretation
The third Kizuna OAV doesn't "carry through" on the sex scene in the love hotel, which may leave anime-only viewers with the impression that Enjouji was the uke in that encounter. Was that the animators' intent?

Incidentally, there's a trace of Enjouji and Ranmaru's first kendo encounter in Hikaru and Akira's relationship. The feelings Ranmaru experienced at the thought of having a rival of his own age are echoed in Akira's side story in volume 18 of Hikaru no Go.

need to discover
I've talked a lot about my need to discover books for myself, and I do tend to project the same desire onto other fans and protect them from spoilers in recent releases. After discovery has charged my interest, however, I savor input from other fans. My responses, particularly for an ongoing series, can be shaped by other people's analysis or simply by their enthusiasm for their favorite characters (which is more likely, since there just isn't a heck of a lot of analysis going on in BL fandom). Case in point: both G-Defend 16 and 17 contain cute character-study moments for Nishiwaki, who is not my favorite and whom I would have ignored if it weren't for the fact that L really likes his character type. Now he's special to me, too.

The cute moments:
vol. 16 ends with a happy side story about characters exchanging Valentine's Day gifts. At the end of the chapter is a 4-koma strip in which Naitoh arrives home to find a bottle of wine from Nishiwaki.
vol. 17 ends with a nearly textless "day in the life" story from the perspective of the stray dog Esumi found in vol. 15. In one early panel, the dog flees the infirmary when Nishiwaki arrives, because he associates Nishiwaki with being leashed. At the end of the story, Nishiwaki finds the dog outside by the gate, leashes him and brings him back in. A textless insight into Nishiwaki's orderly personality, sense of responsibility, and kind nature.

Basically, I want to be able to read a text first in isolation, then immerse myself in a community discussing the same texts or at least pointing out things I may have missed.

posted at 7:37 PM

 
My December order arrived from Fujisan yesterday and my Fruits Basket DVD arrived today. I am my own consumer culture.
posted at 4:37 PM