I think it’s very typical of my life that right after I said I was going to write a bunch of reviews for my new manga, my mom called to tell me that she had an appointment in Toronto and would be coming to visit.  She just went home last night, two weeks later.  We went to several restaurants, got a manicure together (a goal established three years ago that just got accomplished) and watched a bunch of movies.  Most of them with singing.  But none of that left me with a lot of time for writing.  Oops!

Speaking of movies, I just got home from seeing WALL*E  (or however it’s spelled).  Actually I saw it twice tonight, it was that amazing.  The robots WALL*E and EVE both had an astonishing amount of character considering they had a vocabulary of about three words each.  And that applies to the rest of the robots, too.  Even if you don’t consider the adorable robots (and surprisingly charming cockroach) the rest of the movie was stunning.  The landscapes!  I mean, the Earth was basically one huge garbage planet.  It had a lot more serious sci-fi elements than I was expecting (using up the Earth’s resources, the pollution, the sheer LITTER in the atmosphere… which reminded me of Planetes) and I found myself just getting sad looking at the wasteland.  Then WALL*E got to take a ride in space and it was wonderfully beautiful…

Look at me gushing all over the place.  Bah.  Go see it.  I’m probably going to go again.  I can’t decide if this knocks Iron Man out of the #1 movie spot for me, but if it doesn’t then they’re definitely tied.

I didn’t get to read any manga today (I was finishing up the new Diana Wynne Jones book instead) but last night I squeezed in another volume and a novel before bed.

Sweet Admiration by Yuuki Kousaka is a yaoi novel from June.  Katsuya is a young salesman who applies for a job at the company where his childhood crush works.  Shio and his younger brother spent a summer vacationing in Katsuya’s town and he’s never forgotten the older man.  Unfortunately he not only finds out that Shio is just an investor in the company and doesn’t actually work there, but then Katsuya’s company housing falls through.  Fortunately the president finds him alternate housing… at Shio’s condo!  At first Shio is cold and unfriendly but soon the two find themselves getting closer - a situation complicated when a third brother shows up and tries to get between Shio and Katsuya.  This is a fairly tame novel, with no real “events” to perk up the action of the book.  I guess the main point of interest in the book would be a reversal of the usual yaoi type roles.  Katsuya is the outgoing, athletic younger man who turns out to be the uke, and Shio is the cool beautiful man who surprised me by being the aggressor in bed.  I liked the book well enough, but it was a bit bland.

New Beginnings is a shonen-ai manga by Kotetsuko Yamamoto and one that I very much enjoyed reading.  And the whole volume was one story!  Joy.  The story opens with Chihiro, short and cute, being groped on the train.  His response is violent and establishes him as a spunky, tempermental guy.  Standard fare in manga.  :)  When he gets home that night he finds out that his mother has agreed to have his childhood friend Keigo come and live with them.  Keigo was timid and bullied as a boy (Chihiro always protected him) but then moved overseas with his parents.  Eventually he became a shut-in until his parents agreed to let him return to Japan.  Keigo shows up on their doorstep shortly after, taller and better looking than Chihiro and way too happy to see his old friend.  It’s not long before Keigo confesses to Chihiro that he’s been in love with him for years. 

Chihiro, however, is in love with a girl in his class and not interested in Keigo beyond friendship.

Angst and confusion reign as Chihiro spies Keigo spending more and more time with the girl that he’s in love with and rumours begin to fly that the two are going out.  Drama!  Misunderstandings!  Tears!

The two boys develop a new friendship as Chihiro tries to figure out why Keigo is in love with him, Keigo has to deal with Chihiro’s reaction to his confession and the fact that his feelings may never be returned.  There was a lot of shouting, a lot of blushing…  I don’t want to say much else, because I did have a lot of fun reading this one and don’t want to spoil too much of the story.  Two thumbs up on this one, I think.

I usually get so caught up in reading new stuff that I never get around to writing about it.  This week I’m going to try to write a short blurb for my new manga purchases.  I hope the key word there doesn’t end up being “try.”

First up is Restart by Shouko Hidaka, a yaoi book of short stories from June.

Tadashi and Aki are both male models.  Aki is the newest hot young thing, Tadashi hasn’t been getting as much work lately.  When the story opens it’s a few weeks after they’ve shared a drunken sexual encounter.  Tadashi (he gets the POV in the first story) was too drunk to remember much of what happened, but things are definitely awkward now between he and Aki, with both men seemingly going out of their way to avoid each other.  Of course it’s the product of a misunderstanding.   The second story in the book focuses more on Tadashi’s career - he’s just failed his tenth audition while his lover Aki is getting more popular by the day.  Tadashi starts backing away from Aki who has his own complicated reasons for wanting to succeed.  Third story goes back in time (which took me a couple of pages to figure out) to the night they first got together, this time from Aki’s POV.  Poor Aki is in love with Tadashi, with not a little bit of hero-worship thrown in.  Their fourth chapter is the last story in the book and goes back even farther so we can see how Aki gets into modeling and his fateful first meeting with Tadashi (who actually remembers this one).  :)

I am normally not a fan of standalones full of short stories, but with so many in this volume dealing with the main characters there was more of a chance for character development, which I like to see in my manga.  You can tell me they’re in love, but I’d really rather see it for myself if that makes sense.  While I didn’t mind the plot (it was interesting to see how their relationship was complicated by their different levels and ambitions in the modeling world) I didn’t really get a sense of much passion in their relationship.  There almost seemed to be more drama with their enounters with their manager than with each other.  Yes, there were some sex scenes in there, which helped with the feeling that the two were together, but Tadashi spends so much time focused on himself and ducking Aki that it didn’t really feel like he was as into the relationship as Aki was.  My impression there.  As I said - they told me things but I didn’t quite believe it.  I got to learn more about them as individuals (not a couple) which I liked. 

There were two other stories in the book.  The first was a photographer shooting a younger model (still in high school) who is confused as to what kind of pictures the guy is looking for.  No, it’s not dirty.  :)  The photog wants to capture different expressions, and is looking for something a little more real and varied than the usual model’s smile.  When the photographer confesses to the model that he’s in love with him, he gets a new expression that he quite likes.  Poor confused little model…

The second standalone story was probably my favorite in the book.  A college student (Tatsumi) is in a bar reflecting on his first love, a boy who disappeared while scuba diving.  Tatsumi is hung up on the memory because he didn’t realize he was in love until after Shinozaki went missing.  The next day he’s on the train to go home for a holiday when he sees Shinozaki on the train!  (dun!)  Turns out that Shinozaki had a younger brother named Ryo who looks just the same, but is the complete opposite personality wise.  Ryo is grumpy and rude, but Tatsumi is drawn to spending time with him over the holiday and starts to develop feelings for the younger brother.  The complications here should be evident.  :)

While I liked Restart more than the average collection of short stories, I can’t say that I loved it.  It was… pretty good?  I’ll be happy to keep it on my shelves and will most likely be rereading it.  I would say maybe three and a half stars out of five, if I liked giving stars to things.  :)

Sort of on topic: this is the third manga from DMP/June that I’ve read in the past couple of weeks that had editing mistakes.  While I don’t really mind missing letters or wonky phrases in manga that much, to have three of four volumes with errors is kind of unusual.  Are they just really busy?

(Would you consider this to be short?  This is why I don’t write as much as I should.  I talk too much.)

I’m so buying this summer time Yotsuba figure when it comes out…

I’ve actually been meaning to mention J-List (I’ll link to the under 18 site for this) since Christmas, believe it or not.  I got a couple of calendars from them (my Saiyuki Reload calendar, which rocks!) and killed a few hours browsing through their website.  The Japanese make some mighty odd things, people.  I ended up getting a bunch of candy for everyone as well as far too many KitKat bars.  (Oddly enough, I’ve only been able to get the KitKat search to work on their adult site.)  Vanilla Bean KitKats… mmmm…. 

They have a lot of other neat stuff there too.  Figures, t-shirts, bento and other cooking things, learning Japanese books, bilingual manga.  I was tempted by the bilingual Nodame Cantabile but couldn’t justify the cost considering that I’m not actually trying to learn to read Japanese.: Also, I picked up a couple of bilingual volumes of the Tale of Genji when I was at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto and haven’t read them yet.  Bad, Cathy.

I was also going to get an ITunes Japan card from them, but ended up buying one on my trip.  I was looking forward to actually paying for Japanese music!  When I finally got around to loading my gift card onto a new account there, I realized that they don’t sell the songs I wanted there!!  I really wanted to buy some High and Mighty Color songs but couldn’t find any.  I ended up buying a few songs by randomly clicking on things until I found some music I liked.  One thing I dolike is that the songs are all either 150 or 200 yen.  I’m not going to have a stupid little balance left like I did with my Canadian iTunes cards.

Last week I found a new manga by Ai Morinaga when I went to the comic store.  I really like both Your and My Secret and My Heavenly Hockey Club, so this was an automatic buy.  I pulled it out to read on the streetcar ride home without checking the blurb on the back.  Sometimes I like to live dangerously.

My trauma.  Let me share it with you.

At this point I was choking back horrified giggles because 1) I was on the streetcar and I hate laughing in public like that and 2) that dude just violated his pet frog and I really shouldn’t have found it that funny.

It’s okay - we find out later that Strawberry-Chan actually kind of likes the straw…

Ahem.

We next meet Akiyoshi’s new roomate, a handsome gentle boy who immediately falls in love with Strawberry-Chan.  Unfortunately it’s owner is a sadist, which means that the two are now played with instead of finding happiness together.  Yeah, they just fall in love with each other.  It’s weird.  The other sort-of love interest is a younger boy who wants to be punished by Akiyoshi as well, but is denied at every turn - Akiyoshi does not like willing victims.  He keeps trying, though.  Both pet and master seem to care about each other, which kind of makes it all okay.  (Kind of.  This is a story about a talking frog after all.  I wasn’t really worried about redeemable characters.)

The book is odd, and funny and vaguely disturbing.  Most of the situations Strawberry-Chan and co. get into are rather ridiculous but entertaining.  There are weird dreams, body switches, a mad scientist who experiments on Strawberry-Chan and through it all Akiyoshi does his best to torture as many people as possible.  It helps that most of the stories are short (there are 31 chapters in the book) so the jokes don’t get dragged on too long, and it’s easy to put the book down if you want to stretch out the frog abuse. 

In the author notes Morinaga says that she worked on the series over a period of five years, but it was interesting to see that the art didn’t change/evolve much over that time.  

I think if you liked the sample pages, you’d probably like the whole volume. 

Whee!  Tonight was the season finale of Supernatural.  At the end of last season, Dean made a deal with a demon: his soul was forfeit after a year if his little brother Sam was saved.  Tonight was the night the deal came due. 

Heh.  I love this show.  Nothing will ever be as evil as the cliffhanger at the end of season one, though.   When we didn’t know if it was going to be renewed or not.  Evil, I tell you! 

This is, however, the perfect time for anyone out there to run out and get the first two seasons on dvd.  Really, run.  Then you can savour it over the long, tvless summer and watch season three all at once when the set comes out right before the fourth year starts up.  I warn you, though.  Everyone I’ve given my sets to has blown through them in about a week.  This year had it’s flaws, though.  Durn writer’s strike.

Er.  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Supernaturalis a tv series about two brothers who travel around America hunting demons, ghosts and other creatures.  They like to dip into the urban legend pool for some of their stories, many of them are just creepy ghosts.  The show is *really* about Sam and Dean Winchester, though.  They’re so completely believable as brothers.

That’s it, I’m spent.   I’m going off to lounge in bed to read some of yesterday’s manga.   Night all.

I haven’t forgotten that I was going to post some pictures from my trip to Japan some weeks back.  (Only a little over a month!  Why does it always seem so long ago?)  I had Flickr issues.  Specifically, I had to decide if I wanted to pay for an account so I could organize my pictures or just not bother.  I finally decided on the account.  :)

I’ve just started messing around with it, but I have created my first set of pictures from the trip.  So if you’re interested, here are some of the sakura and plum blossoms.  It’s a mix of photos that I took on our first and second trip to Kyoto (a week apart so the trees had time to bloom a little more) and the garden Kenrokuen in Kanazawa.

This is a close up of some plum blossoms with sakura in the background.

Some of the branches on a rather spectacular sakura tree.

My half-hearted attempt at being artistic… :)

If you’re interested, you can view the rest of the set here.

Slideshow is here.

After closing down the comments on my manga library page I’ve decided to allow them again.  I was getting tired of people asking me to upload stuff so I got rid of the comments about a year and a half ago.  But I miss the recommendations!  So I’m going to allow comments again and just delete the people asking for me to send them stuff. 

I’m so mean.  :)

Last Wednesday when I spotted Kiichi and the Magic Books, a new CMX manga about a young demon boy who meets a travelling librarian who rents out magical books I had to pick it up.  Magic books?  A travelling library?  I’m there!

Kiichi is a young boy living in a small village, sheltered by his mother and hiding his true appearance.  After his mother dies, the villagers discover that Kiichi has a horn growing out of his forehead, label him an “oni” and therefore a bad omen.  Shunned by his former friends yet unable to leave, Kiichi lives a lonely life until one day he comes across a strange man in the forest reading a book to a little girl.  Not just any book, though.  This one has little dancing demons inside!  Kiichi is excited and positive he’s finally found his own kind, but is disappointed to find out that the book is magic and isn’t really full of oni.  Mototaro, the travelling librarian, assures Kiichi and the villagers that oni are actually good, but the knowledge has become lost over the years.  Kiichi decides that he should leave the village and travel with Mototaro to learn more about his own kind.

While I’m sure that Kiichi’s journey will be interesting (Kiichi’s character is the standard friendly, earnest sort of kid you see setting off on some quest in manga all the time), I admit what really caught my interest were the books and librarian.  The books we saw were magical and dangerous in the wrong hands, and contrary to a real world librarian Mototaro seemed quite put out to find that the next village had it’s own small library. 

Ooh!  Why is it forbidden?  Obviously it’s not reading itself that’s bad, otherwise why would they have travelling librarians?  Are all books magical?  Mototaro certainly needs to know magic to contain the contents of the books, but it doesn’t seem to take any special abilities to pull things out. 

Forgive my tilted scan job here.  Mototaro is a fairly typical gruff, grumpy character with a soft spot underneath.  Otherwise why agree to travel with two children, even as odd as they are?  He very reluctantly agrees to let Kiichi travel with him but is appalled by the fact that no one has ever taught the boy to read.  Because of course, the information about the lost oni Kiichi is looking for is all contained in books at the Depositories.

Heh.  Abridging.  They make it sound like a ceremony.

In volume one, Kiichi and his group visit a new village (the one mentioned above that owns books) and Kiichi befriends a girl with a strange kitty that turns out to be a little more dangerous than it first appears.  We also see Hana (the little girl with problems of her own) get kidnapped by a huge bird, there’s a run in with bandits and finally an encounter with a new friend in the forest that Mototaro doesn’t quite trust. 

I found the art a little rough, but charming and it managed to be quite expressive.  I really enjoyed the first volume and I’m definitely going to pick up volume two to see how Kiichi’s journey to the first book depository turns out.

This would have been a great way to start the day on Friday if I hadn’t spent it asleep….