Now that I’m more or less free to do what I want until next Monday when classes start again, I decided to look through some old stuff that’s accumulated in my room in my parents’ house to throw away the things I don’t need to keep and make room for new things. I found a huge stack of Italian manga which I bought when I was, well, in Italy. They had all the cool stuff back in 1999 or something, when the manga market here wasn’t really as massive as it is now. I bought lots of random stuff, basically anything I could get my hands on, mostly shounen and seinen titles like Macross 7 Trash, Gundam and Cat’s Eye – sadly no shoujo manga, though. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any manga for girls even though they were said to be already quite popular in Italy at that time. (We only had Sailor Moon back then.)

I also found old manga scripts that I’d printed out to read Japanese manga. Ah, the good old days as a manga reader! Yes, we actually bought Japanese manga and tried to read them in Japanese with the help of scripts kind souls with admirable Japanese skills had provided for us on the internet. This is how I learnt Japanese! I taught myself hiragana and katakana, got myself a good dictionary and started reading manga with the help of English scripts. I found scripts for Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary and other old Yuki Kaori titles, CLAMP stuff like X, Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda and Clover and more light-hearted shoujo series like Emura’s W Juliet. This way, I acquired quite an impressive range of vocabulary which I’d probably never been able to use in every-day life in Japan, including words like “organic angel” (yuukitenshi)…

I might not be doing what I’m doing now if I’d gotten into manga just three or four years later when the scanlation business took off and people became lazy and didn’t buy manga anymore but downloaded it and read it in English. Back in the days, you just had to learn Japanese if you wanted access to all the good titles…

(Does anyone remember fansub tape trading? So last century!)

This is such a great season for shoujo anime fans! The TV anime adaptation of Ouran Koukou Host-bu is excellent, I like it a lot more than the manga (which I thought was rather boring when I was still reading LaLa) because it’s so explosively fast-paced and funny. And colourful and heart-warming. Aww. I’m usually not that fond of comedy but this I like, yes.

And Bokura ga ita! One of the few Betsucomi manga I like. So far I’ve only seen the first episode of the anime adaptation but it seemed pretty well done.

There’s NANA, of course, which I’m still following, of course, because the anime doesn’t disappoint at all, of course. The runner-up for this year’s most hyped shoujo title must be Nakahara Aya’s Lovely Complex because of its movie adaptation. I hope I’ll get to see the film soon (most definitely when the DVD comes out), for now I’ll have to be content with the cool furoku in Betsuma *_*
(And then there’s also the HachiKuro TV anime II and the HachiKuro movie. Great year for Shueisha, ha.)

I’ve also been watching Jyuohsei, the adaptation of the same-titled manga by one of my personal mangaka goddesses Itsuki Natsumi (♥).

And then from autumn on, there’ll be TV anime adaptations of Kin’iro no Corda (another bishounen title running in LaLa, I’ll only get to see it if I survive the cuteness and sheer silliness of Ouran Koukou!!) and Yamada Nadeshiko Shichi Henge (which I, admittedly, don’t like all that much as a manga).

Speaking of the latter: one of my favourite Betsufure series, Life by Suenobu Keiko, received the Kodansha Manga Award. So happy!! I felt even more glad when I read some of the members of the jury’s notes explaining they’d voted for Kawahara Kazune’s Koukou Debut and that it was a tight decision between those two titles in the shoujo category. I was a huge fan of Kawahara’s Sensei! but Koukou Debut turned out to be such a huge disappointment to me that I’m sort of twice as glad Life got the award ^^; But no really, Life’s such a brilliant series. It embodies so much of ‘classic’ shoujo, the drama, the emotions, the style, I’m glad it’s been getting all this recognition!

Paper is done. Jubilation. I can’t even remember the last few days properly because I was concentrating so hard on writing it. I know for sure that on Moday I got my Nana 15 tankoubon, complete with a shiny golden obi advertising the Nana TV anime (which starts in not even 2 weeks, yay!) on one side and the Nobu special in Cookie on the other. Will be able to read the book tomorrow, I hope. First, I’m going to upload songs and then try and do something against my sleep deprivation z_z

It’s been a fantastic autumn so far with a wonderfully warm sun whose brilliance and beauty was only rivalled by the golden leaves everywhere. And then the weather decides to turn all nasty, foggy and cold – on the night I go and see the Editors :( I almost froze to death on my way home and I have a feeling I’m coming down with something. (Nose is already running, throat feels sore.)
The show was brilliant though! What gripped me most was Tom’s voice, it was just so intense and seemed to echo within my whole body, something that works only live and not on records.
Editors are now my second favourite band at the moment (whereas up until about 20 hours ago, they ranked only as my 3rd favourite band XD).

There’s this one girl in my Japanese class that I’ve noticed only a few days ago (we’re about 60 students in that class so…), who looks just like Hagu from Hachimitsu to Clover! She’s really tiny, has curly blond hair and a cute doll-like face. I swear she looks like a 7-year-old, just like she never went through puberty *_* When I saw her up close for the first time today, I could barely keep myself from mumbling ‘Hagu, kawaii~’. The only thought that prevented me from doing so was that I do not – under any circumstances! – want to be associated with those weird, downright annoying, childish and immature manga and visual kei freaks in our year. I prefer being a closet manga reader so nobody mistakes me for some uneducated otaku who has no clue about Japanese culture (besides aspects of pop culture like manga, anime and Japanese rock music, of course) and runs around with their favourite comic characters and/or visual kei band members pinned to their backpacks.

Time passes way too quickly for me at the moment; the first week of May is already over! Which means it’s high time I started writing something about the new anime series that started in April. So here’s my impression of Hachimitsu to Clover, the new anime series I’ve been looking forward to the most this season.

The original manga series by Umino Chica is one of my favourite manga at the moment. I’m so in love with it! It’s been running in Shueisha’s Young You for slightly more than 3 and a half years now and it received the Kodansha manga award in 2003. The manga succeeds in combining light-hearted and often downright hilarious comedy depicting the everyday life of a group of art school students and some of their teachers with philosophical moments of bittersweet melancholy and romance that can move the reader to tears. Primarily, it is a manga for young women but it speaks a universal language that transcends boundaries of age and gender and thus appeals to both female and male readers from young teenagers to adults.

So last night, I watched the first two episodes of the Hachikuro anime TV series that is currently shown on Fuji TV. I was half-expecting something stylish but I was by no means prepared for something this perfect *_* Mind you, the first chapters of the manga were published in Cutie (before Young You picked it up), a fashion magazine for young women (and one of my favourite mags, too ♥), which means the series always had a artsy, fashion, lifestyle and music-related sort of background. So it’s no wonder that the anime adaptation is supported by fashion labels such as adidas, we and Levi’s. And the opening sequence is directed by Noda Nagi, an art&video director responsible for ad campaigns for a variety of fashion labels and music videos; it’s the weirdest anime OP I’ve ever seen. In a good sense :)
I don’t like the opening song too much because I’ve never been a fan of (ex-Judy and Mary no) YUKI’s voice, in fact I find it quite annoying ^^; But it fits the quirky, indie pop inspired atmosphere of the anime just perfectly.

The show itself is beautifully animated, the character designs are splendid and the voice acting is superb (though I don’t like the voice of Takemoto at all -_-). I’m really fond of the colours, they work very well together with the general atmosphere of the anime :)
The story follows the manga quite closely, though there are a few extra scenes and variations here and there.
They’ve preserved the hilarious slapstick scenes (oh my God, I LOVE Morita!!!) and even Hagu’s annoying-ness is just as bearable as in the manga. They could’ve made me hate her by giving her an overly cutesy voice actress but the voice she now has is quite alright. I’m also glad they introduced Yamada Ayumi right in the first episode and gave her a few extra scenes because she’s my favourite character (go Ayu!) and I think she’s the one most fans of the manga can identify with most easily.

And then, right in the first episode… a melancholic moment… a song starts playing – and it’s Hachimitsu by Spitz. ;__; (‹– Yuuya’s face during that scene)

That was the moment I decided this is my anime.

The ending theme song by Suneo Hair is much better than the OP, and the ‘insert song’ of the second episode by Suga Shikao came at just the right moment, just like the Spitz song.
The background music reminds me a lot of the Chobits BGM, with easy listening tunes that aren’t anything special but match the tone of the story really well.

The only weakness of the anime is the typical problem of books turned into movies. Things that are explained in the manga by a universal narrator who, unfortunately, isn’t present in the anime. Each episode of the manga ends with a philosophical little note that often foreshadows things to come. There is no such thing in the anime. So for example, when Takemoto’s stomach suddenly aches when he thinks of Hagu while carrying Morita on his back, it is left to the viewer to realise that this pain isn’t caused by hunger but by love, something which the narrator tells us in the manga (in a very sweet way).
But so far, this is the only negative thing I can note about the anime…

[One additional negative note which has nothing to do with the anime itself: The contrast of the subs released by ANBU&Solar is way too bright; sometimes you can't even make out the outlines of bright objects moving in front of a bright background >_< It's really annoying.]

I’m so glad they’ve preserved the atmosphere of the manga and even enhanced it with elements such as beautiful colour schemes and (not so) indie guitar pop songs. If no American or European company licenses it, I’ll definitely buy the Japanese DVDs. This might sound like financial suicide but it’s well worth it :)

I suppose the best way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon is to sit down on the carpet, have a nice cup of tea and read various volumes of Umino Chica’s Hachimitsu to clover (fluffy yet weird and philosophical shoujo manga, yay!) with Belle & Sebastian playing in the background. I couldn’t help laughing out loud at the hilarious jokes in Hachikuro and smiling quietly at some lines in various B&S songs. I was also overcome by nostalgia, my most favourite feeling. I vividly remember lying on a beach somewhere in the south of England on a warm and sunny day in late October ‘97, listening to 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds Of Light on headphones.

I made a new site! For Yuki-sensei’s Fairy Cube! The decision was made quite quickly because I just couldn’t get the story and characters out of my head… I wrote a translation of the first installment for my personal reference and then I though ah well, I might as well make this available to everyone else, hence the idea to dedicate a whole site to Fairy Cube was born.

And here it is:
Fairy Tales.

It’s a bit of a lame name, I know. It was the title of the first blog post I made about the manga here and it kind of stuck so I used it as the site’s name.

Oh and yuukitenshiNET has a new layout (after what? 15 months or something).

And now I’m tired *yawns and crawls off to bed*