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!)

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!

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.

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 :)

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*

I read volumes 3 and 4 of Itsuki Natsumi’s Demon Sakuriido on our way to the concert. I’m starting to become very very fond of that manga. I really liked the first volume, was hooked by the second and now I’m just loving it :)

I cannot praise Itsuki Natsumi enough for being such a versatile mangaka. Whereas Yakumotatsu is this dark historic horror epic, Demon Sakuriido appears to be much lighter on the surface but damn, those characters with all their dark pasts and their secret angst are breaking my shoujo manga fangirl heart!
Also, her character designs are getting more and more gorgeous with every new installment. The male characters are irresistibly handsome!

Oh and that staff member of a large “manga scanlation information site” who quoted my post about Aikawa Natsu’s retirement from the manga world as “some rumors” needs to check the definition of “rumor.” If Aikawa makes that statement in one of her own books and I own and read that book and humbly post about it here, it can hardly be called a rumor. If that person had had the courtesy to include a link to my post, readers of that site would have realized it’s a fact and not “some rumors.”
(And I’ve been wondering why I’ve been getting all these Google hits from people looking for Aikawa Natsu… I believe about 99.999% of the users of said site don’t even know her manga. And the staff member just included it in his post after he’d found my post on Yousei Hyouhon and Sugar Princess which he also quoted in that news bit. Oh well. Shikata nai wa ne.)

I’ve become a pathetic blogger. I keep leaving out important details of my life. Is it laziness? Is it lack of time? Or paranoia? Maybe it’s all three things or maybe it’s something completely different but either way, I’m no longer raving about things as much as I used to in this place even though there is so much to rave about!
-Idlewild have a wonderful new single out and their new album is released next week!
-Starship Operators is the best serious SciFi anime since… mhhhh… Mugen no Ryvius.
-I got my copy of HanaYume 6 with the first installment of Yuki Kaori’s Yousei Hyouhon – Fairy Cube - yesterday. There’s death and gore on the first and the last page. What’s new pussycat? (But yes, it’s a really cool manga so far. More info to follow?)
So much for life-changing things, ha.

I sort of expected that the majority of the readers of the magazine would find it too quiet and melancholic and I was probably right. On the last few pages of the book, Aikawa writes about how she struggled to create that title she’d always dreamed of but how she encountered a lot of problems during the serialization.
She knew Happy End was a bit different than her previous titles (which are all short stories) and I feel the same about it: It is so much more like real life, it’s incredibly moving and touching and beautiful and serious without ever being cheesy at all. It’s so mature. And that’s probably what the majority of the Betsuma readers couldn’t get used to.

I’m a bit disappointed at both the magazine editors and the readers. It’s the readers who decide which manga keep running in the mag because there are enquete cards in every issue of it. I have the impression that shoujo manga that’s poetic and meaningful and disturbingly shocking or cheesy is just not as popular as the romance stuff that’s mainly running in Betsuma. But hey, let’s face it, to most people manga is just entertainment, and I can’t blame them for that…

The worst part of it all is, though, that Aikawa Natsu writes in the last paragraph of the last page that she is not drawing/writing any manga at the moment and that she never will do so again in the future!!
It was such a shock to read that. I really love all of her works and that makes me a very very sad Aikawa fan ;_; I hope she finds the right way for herself to express her creativity and to live a very happy, satisfied life. She really deserves it. ♥