I survived the trip to Frankfurt yesterday! The drive back home was quite difficult because it was so cold, the roads seemed like frozen rivers and it was snowing quite heavily. But we made it back all okay!

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.)

…are made to be broken. Had to go out several times every day of the weekend ;_; And it just won’t stop snowing. We’ve been getting new snow every day for almost a week now. Driving poses an almost fatal danger in this sort of weather so I don’t know if I’ll make it to Frankfurt alive tomorrow (Feeder!).

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 got a manga order yesterday which included the 3rd and last volume of Happy End, a wonderful series by Aikawa Natsu whose manga are usually very melancholic but beautiful. The first part of the series ran in Bessatsu Margaret (Betsuma) but later it was moved to The Margaret (also published by Shueisha, a sister mag of Betsuma). I was quite sad about this because I really liked the manga as it wasn’t just average, shallow romance stuff. I thought it was really interesting to read about the life of an aspiring mangaka because it’s that side of manga you rarely get to read about – the life of the creators. It’s a truly moving story about adolescence, realising one’s dreams and finding one’s place in the world.

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. ♥

I’m going through all those different phases all the time when it comes to music and manga genres. And I’m currently in my nihonbunka (=Japanese culture) appreciation phase ^^;
No manga with any references to Japanese history/myth/legend/tradition is safe from being devoured within hours. That’s basically everything that is or has been running in Hakusensha’s Melody. I’ve also read Onodera Akira’s Rokutousei Supika for the millionth time. (If any manga is neo-Japanesque, it’s his.) At the moment, I’m reading Itsuki Natsumi’s Yakumotatsu. I can’t even find the right words to express my deep love for this manga (or any manga by Itsuki-sensei) ♥ Status: 7 volumes of 19 have been read, the rest will follow as soon as I get them.

Now, I also dug out my Kagrra CDs because they’re like the musical equivalent to all the manga mentioned above. Even though I haven’t been very fond of any of their CDs as a major band, they’re still one of my favourite bands because of all their indie releases. And in a moment of mental weakness, I decided to take my appreciation for all those earlier releases to a whole new level and translate my favourite Kagrra CDs -_-; I thought I’d start with gozen and ~Kirameki~. OMG, I must have been crazy! They’re so difficult to translate ;_; (Yeah right, it’s not as if I didn’t know that all this time…)

But still, I’m absolutely fascinated by Isshi’s use of old words and grammar structures. They don’t make translating the lyrics any easier, but at least it’s interesting from a linguistic point of view. And it’s ultimately satisfying to bring out the beauty of the songs by fully understanding all those mythological references and stories Isshi wrote.

It’s especially interesting with gozen because the whole album is one long story and it’s really nice to understand what exactly is going on in every song, how the music mirrors the respective events, how the story progresses and what themes, both in the lyrics and the music, are repeated throughout the whole album.

…I just wish I had someone Japanese here with me so I could bother them with the parts that are absolutely killing me. I can make perfect sense out of them in my head but it’s so hard to put them into decent English. I have to admit it’s a really challenging task and it’s difficult to preserve the original beauty of the lyrics, but ganbatte iru yo :) I might give up halfway through but at least I gave it a try… ^^;;

Yuki Kaori’s new manga, Yousei Hyouhon – Fairy Cube -, starts in the next issue of Hana to yume (#6; out Feb 19, see Hakusensha’s website for a preview on the HanaYume page)! I’m so tempted to buy it…

Hana to yume was the first manga magazine I bought regularly. I started reading it because of Yuki Kaori’s Tenshikinryouku/Angel Sanctuary but quickly fell in love with some of the other series that ran in it at that time (circa 1999).
I stopped buying it after TenKin had ended and I didn’t like the other titles enough to make me want to keep buying the magazine. I was also running into space problems because HanaYume comes out twice a month and I simply cannot throw away my beloved manga mags. (I know that’s kind of silly but I haven’t bought the tankoubon for every title I liked yet so I cannot part with the mags.)

I’ve lived quite happily without HanaYume for the past few years (except for a few issues I bought because of the cute furoku). Now, I am going to buy #6 for Fairy Cube. Also, I want to have a look at Nakajo Hisaya’s new manga, Sugar Princess, that started in the current issue. (It’s about figure skating. And if that doesn’t scream ‘instant shoujo classic,’ I don’t know what is.) I just hope I’ll be able to resist the urge to buy it after that one issue ^^; Maybe I’m lucky and Yuki-sensei’s new series isn’t even that great. (I didn’t like the Count Cain series that much, so…)
I have enough manga mags to read (Betsuma, LaLa, and an occasional copy of Asuka and Deluxe Margaret) so I’ll probably have to buy a house for myself just to store all those telephonebooks if I start buying HanaYume again. I must resist that temptation. Must. Resist.