By Shelley Pallis. Tanya is twenty-five years old. She’s got half a decade of adventuring behind her, looting treasure from dungeons, spell-casting to protect her friends from goblins and ghouls. But, you know, twenty-five is kind of old, right? And Ryan, the leader of her party, has just told her that he expects she’ll be […]
Jun 29, 2021 • Subscribe
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Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books & Sake
「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and…
Books: Ghibliotheque
By Andrew Osmond. The Ghibliotheque podcast started in 2018, and soon became an institution. It offered a journey through the films of Studio Ghibli, presented by Michael Leader…
Books: Orienting
By Jonathan Clements. “My stay here has been so short,” said Rabindranath Tagore to Japanese students in 1916, “that one may think I have not earned my right…
Books: Studio Ghibli
By Jonathan Clements. Producer Toshio Suzuki was entertainingly underwhelmed when he was approached by agents for the pop stars Chage and Aska, who asked if Studio Ghibli would…
Books: Otherside Picnic
By Shelley Pallis. Sorawo Kamikoshi is a loner, a twenty-year-old nerd studying cultural anthropology at a Saitama university, whose hobby is exploring spooky places. Nor are these randomly…
Books: Hayao Miyazaki
By Andrew Osmond. Hayao Miyazaki, published to tie in with the current exhibition about the director at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, is a whopping big book.…
Books: Terminal Boredom
By Jonathan Clements. “There is something wrong with our present society,” Izumi Suzuki once wrote, “and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that… Even…
The Best Books
Buying books, especially old books, is a fascination and my biggest weakness. I love the old wear and tear on antiques, and sitting and pondering where the scraped…
Books: Anime’s Identity
By Jonathan Clements. Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted…
Books: Tearmoon Empire
By Jonathan Clements. Then she woke up, and it was all a dream. Or was it? The teenage princess Mia Luna Tearmoon vividly recalls being eight years older,…
Books: Spirit Chronicles
By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even…
Books: Monster Kids
By Jonathan Clements. In his lively new book Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All, Daniel Dockery talks us through the original plans in…
Books: Hell Mode
By Shelley Pallis. Kenichi is a gamer suffering from that common modern malaise, a frustration with games that make life too easy for him. He’s just spent three…
Books: Japanese Drinking
By Shelley Pallis. Masaaki Watanabe’s anime series Bartender is part of a long tradition of TV shows about smart loners who help others in secret. Its leading man…
Books: Japanese Cinema
By Jasper Sharp. There are many paths one might take through the vast and varied terrain of Japanese cinema. Peter Cowie’s addition to the ever-expanding range of publications…
Books: Rediscovered Classics
By Zoe Crombie. Anime has taken inspiration from Western cultures throughout much of its history, from Astro Boy’s Disney-inspired aesthetics to the gorgeous European locales of films like…
Books: Rebuild World
By Jonathan Clements. When we first see Akira, he is gripped in the jaws of a mutant dog. Nafuse’s Rebuild World ditches the tiresome induction scene of many…
Books: Reading Murakami
By Jonathan Clements. Almost everything that is written about fiction is either reception (what the reader thought of the book) or production (an occasional making-of about the author…
Books: Combat Baker…
By Jeannette Ng. The light novel series The Combat Baker and the Automaton Waitress follows Lud “Silver Wolf” Langart, a former captain and mech-operator who retires after a…
Books: Tatami Galaxy
By Tom Wilmot. Any mention of The Tatami Galaxy usually brings to mind Masaaki Yuasa’s much-loved 2010 anime. The charming series has become something of a modern classic,…
Books: Infinite Dendrogram
By Shelley Pallis. Infinite Dendrogram is the best game ever invented, a “virtual reality massively multiplayer online game” but not a crap one like all the ones that…
Books: Leiji Matsumoto
By Jonathan Clements. For all the passion and excitement that the contributors bring to the new collection Leiji Matsumoto: Essays on the Anime and Manga Legend, their subject…
Books: Kyoto Stories
By Jonathan Clements. “Riding on public transportation in Japan makes you feel a part of the general population,” writes Steve Alpert in Kyoto Stories. “One of the people.…
Square Enix Manga & Books Reveals New Books Coming Spring 2023
The good folks from Square Enix Manga & Books have sent us their upcoming release slate for spring 2023. Headlining their releases is the Ch...
Manga Adaptation of Feminist Yuri Series ‘Sexiled’ Released on the Web
A manga adaption of Ameko Kaeruda’s Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress! began serialization yesterday on Shogakukan’s digital platform Sunday…
Books: Japan’s Carnival War
By Jonathan Clements. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the boggling weirdness of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, that animated oddity in which the child-hero from Japanese…
Books: Her Majesty’s Swarm
By Shelley Pallis. And then she woke up, and she’d been transported to the world of her favourite real-time strategy engine. These light novels don’t hang about, do…
Books: Cooking with Ghibli
By Helen McCarthy. Les Recettes des Films du Studio Ghibli by cook Minh-tri Vo, with photos by Apolline Cartier and film research by Claire-France Thevenon, is out now…
Books: World of Ghibli
By Zoe Crombie. A gorgeously illustrated guide to stories, characters, and cultures of the films of the beloved studio, An Unofficial Guide to the World of Studio Ghibli…
Books: One Shining Moment
By Shelley Pallis. Book-length studies of anime TV shows are rare indeed. Critics tend to favour the shorter hours and wider footprint of writing about single anime movies.…
Books: The Japan Lights
By Jonathan Clements. Scottish-born Iain Maloney writes of the way that he always needs a body of water somewhere nearby to feel grounded, to know which way is…
Books: By Your Side
By Jonathan Clements. The inauguration of Barazoku (“Rose Tribe”), a magazine for gay men in 1971, brought with it a sop to the ladies, in the form of…
Books: Crunchyroll Essential Anime
By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from…
Books: Holmes of Kyoto
By Jeannette Ng. Now also an anime, as the title aptly implies, Holmes of Kyoto by Mai Mochizuki began a light novel series about a pair of amateur…
Books: Speaking in Subtitles
By Jonathan Clements. The sub-versus-dub debate was first truly ignited in August 1960, when Bosley Crowther in the New York Times issued a broadside against having to read…
Books: Ghibli and Grief
By Zoe Crombie. As one of, if not the, most popular anime studio in the world, Studio Ghibli has attracted attention from academics, authors, and journalists globally –…
February 2023 Backlog Books
Time for another backlog round! I tried out a new-to-me series, a stand-alone volume, and two series that I know from their anime adaptations.
Books: The Incredible Tide
By Jonathan Clements. The novelist Alexander Key (1904-79) is best known outside anime fandom for Escape to Witch Mountain, the sci-fi story that has thrice been adapted for…
Books: Japan at War
by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. A country opens up to the West and goes through a flowering of political and social liberalism before reactionaries force a backlash, democracy flounders, and…
Books: Branding Japanese Food
By Jonathan Clements. In 2013, the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe took the remarkable step of appearing on YouTube to talk about Japanese food. He was addressing the…
Books: The Reincarnated Prince
By Jeannette Ng. Some portal fantasies are all about the wish fulfilment: being reborn beautiful, beloved and with all the “cheat skills” at your fingertips. The Reincarnated Prince…
Books: Anime — A History
By Zoe Crombie. Since its initial release in 2013, Jonathan Clements’ Anime: A History has served as a unique resource for anyone looking to contextualise their love of…
Books I didn’t finish
My DNF (Did Not Finish) List is short. I don’t usually quit reading a book because I become a little guilt-ridden. However, there are some books that I’ve…
Books: Approaches to Eva
By Jonathan Clements. Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion is a delightful collection of fresh scholarship on all sorts of intriguing aspects of anime, as revealed…
March 2023 Backlog Books
Let the backlogging continue! This month I finished a series and tried out two more titles that I know from their anime adaptations.
January 2023 Backlog Books
Here's the books on my backlog that I finished in January 2023!
Books: The Deer King
By Motoko Tamamuro. A salt mine controlled by the Empire of Zol is attacked by a pack of dogs. The workers and slaves are all bitten, and within…
Project Skip the Books
Finally, time for this blog to be used for something that isn’t just the monthly reading log! Last year I gave myself a new project because I realised…
Books: The Apothecary Diaries
By Jonathan Clements. It is the ultimate in blood-sports – hundreds of the most beautiful women in the world, locked away in a palace where their sole chance…