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 I was spending a lot of money on manga a…
Mar 22, 2023 • Subscribe
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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: 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: 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: 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: 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…
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…
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: Sexiled
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…
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…
![Featured image for [PPD] Playing Project DIVA simulator: Project -Project DXXX-](https://cdn.aniblogtracker.com/live/20210410/1618087439.9458.33545.jpg)
[PPD] Playing Project DIVA simulator: Project -Project DXXX-
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA was a rhythm game produced by SEGA for Sony’s PSP. This involves pressing the correct combination of buttons as they appear onscreen, whilst Miku…
Skip Week!
Following up on the 'end' of Season 2 last week, we're taking a week off to rest and recharge! Fear not though, because over on the MSX Newsletter,…
Books: Grave of the Fireflies
By Jonathan Clements. Long overdue for inclusion in the BFI’s Film Classics series, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies finally gets the critical treatment, courtesy of Alex Dudok…
The Cat Who Saved Books
Japanese Title: 本を守ろうとする猫の話 (Hon o mamorō to suru neko no hanashi)Author: Sosuke Natsukawa (夏川 草介)Translator: Louise Heal KawaiPublication Year: 2017 (Japan); 2021 (United States)Press: HarperColli…
Books: The Garden of Words
By Andrew Osmond. This August, Makoto Shinkai’s film The Garden of Words – soon to have a new Blu-ray/CD Steelbook – will be adapted as a London stage…
Books: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer
By Shelley Pallis. The trouble with Rentt Faina is that he isn’t very good at his job. He’s spent ten years wandering the ruins of a haunted dungeon,…
Books: The Impact of Akira
By Andrew Osmond. If you were asked which singer comes to mind in connection with Akira, most readers would think of Kanye West cosplaying Tetsuo in his pants…
Books: The History of Sushi
By Jonathan Clements. Eric C. Rath observes that in the anime series Sushi Police, fish are portrayed weeping at the injustices done to them by culinary criminals. Luckily,…
Books: Eavesdropping on the Emperor
By Jonathan Clements. In 1939, Japanese embassy personnel in London were ordered to destroy stacks of compromising documents, and made the mistake of hiring a local company called…
Books: The White Cat’s Revenge
By Jeannette Ng. The ever-lengthening ever more direct yet elaborate light novel title is a commonly observed phenomenon and The White Cat’s Revenge as Plotted from the Dragon…
Books: The Ethics of Affect
By Jonathan Clements. Those silly do-gooders in Akihabara, making a computer game company take down a mere advertising billboard on the grounds it might offend, shock or otherwise…
The Books of Monster Hunter
Want to see ALL videos early? Support me on patreon for exclusive access! https://www.patreon.com/oceaniz TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Intro 01:44 - Artbooks 07:30 - Lorebooks 15:21 - Guidebooks Books shown/discussed in this video: Monster Hunter World Editors…
Books: Behind the Kaiju Curtain
By Jonathan Clements. Despite the title, which immediately and perhaps unjustly evokes Jasper Sharp’s magisterial Behind the Pink Curtain, Norman England’s Behind the Kaiju Curtain: A Journey onto…
Books: Batman – The Animated Series
By Raz Greenberg. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Joe Sutliff Sanders new book, Batman: The Animated Series, which analyzes the superhero show as part of Wayne State…
Books: By the Grace of the Gods
By Shelley Pallis. And then he died. In his sleep, because of a particularly powerful sneeze. Ryoma Takebayashi wakes up at tea party in heaven with several gods,…
Books: Miyazaki and the Hero’s Journey
By Helen McCarthy. A book can be a ground-breaking work of scholarship and still accessible to any intelligent reader. Language capable of being understood by the average well-read…
Books: The Works of Hayao Miyazaki
By Shelley Pallis. In an already crowded field of critical appraisals of Ghibli films, the Toulouse-based Third Editions offer their latest English-language publication, Gael Berton’s The Works of…
Books: The Story of British Animation
By Andrew Osmond. Most people looking at this review will be anime fans. But what does “British animation” bring to your mind? Probably Wallace and Gromit and Aardman.…
Books: The Characters Taught Me Everything
By Jonathan Clements. Megumi Hayashibara is an observant and empathetic narrator, walking the reader through her early years as a nobody struggling to finish nursing school while burning…
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: 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.…
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: 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…
Skip and Loafer
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