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larryhammerIt seems I've collected a bunch of short takes on various readings. Time to bundle them into a post.
The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff - I lost count of the number of resonances with Kipling I caught. Okay, some of which would come naturally with the territory, but still. It's not executed with Kipling's gift with voice, but then very little is. Tasty, in the way boy's adventures in Roman Britain and across the Wall often are. Available in paperback.
Sakura-hime Kaden ("Legend of Princess Sakura"), Arina Tanemura - It's been a while since a manga made me go " ... the hell?" in quite this way. This is the unlikely fusion of Heian-era historical drama, as in teh dramaz, and shoujo magical-girl adventure, as in starring the granddaughter of Princess Kaguya prancing around Heian Kyo in a pimped-out upgrade of a Sailor Senshi outfit,* slaying demons with a katana she pulls out of her palm. And then it gets weird. It's good to be kept on your genre-expectation toes.
I won't say it's a perfect story. For one thing, there's not enough, or even any, snark about those Heian Hats. But it is crack. 3 volumes ongoing, unlicensed, scans current.
After School Nightmare, Setona Mizushiro - I'm having a hard time articulating my response to this, and an even harder time saying anything without completely spoiling it. It's pretty, yes -- disturbing, yes -- tightly plotted, yes. Even the elements that initially don't make sense make perfect sense by the time our mixed-gender hero(ine) graduates from the "dreaming class". The sort of plotting that is helped by reading the entire series at once, within a day or two. I can't tell whether it's brilliant or not, but it's very much worth reading. 10 volumes, official translation complete.
Collect Poems, Philip Larkin - I hadn't realized early Larkin was so deeply influenced by Yeats's manner, if not matter, giving his first collection an almost Audenian voice. Fortunately he grew out of it into something rich, terse, and strange for his other three collections. Poor toad. Poor church windows. It's probably just as well Larkin was as productive as Housman -- and just as craft-oriented. Readily available in paperback.
Mana, Vin Lee - I don't read as much manhwa** as manga,*** but this uses traditional Korean spirit lore the way Natsume Book of Friends and Hyakkiyakou Shou use Japanese equivalents. Our heroine, a college student, accidentally makes a contract with the ghost of a rock musician, and using his powers sets herself up as an exorcist. Like many of these sorts of stories (including Natsume Book of Friends and Hyakkiyakou Shou), it's very episodic, as in ghost-of-the-week sort of thing, but some episodes are several chapters long. I'm not entirely sure I believe the heroine gets away with dressing in quite that much see-through netting on campus, but exploring yet another world of spirit lore is fascinating, even the classroom dissection of the various shamanistic traditions. Warning: the first chapter is a prologue with a very different tone from the rest. 4 volumes, unlicensed, scans complete.
Akagami no Shirayuki-hime ("Red-Haired Princess Snow-White"), Sorata Akizuki - I thought I'd posted about this before, but the Google gods say otherwise. If you like the linework of Natsume's Book of Friends (and you should), you'll love this -- very much in the same style, and indeed runs in the magazine Natsume started in. It has a similar sense of pacing as well, despite dealing with court politics. Um, let's see, summary -- orphan Shirayuki escapes the unwanted attentions of the heir of her country's throne, attracted to her unusual red hair, by decamping the kingdom, along the way meeting and being rescued by another prince, Zen. These two strike up an unlikely friendship and in order to have a legitimate reason stay in contact, she becomes an apprentice herbalist at his castle. The series has been getting notice for having a male romantic lead recently win the title of shoujo hero least likely to be mistaken for a jerk -- he has disturbingly little competition -- by apologizing for kissing her without prior consent and promising to always ask first. Er, if you couldn't tell from the above, it's the sort of friendship that slides into romance -- the best kind of romance.
One particularly interesting aspect is the series's examination of agency in circumscribed situations. Shirayuki is neither politically powerful nor physically strong -- she's a teenager without a family who happens to have been apprenticed in a useful skill. But she is strong-willed, and within her bounds she has the agency to work towards her goal. She can be frightened when threatened but refuses to be pressured -- "I don't want to live that way." Which is good because, well, being friends with a prince can be dangerous for commoners. And then there's how Prince Zen is circumscribed by his situation as younger brother to a ruling prince who does not believe in coddling his heir presumptive, especially when he's a useful tool for dealing with restive nobles. 5 volumes ongoing, unlicensed, scans nearly current.
Sasameki Koto ("Something Whispered") and Aoi Hana (literally "Blue Flowers," officially "Sweet Blue Flowers") - It's hard not to treat these as a pair. Both are short, dozen-episode anime series about high-school lesbians, neither of which, wonder of wonders, are about the titillation or fanservice. Well, there's some fanservice -- the pool episode of Sasameki Koto and the bait-and-switch opening credits of Aoi Hana, I'm looking at you two -- but it's rare and not the focus, which is instead the lives and loves of a cast of teenage girls, some gay, some not. The difference here is that Aoi Hana plays it for teh dramaz while Sasameki Koto goes largely for the comedy. Both successfully navigate tricky tonal lines -- Sasameki Koto as it mixes that comedy with a deep melancholy that's steeped from a complex of unresolved romantic tensions, Aoi Hana by using a low key approach to keep itself from tripping over the bathos line into melodrama. Both also end inconclusively, being based on on-going manga, but at least at something of a pause that looks forward to changing relationships -- Aoi Hana with a little more resolution than Sasameki Koto.
If I had to chose, I think I prefer Aoi Hana as giving slightly more respect to the characters' emotions and dilemmas, and productionwise it looks better -- as in visually gorgeous, making excellent use of its Kamakura setting. OTOH, Sasameki Koto is, unusually for yuri-with-teens, set in a co-ed high school -- so the male characters are peers instead of in their early 20s. Both TV series available legally on Crunchyroll; both manga are ongoing, unlicensed, scans into volume 5.
Making Sense of Japanese, Jay Rubin - Subtitled "What the Textbooks Don't Tell You," this is a short collection of immensely readable essays on a dozen hard-to-wrap-brain-around topics of advanced Japanese grammar and idiom. It's pitched at slightly more advanced students than I am now, but I still got a lot out of it. Rubin's concept of the "zero pronoun" isn't radical, but still a useful tool for parsing, e.g., how many people are involved in statements using kureru/kudasaru/itadaku/ageru when none are named, and his insistence on not translating active verbs with unstated actors as passives was a good reminder. OTOH, I haven't gotten the knack of his technique of analyzing upside-down sentences rightside-up, which is supposedly more restful than the traditional inside-out method, but I'm working on it. I'm going to be rereading this every so often, I suspect. Readily available in paperback.
Onna-no-ko wa Yoyu! (roughly, "Girls Should Be Calm"), Kyoko Hikawa - Certain kinds of low-key shoujo romances can be especially charming, and this is a perfect example. The first chapter, in which the protagonist subtly helps her male friend hook up with another girl only to recognize her own feelings for him, is especially poignant -- no angst, just quiet melancholy followed by recovery. Her two friends are also nicely handled. Sweet and nearly pitch-perfect throughout, even unto the open ending. Note that, being from 1990 by an author who started in the '70s, the art is slightly old-school -- showing mainly in the size and faces of the boys -- this being another by the author of Kanata Kara/From Far Away. 1 volume, unlicensed, scans complete.
Miriam, Kyoko Hikawa - A slightly older series by the same author, this one a Wild West romance. Yes, really. Miriam Todd is, initially, a strong-willed eight-year-old orphan living with rancher Grace Howard. Douglas is a 17-year-old drifter with two friends named Card and Joel (guess which one plays poker) that Miriam ropes into accepting jobs as ranch-hands. Young Miriam is cute in an adultlike child sort of way -- she's had a harder life than she initially lets on, and is the sort of strong that you know things are really bad when she finally cries -- Doug is more soft-hearted than he wants to admit, and just about every western movie cliche shows up at least once.**** Fair warning: be prepared to gloss over such lapses as confusing county sheriffs with federal marshals.
At first, that "romance" is in the generic, rather than genre, sense but in part 2, Miriam grows up into an even more spirited young adult. Good fun adventures, not just because of that spirit but also the author's clear-eyed sympathy for what her characters have survived. 7 volumes broken into 3 arcs, unlicensed, scans complete.
* Including a frilly miniskirt complete with a yin-yang symbol over her crotch. Plus a leather choker -- wouldn't be Tanemura with one.
** Korean comics, as opposed to Japanese manga. See also Chinese manhua. Yes, these are all cognates.
*** Partly because of availability, but also the gender politics manhwa depict is frequently even more disturbing than that of manga.
**** NB to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija: including an amnesia plot.
As for chapter one of Ooki na Mori no Chisa na Ie, I can report that frontier winters require lots of preparation. Also, after the first few pages, the language got less simple and I started taking longer than that 30 min/page I was so proud of. However! -- every now and then, I can correctly read an entire sentence without using a dictionary. Progress, sez I. Now -- if I could only reliably recognize potential forms of verbs ...
---L.
The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff - I lost count of the number of resonances with Kipling I caught. Okay, some of which would come naturally with the territory, but still. It's not executed with Kipling's gift with voice, but then very little is. Tasty, in the way boy's adventures in Roman Britain and across the Wall often are. Available in paperback.
Sakura-hime Kaden ("Legend of Princess Sakura"), Arina Tanemura - It's been a while since a manga made me go " ... the hell?" in quite this way. This is the unlikely fusion of Heian-era historical drama, as in teh dramaz, and shoujo magical-girl adventure, as in starring the granddaughter of Princess Kaguya prancing around Heian Kyo in a pimped-out upgrade of a Sailor Senshi outfit,* slaying demons with a katana she pulls out of her palm. And then it gets weird. It's good to be kept on your genre-expectation toes.
I won't say it's a perfect story. For one thing, there's not enough, or even any, snark about those Heian Hats. But it is crack. 3 volumes ongoing, unlicensed, scans current.
After School Nightmare, Setona Mizushiro - I'm having a hard time articulating my response to this, and an even harder time saying anything without completely spoiling it. It's pretty, yes -- disturbing, yes -- tightly plotted, yes. Even the elements that initially don't make sense make perfect sense by the time our mixed-gender hero(ine) graduates from the "dreaming class". The sort of plotting that is helped by reading the entire series at once, within a day or two. I can't tell whether it's brilliant or not, but it's very much worth reading. 10 volumes, official translation complete.
Collect Poems, Philip Larkin - I hadn't realized early Larkin was so deeply influenced by Yeats's manner, if not matter, giving his first collection an almost Audenian voice. Fortunately he grew out of it into something rich, terse, and strange for his other three collections. Poor toad. Poor church windows. It's probably just as well Larkin was as productive as Housman -- and just as craft-oriented. Readily available in paperback.
Mana, Vin Lee - I don't read as much manhwa** as manga,*** but this uses traditional Korean spirit lore the way Natsume Book of Friends and Hyakkiyakou Shou use Japanese equivalents. Our heroine, a college student, accidentally makes a contract with the ghost of a rock musician, and using his powers sets herself up as an exorcist. Like many of these sorts of stories (including Natsume Book of Friends and Hyakkiyakou Shou), it's very episodic, as in ghost-of-the-week sort of thing, but some episodes are several chapters long. I'm not entirely sure I believe the heroine gets away with dressing in quite that much see-through netting on campus, but exploring yet another world of spirit lore is fascinating, even the classroom dissection of the various shamanistic traditions. Warning: the first chapter is a prologue with a very different tone from the rest. 4 volumes, unlicensed, scans complete.
Akagami no Shirayuki-hime ("Red-Haired Princess Snow-White"), Sorata Akizuki - I thought I'd posted about this before, but the Google gods say otherwise. If you like the linework of Natsume's Book of Friends (and you should), you'll love this -- very much in the same style, and indeed runs in the magazine Natsume started in. It has a similar sense of pacing as well, despite dealing with court politics. Um, let's see, summary -- orphan Shirayuki escapes the unwanted attentions of the heir of her country's throne, attracted to her unusual red hair, by decamping the kingdom, along the way meeting and being rescued by another prince, Zen. These two strike up an unlikely friendship and in order to have a legitimate reason stay in contact, she becomes an apprentice herbalist at his castle. The series has been getting notice for having a male romantic lead recently win the title of shoujo hero least likely to be mistaken for a jerk -- he has disturbingly little competition -- by apologizing for kissing her without prior consent and promising to always ask first. Er, if you couldn't tell from the above, it's the sort of friendship that slides into romance -- the best kind of romance.
One particularly interesting aspect is the series's examination of agency in circumscribed situations. Shirayuki is neither politically powerful nor physically strong -- she's a teenager without a family who happens to have been apprenticed in a useful skill. But she is strong-willed, and within her bounds she has the agency to work towards her goal. She can be frightened when threatened but refuses to be pressured -- "I don't want to live that way." Which is good because, well, being friends with a prince can be dangerous for commoners. And then there's how Prince Zen is circumscribed by his situation as younger brother to a ruling prince who does not believe in coddling his heir presumptive, especially when he's a useful tool for dealing with restive nobles. 5 volumes ongoing, unlicensed, scans nearly current.
Sasameki Koto ("Something Whispered") and Aoi Hana (literally "Blue Flowers," officially "Sweet Blue Flowers") - It's hard not to treat these as a pair. Both are short, dozen-episode anime series about high-school lesbians, neither of which, wonder of wonders, are about the titillation or fanservice. Well, there's some fanservice -- the pool episode of Sasameki Koto and the bait-and-switch opening credits of Aoi Hana, I'm looking at you two -- but it's rare and not the focus, which is instead the lives and loves of a cast of teenage girls, some gay, some not. The difference here is that Aoi Hana plays it for teh dramaz while Sasameki Koto goes largely for the comedy. Both successfully navigate tricky tonal lines -- Sasameki Koto as it mixes that comedy with a deep melancholy that's steeped from a complex of unresolved romantic tensions, Aoi Hana by using a low key approach to keep itself from tripping over the bathos line into melodrama. Both also end inconclusively, being based on on-going manga, but at least at something of a pause that looks forward to changing relationships -- Aoi Hana with a little more resolution than Sasameki Koto.
If I had to chose, I think I prefer Aoi Hana as giving slightly more respect to the characters' emotions and dilemmas, and productionwise it looks better -- as in visually gorgeous, making excellent use of its Kamakura setting. OTOH, Sasameki Koto is, unusually for yuri-with-teens, set in a co-ed high school -- so the male characters are peers instead of in their early 20s. Both TV series available legally on Crunchyroll; both manga are ongoing, unlicensed, scans into volume 5.
Making Sense of Japanese, Jay Rubin - Subtitled "What the Textbooks Don't Tell You," this is a short collection of immensely readable essays on a dozen hard-to-wrap-brain-around topics of advanced Japanese grammar and idiom. It's pitched at slightly more advanced students than I am now, but I still got a lot out of it. Rubin's concept of the "zero pronoun" isn't radical, but still a useful tool for parsing, e.g., how many people are involved in statements using kureru/kudasaru/itadaku/ageru when none are named, and his insistence on not translating active verbs with unstated actors as passives was a good reminder. OTOH, I haven't gotten the knack of his technique of analyzing upside-down sentences rightside-up, which is supposedly more restful than the traditional inside-out method, but I'm working on it. I'm going to be rereading this every so often, I suspect. Readily available in paperback.
Onna-no-ko wa Yoyu! (roughly, "Girls Should Be Calm"), Kyoko Hikawa - Certain kinds of low-key shoujo romances can be especially charming, and this is a perfect example. The first chapter, in which the protagonist subtly helps her male friend hook up with another girl only to recognize her own feelings for him, is especially poignant -- no angst, just quiet melancholy followed by recovery. Her two friends are also nicely handled. Sweet and nearly pitch-perfect throughout, even unto the open ending. Note that, being from 1990 by an author who started in the '70s, the art is slightly old-school -- showing mainly in the size and faces of the boys -- this being another by the author of Kanata Kara/From Far Away. 1 volume, unlicensed, scans complete.
Miriam, Kyoko Hikawa - A slightly older series by the same author, this one a Wild West romance. Yes, really. Miriam Todd is, initially, a strong-willed eight-year-old orphan living with rancher Grace Howard. Douglas is a 17-year-old drifter with two friends named Card and Joel (guess which one plays poker) that Miriam ropes into accepting jobs as ranch-hands. Young Miriam is cute in an adultlike child sort of way -- she's had a harder life than she initially lets on, and is the sort of strong that you know things are really bad when she finally cries -- Doug is more soft-hearted than he wants to admit, and just about every western movie cliche shows up at least once.**** Fair warning: be prepared to gloss over such lapses as confusing county sheriffs with federal marshals.
At first, that "romance" is in the generic, rather than genre, sense but in part 2, Miriam grows up into an even more spirited young adult. Good fun adventures, not just because of that spirit but also the author's clear-eyed sympathy for what her characters have survived. 7 volumes broken into 3 arcs, unlicensed, scans complete.
* Including a frilly miniskirt complete with a yin-yang symbol over her crotch. Plus a leather choker -- wouldn't be Tanemura with one.
** Korean comics, as opposed to Japanese manga. See also Chinese manhua. Yes, these are all cognates.
*** Partly because of availability, but also the gender politics manhwa depict is frequently even more disturbing than that of manga.
**** NB to
rachelmanija: including an amnesia plot. As for chapter one of Ooki na Mori no Chisa na Ie, I can report that frontier winters require lots of preparation. Also, after the first few pages, the language got less simple and I started taking longer than that 30 min/page I was so proud of. However! -- every now and then, I can correctly read an entire sentence without using a dictionary. Progress, sez I. Now -- if I could only reliably recognize potential forms of verbs ...
---L.