New Release: Yamamoto Kotetsuko, A Boring Man, Chapter One

Hi everyone,

With all my attention focused on Carp, I completely forgot that I had another chapter due by the end of October! Here’s the first chapter from Yamamoto Kotetsuko’s A Boring Man. You can download it, along with chapters 3~5, here.

First, about this chapter, I don’t have much to say. It’s a cute, very light yaoi story about businessmen. I always like stories about businessmen. ^__^ There’s an extra at the end of this manga featuring these two characters, but we’re going to do Chapter Two next, a story called “Sweet Room.”

Thank you, Mah-chan! Sorry this took so long to get out. I’ve been having some website issues.

Second… Wow, the response to Carp has been really amazing. When I checked my email Sunday morning, I had over 100 emails (This never happens at home. Work, unfortunately, yeah…) and I still haven’t had a chance to read all your replies. From what I’ve seen, you are all overwhelmingly supportive. That’s wonderful to hear. I think, sometimes, it’s only when someone is upset that they actually take the time to write an email or a comment, so I’m very pleased to see so many people take the time to do the opposite. Thank you so much!

Anyway, I mentioned in my previous post that I would be taking a break. I’ve thought more about it and I’ve decided that I will probably come back to this in the middle of December. I will have some time off work then and I’m sure I will be bored. I will start serious work again then. In the meantime, I’m going to keep translating, but I’m not going to worry about deadlines and what should logically come next. I’ll probably do some text translations of short stories, and there are a couple manga that I want to read, but not scanlate. After this release, it will probably be next year until you hear from us again (maybe late December, if you’re lucky ^__^) but please don’t worry that we’re gone for good. There is no chance of that happening.

I also mentioned Setona Mizushiro’s manga, Violinist, in my last post. An editor volunteered to do it, so it looks like we will be scanlating it after all. I started scanning my books, too, so that’s a pretty good sign it’s happening. ^__^ Mizushiro-sensei wrote this manga when she was 23-years-old! That seems so young to me! It will be interesting to see if there is any similarity between her work then and her now, fifteen years later. I’m looking forward to this.

One last thing… someone asked me why I didn’t consider Carp yaoi. Well, I’ve been thinking about this question in relation to Winter Walk and A Garden in Full Bloom (which is forthcoming, but we’ve already started work on it) and I wonder, does having a gay character, or a gay romance, automatically make a manga yaoi? My answer is “no.” I think people can write stories that feature gay characters and they are still action/adventure, romance, comedy, what have you. That said, it’s not exactly clear where to draw the line. So I decided to make the decision based on the magazine that originally carried the story. My assumption is, the author wanted to write a story for the target audience of that magazine. If it’s a yaoi magazine, then the author intended to write yaoi. If it’s a “women’s magazine,” like Mouse and Carp, I think the author intended to write a love story (of sorts) for older women that happens to deal with homosexuality. But I’m not going to worry about it too much if people want to call yaoi. Maybe it’s simpler that way, just to warn people who don’t like reading about homosexuality, regardless of the genre.