Ima Ichiko

Hi everyone,

Wow! It’s May already! Time flies. Well, here’s the fifth Chapter of Ima Ichiko’s Five Box Stories, “A Warm Box”. You can download it here at the web page.

I feel like this one has been neglected for a while. I didn’t have a regular editor for it so different people were doing chapters whenever they had time. I’d translated the fifth chapter a long time ago, but no one was available to work on it, so I kinda forgot about it. Then, out of the blue, someone sent me an email and offered to help get the ball rolling again. So please thank Liz for volunteering to edit. She did a great job and she’s hoping to do the rest of the volume, too, as soon as I translate it. (Hahaha… that’s the hard part for me.) Well, I hope you enjoy this story. It’s not one of Ima’s more dramatic and gripping works, but I was a little surprised by the serious tone in parts.

Hello, hello…

Finally! Another chapter of Ima Ichiko’s The Mysterious Stories of Ghost Moon Tower. You can download it here. I hope you enjoy it. Next time, Shouichirou attends a party at a haunted house, disguised as a famous artist.

This manga requires a lot of internet research. This chapter was easier than the first, but I still spent a lot of time researching various topics online. I’ve also been collecting interesting photographs and artwork, relating to geisha, courtesans, or life in Yoshiwara, along the way. One of the things I found was this collection of postcards, describing a typical day in Yoshiwara, drawn in 1906. That’s twenty or thirty years before Ghost Moon takes place and some of the customs had changed (for example, it was illegal to display prostitutes behind cages, or harimise, by the 1920’s) but they are still interesting to look at. The strange thing is, they are written in English. (I’ve written the words below each picture because some of them are hard to read.) The series is not complete, but this is all I could find. They are part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (at least, most of them are…)

While we on the subject of artwork, I’m wondering if anyone out there can help me. I discovered that Ima-sensei started each chapter of the magazine version with a color page. In the current chapter, it’s page 49. As you can see, it’s black and white in the manga version. I was lucky enough to find someone with the color pages for most of volume 2. She sent me a photo of one, and they are much prettier in color. I’d like to include the color pages in the releases, if possible. So, if anyone has scans of Chara magazine from as far back as 2003 up to 2005, and you’re willing to share, please let me know. It’s a long shot, but you never know… ^__^

Hi everyone,

New release time! Chapter Four, of Ichiko Ima’s Five Box Stories is available for download here. The story is called “Coffin Under the Snow.”

Happy belated Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it!

I had to go back to work today after five days off. Boo. Well, I’m grateful to have a job at all, so I shouldn’t complain too much. But, man, I’m tired! I hope I didn’t make any mistakes posting this release. If so, I’ll correct them tomorrow. Sorry.

A super HUGE thank you to my editor, RockCJ, for her hard work and finishing this way ahead of schedule! Like I said in my last entry, things have been slowing down here a bit, so I was very surprised and happy to see this in my inbox this morning. It definitely made my Monday more tolerable. Please be sure to thank her for her fantastic work.

If anyone wants to help out and get things moving, please send me an email. An editor who doesn’t mind shoujo would be great! Please take a look at my project status page if you want to get a sense of what I’m currently working on. The shoujo works are all by Kunie Sakai.

Well, I hope you all enjoy this story. It’s sort of a melodrama. Very serious and dramatic.

Good night!