news

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.

Hi everyone,

I’m back from my vacation. I had a great time, but more about that later. Today, we are releasing a oneshot called “Stories.” That’s “stories” like the floors of a building, not “stories” like a tale.

This comes from the Gankutsuou Comic Anthology. Gankutsuou, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is an anime based on Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It takes place in the future, and some people find the visual effects odd, but the story is very intense and depressing. I absolutely loved it. It’s one of the few anime that I will watch again when I have the emotional fortitude to handle it. I was very pleased to discover that Kunieda Saika had done this little piece. Her artwork work captures the feeling of the anime very well, I think. Of course, I’m prejudiced in her favor. ^__^

Anyway, please go here to download if you are interested.

I want to thank Kokiden and Abscondite from Moon in a Box for helping me with this. I translated this years ago (I think it was almost two years ago) but I couldn’t find an editor to do the graphic work. So they very kindly offered to help out. I appreciate their generosity tremendously. Please visit their site if you are looking for more good things to read. I highly recommend it, too.

So, about my vacation, I actually had a chance to meet Kokiden from Moon in a Box in person. In this business, we are all over the globe, so it’s rare, unless you attend a convention of some kind, to meet people in real life. Kokiden is just as awesome in person as she seems online. I wish we’d had more time to talk, but, alas, I had to leave. This release is dedicated to her, since she loved The Count of Monte Cristo (which she read in the original French, I believe! She’s very talented with language) and Gankutsuou, too. ^__^

Here are a couple photographs relating to my trip:

Lunch. Yum! I love eel.

Here are some purchases I made. A teacup with kitties. Inside, there are paw prints. It’s so cute! And I got two volumes of this series, Shitsuren Chocolatier (or Un Chocolatier de l’Amour Perdu,) by Setona Mizushiro. The artwork looks great and parts of it are in French. ^__^ I will be reading this for fun. I believe someone is planning to scanlate so those of you who like josei will be able to read it, too, eventually.

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.