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.

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.