Putting in my report early this week since I’ll have guests over the weekend and probably won’t get a chance to read much.

First up, I finished vol. 2 of 女神異聞録ペルソナ after running out of time to finish it last week. Now that the base cast has been established they’ve been introducing new characters and they keep impressing. One scene in particular features the newest member shocking the entire party by his ability to avoid fighting demons by negotiating with them, which is basically just an excuse to drop in a bunch of heinous puns.

This week’s chunk of 夜市 actually brings the titular story to a close with half of the book still remaining. When I realized this was published by the Kadokawa horror imprint it set me up to expect some pretty awful developments, but in the end it was more akin to the kind of philosophical emptiness that that Twilight Zone usually instills. I liked it quite a lot and I’ll be looking forward to how the next story plays out (based on a quick skim of the first page it seems to be quite different from the get-go).

I also read vol. 9 of Flying Witch, which I was very excited to get (it’s a monthly manga so we only get a new volume about every ten months). There were lots of opportunities to pick up new words through context alone, which is always fun. Picked up a new grammar point, がてら, which appears in my N1 新完全マスター grammar book. There were quite a few good chapters in here; in one, Makoto’s mini mandrakes are causing hilarious mischief and a new character from America is introduced, leading to a few pages of very broken English until it’s revealed that she can speak Japanese too. Interestingly, both of the manga I read this week used horizontal text to indicate when characters were speaking a foreign language that was being translated into Japanese for the benefit of the reader. There was also a chapter featuring the samurai ghost Okada, who was much easier to understand this time than when I first met him in the last volume.

I also jumped on the Persona 4 train, though I’m actually picking up from an old save on my Vita rather than the new Steam release. Some friends of mine are starting to play it in English so I figured I’d follow along and get some practice in. Most of my time this week was spent idly grinding to get a good set of personas for the Yukiko fight so it was a bit light on actual reading, but worth mentioning I think.