I’ve been in Japan all this week and my report is a bit of a mess because of it. Some of what I read is technically from last week while I was on my flight, and my daily reading throughout the week was pretty sparse. I did ultimately get a decent amount of reading in all things considered.

First up, manga: 東京卍リベンジャーズ vol. 31, 僕が死ぬだけの百物語 vol. 5, 殺し愛 vol. 1-3. I can see why people didn’t like the 東マン ending but I thought it was alright. Considering how popular the series is I can’t imagine it was cancelled so I am curious why it all had to wrap up in just one volume. 百物語 is still pretty good, though I wish it would pull a paradigm shift and focus more on the meta-narrative around the boy who’s telling the stories. 殺し愛 is very light reading, lots of pages with no dialogue at all. The main guy is a pest but in kind of a funny way. There’s an indian guy who uses only kanji/katakana and says things like 見ロクダサーイ and he is rather grating.

I also read よつばとしろとくろのどうぶつ; a secret addition to the yotsuba canon. It’s 30 pages long and each page has one animal name. Highly educational.

I watched a movie (in the theater) called グッドバイ・バッド・マガジンズ, which was about an image-change campaign by the four big convenience stores around the time of the Japanese olympics, where they stopped selling erotic magazines in an effort to appeal to tourists’ sensibilities. It’s the first live-action movie I’ve seen in a while and it’s amazing how much of a difference there is from anime in terms of speech clarity. The movie itself was fairly interesting as a peek inside the day-to-day of a small business.

Finally, I spent some time on two different nights watching variety TV; one for adults and one for children. Learned about ゴンズイ and other poisonous fish, heard some opinions on why Japanese has three writing systems and the worst parts of visiting the country. Kids’ TV is pretty funny. I have a frame of reference for うらみちお兄さん now and it makes the series funnier in retrospect.