laceblade

BBC's Sherlock - for some reason I hadn't realized that the source is only three 90-minute episodes. I watched the first one last night with Antoine; it was pretty great! I love Watson, and can now pay proper attention to people's related icons and fandom posts. Do people really like Sherlock as a person??
Despite knowing things about Sherlock Homles/Watson, this is the first time I've ever actually watched an interpretation of it (no, I've never watched House).
I've never read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but I think I'd like to someday.

Love*Com: The Movie - based on the manga series by Aya Nakahara. The basic premise is the budding relationship between a taller-than-average girl and a shorter-than-average boy who are both in high school. They keep trying to find romance while also constantly bickering with each other, and then realize that all their friends/classmates are rooting for them to be together. Can they get over their height complexes to do so?!
I liked this a lot more than I expected to! The actress playing Risa could contort her face magnificently. I still need to finish reading the manga, but I think I like the anime the most. The Kansai accents were best in the anime, IMO.

Among Others by Jo Walton - Did not love this as much as everyone else did, I don't think. We'll see if my opinion changes after we discuss it at Book Club. I still like Walton's writing, etc.

Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga - Don't have tons to say about this. I think I like her Flower of Life series better??

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!! by Fumi Yoshinaga - BWAHAHA, amazing. The manga-ka writes a mostly-autobiographical tome about visiting restaurants and eating with her friends. I guess she's a big foodie. She visited lots of pricey places, though, so I only made a photocopy of the bagel/bread shop instructions/hours for our upcoming trip to Japan.

Soul Eater by Atsushi Ohkubo - the first two volumes of the manga are about how far I had seen of the anime. I think this works better for me as a manga? It certainly cuts down on how long it takes me to get through it, :D I love the trippy/drippy backgrounds in this series. I think Maka is a great protagonist. If this were a regular shonen series and she were just a secondary character, I would be upset. I hope this series does not disappoint me like Bleach and Naruto did (focusing on endless power-ups/battles that I didn't care about).

Glee, season 1 - I KNOW. I KNOW. I watched it and I recognize the fail and I would absolutely not "rec" this series. BUT. It's an easy thing for me to mainline when my brain is dead, and sometimes I like watching popular shows just so I know wtf is going on in pop culture (and so I understand the Fandom Secrets about them, lol).

Saturn Apartments by Hisae Iwaoka - This is one of the few manga series that I know of that focuses on class issues as a central theme and doesn't shy away from it. In the future, people no longer live on the planet surface, but instead in rings that surround the planet. The ring is tiered, upper/middle/lower, which corresponds with the class identification of most people who live in that ring level. Our protagonist is Mitsu, a member of the lower class-ring who joins a window washing guild. As window washers, they clean the windows outside of the apartments of those who live in the other classes. Mitsu navigates around the ring levels/classes, and also learns how to get along with his co-workers, who all knew/worked with his father before his death.
There are no epic plots here, just following Mitsu throughout his (sometimes) normal days of working, vacation, etc. The art style is unconventional for manga, but I find it very endearing.

Fumi Yoshinaga is famous for writing series like Antique Bakery, in which men in Japan create a French bakery and sell delicious pastries. Ōoku is a more serious piece, focusing on an alternate history in 18th century Japan. The series has won many awards in Japan, including the Japanese Sense of Gender Award.

There are currently four volumes in Japan, and the series is on-going.

In the United States, Ōoku is being published as part of the Viz Signature series, which means that the book is taller and wider than standard manga. It also has cover flaps and a few pages in color. The book is beautiful.


Traditionally, the Ōoku was the part of Edo Castle where the shōgun's concubines and relatives stayed.

In Yoshinaga's alternate history, 75% of Japanese men have been killed by the Redface Pox. Men and their seed are a scarce resource that women protect by making up the labor force themselves. They also make up the shogunate. Because of this, Yoshinaga's Ōoku is populated with men.

This world in which gender roles are reversed mostly focuses on court life, as indicated by the title. I personally might have preferred it if the narrative focused on life beyond the palace where there are more women learning to cope with fewer men, but I am able to empathize with the characters.

In each chapter, the plot continued to deliver dramatic and unexpected turns. I look forward to reading more, and I recommend this series to others.



The main quibble that I have with this series is not the fault of the manga-ka, but the translators at Viz. The series takes place in 1716 Edo. Throughout the volume, characters are shown speaking in Early Modern English, or the same type used in Shakespeare, with thees and thous, etc. While it's clear that whoever translated the text was familiar with Forsooths and thines, I think that sometimes the translated text is ridden with errors, or at the very least not edited for an optimal flow.

An example would be, "Such brazen shouting! Doth he think this is a soldiers' barracks, perhaps?"

If this were actually written in Elizabethan time, wouldn't the phrase read, "Doth he think place a soldiers' barracks?" or maybe, "Doth he think this place to be a soldiers' barracks?"

More often than not, it seems that words like doth, thee, and thou are simply inserted for their modern counterparts and the rest of the sentence is left unedited.

The language is also combined with colloquialisms, or sharp shifts to modern English that often seem an uncomfortable mix:
"Do not get so full of thyself!" [Even if this colloquialism were used, wouldn't it be, "Do not get so full of thine self!" ?]
"Verily so. I got a good look earlier, and...."

One character even employs the use of the curse, "Zounds!" which doesn't even make sense. "Zounds" was a shortening of the epithet, "God's wounds!" which makes sense in a predominantly Christian society. However, in 1716 Japan, Christians lived in hidden societies, and feared discovery because the punishment was death.

I will confess that I don't know very much about the Japanese language, so maybe those on my FL can correct me if I'm wrong?
I don't even know much about the mechanics of the English language, aside from reading it a lot. For some reason, throughout my years of schooling (including being an English major at a good university), I never learned how to diagram sentences. My sense of "wrongness" in writing is usually intuitive, so I could be quite wrong myself.