I used Mandarake (Sapporo shop specifically) recently to buy the complete set of 月刊少女野崎くん。 They are sending with DHL as Amazon Japan, so it was pretty quick, and the books were in good condition.
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Thanks for your feedback. I ordered from the Akihabara Complex. It’s unfortunate that I won’t know if the books are in stock until they check the shelves. I was also a bit confused if they are still going to send the order if some items are missing.
But hopefully I’ll get a confirmation on Monday.
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Finished 蜘蛛ですが、なにか 5 to reach 20 books (from my goal of 30). The book went by really fast because 1. the sections I like were really good, as always, so I sped through them, and 2. the sections that aren’t those sections, I always look ahead to see how far to the next section I like, and then speed through to get there. I might actually read these books slower if all the parts were parts I liked a lot. 
I enjoyed this one a lot overall, though. My favorite by far is still 蜘蛛子, but also: doodles hearts around 
メラゾフィス .
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You know, I try to read aka do some 多読, but as easily distracted as I am, I end up on the paths of 多岐 instead… 
sorry for the bad pun
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Read all the things. At the same time.
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Absolutely!
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I finished and enjoyed 明智小五郎事件簿 I
oops I had the name slightly wrong in the status graph
Some enjoyable classic mysteries, and an intro to a fun 名探偵.
Brief (for me) notes about it
It’s a collection of five stories from the mid-1920s, introducing Kogoro Akechi, an amateur sleuth who uses psychological insight to solve crimes for the intellectual fun of it from the comfort of his 棒縞の浴衣. Edogawa Ranpo is (obviously, from his pen name), someone who is obviously a huge fan of mystery novels at the time and wears that influence on his sleeve, and all of these feel like totally well done iterations on the form.
I was worried that the psychological angle would involve like, Akechi making blanket declarations like “this could never have happened because X type of person would never do Y,” but it’s always sufficiently thoughtful to avoid that, and the pattern is more like “Akechi notices the obvious explanation is odd for a psychological reason, and that starts his hunch in a different direction.” Like, there’s a word-association / polygraph style lie detector test in one of the stories, but it ends up being about how that kind of test can be fooled, and the word association just happens to coincidentally start one of those hunches, which I thought was surprisingly well thought out considering nowadays there’s still explainer videos on youtube that have to go out about the unreliability of things like witness reports and lie detector tests. Akechi knew those weren’t to be taken 100% at face value almost 100 years ago, it turns out, and it gives the impression of more thoughtful mysteries than usual.
The specific stories are:
D坂の殺人事件 – This is the 名探偵’s first appearance and my favorite of the five. The introduction is done really cleverly, because you get the setup, and then you get a conventional mystery novel explanation of the events based on convoluted physical circumstance, and then you get an Akechi-style explanation based on observed psychology. Both of the explanations are fun, so it’s a two-for-one on fun mystery stuff!
幽霊 – This one’s fun but I have nothing to say about it.
黒手組 – This one has a fun cipher! Tip for Japanese ciphers: try looking for hidden 濁点
心理試験 – This is structured identically to an episode of Columbo, to the point that Akechi all but literally says “oh and just one more thing” while catching the guy we know is the murderer off guard with a minor detail he noticed. Like, it’s 100% Columbo, half a century before Columbo, to the point that I’m really curious how much Kogoro Akechi influenced the show. I’d guess it’s possible! Although it may just be that they mutually were influenced by the same sources. This story is after all, also extremely obviously influenced by Crime and Punishment.
屋根裏の散歩者 – This one felt a lot like The Human Chair Lite, and according to Wikipedia at least, the Human Chair would have come just a couple of months after this, so Ranpo must have had those themes on the mind. (i.e. crawling into stuff to violate people’s privacy)
Thanks to the twitter user Minovsky (who put me onto this, Case Closed, Columbo, etc.), mystery recently has gone from a genre I wouldn’t have said was a particular favorite, to a consistent treat. And it’s especially fun for reading in a second-language since there’s guaranteed to be an unusual but thoroughly explained situation that you can feel very smug for having understood. I’m not really a “try to figure out what’s happening beforehand” type of reader, but I’m more than happy to just go along for the ride, and these are fun ones.
Overall though, I preferred the other Ranpo collection I read, if only because that one had a variety of genres so you never knew what kind of thing you were going to get. Whereas one mystery story after another like this can make them feel a little slight and samey (even if they are all better than the one locked-room mystery in that collection). But that makes it a great appetizer for the rest of the set, however, and I’m happy to see that the rest of the volumes all have only 1 or 2 stories per book, so I’m very curious to see what Akechi can do with more room to breathe.
I rolled for the next thing, and it’s キノの旅 !
I’m looking forward to this more now that I use bookwalker all the time and know I can get at further volumes than when I thought I would have to import them. The only impression I really have of it is “gender ambuigity + motorcycle?” which was enough for me to pick this up a long time ago long enough ego that I bought the first manga volume accidentally because I was so new to navigating Japanese book storefronts so I’m looking forward to finding out more.
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As I have been requesting manga for Natively, I went over the whole list of stuff I have read in Japanese, and boy
- it’s really biased toward shonen stuff
- when I started reading, I really had no sensitivity to fan service (which kinda makes sense, since I had no idea how prevalent it was).
Overall, I was just picking stuff from the 100円 section on the first floor of my local BookOff, just happened to be the shonen section, so, sure. By the time I understood the various categories, I was already kinda locked in, since I was interested into a few series and didn’t really move away from that. Also, I knew way less about 少女/女性 manga, since I didn’t see that many adds in the subway about them (my primary source of recommendation, strongly biased obviously).
By the time I knew better (and had a better grasp of what I liked), I moved on to novels. Found about light novels through WK, and fumbled into the same trap all over again
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I wonder what the same list will look like in a few years! At the pace you read, it wouldn’t be too hard to change the composition if you wanted to.
I am also having a weird imagining where I think of what 少女/女性 manga I would make ads for to lure you in, lol.
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Out of curiosity, were you reading a lot in translation before that?
A lot of that general arc of figuring out tastes and trying or wanting to deprogram at least a bit the shonen headliner bias is totally relatable - I just associate it with my english-language library book shelf, rather than a local BookOff! So the different perspective is really interesting.
I think I’m still at the level where my tastes in English are mainly guiding my steps towards what to try in Japanese – reading extensively enough to figure out insights about personal taste wholly in Japanese sounds really satisfying!
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I wonder too! That being said, I feel like there’s a constant vicious cycle keeping me in here, since a lot of my reading comes from, e.g., Booklive recommendations, which are based on my previous purchases, which in turn were also of that type…
Hm, I read a few manga before coming to Japan, but that mainly coincides with the time I started learning Japanese.
In general, though, my taste are heavily influenced by my parents. They are respectively a hardcore fantasy fan and a hardcore SF fan, so I just merged both aspects In Japan, though, those topics tend to be strongly associated with 少年/青年 stuff, which is part of the problem, I guess.
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I’ve apparently only read one shoujo manga, and that was in English (I’ve only read two manga in English, the other being Nausicaa). The manga was called Orange, and while I enjoyed it, it also had clear shoujo tendencies. I also have Cardcapter Sakura and Full Moon wo Sagashite on my plan to read list, but I haven’t gotten to either of them yet.
The josei anime on my list are Kuragehime and Kakukaku Shikajika, though I’m not sure I’ll actually read either of them. Haven’t you read Kuragehime though? 
I’ve seen more anime in general, so I’ve also seen more shoujo and josei anime than I’ve read in manga form. I’ve tried to watch some with fairly “unique” premises, but they tend to drop those pretty quickly and just lean into its shoujoness pretty heavily, which I usually don’t enjoy that much.
My favorite shoujo anime by far is Fruits Basket. I’m still waiting for the final season of the anime to end to see the rest of the story. If it wasn’t for the art style of the manga (which is pretty typical early 2000s shoujo style, despite the story being very unique) I would have already bought and binge-read the entire series. Besides that, Akatsuki no Yona was an entertaining anime, but not something I’d read. Last is Princess Tutu, which is surprisingly interesting and dark (but not violent dark, don’t worry). But this was an anime original, so no manga or book to recommend there.
Finally let’s not forget Nana! I probably would read that if it was a completed series, but I don’t really want to read past the point in the anime just to never see a true ending anyway. I’ve seen several other shoujo series, but none I’d recommend.
For josei anime, there’s Chihayafuru which is one of my favorite series. But the manga is way too long for me to bother reading. I also enjoyed Usagi Drop, but you know what they say… Don’t read the manga. 
I’ve seen a few others, but none I’d recommend.
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Nah, it’s perfectly fine to read the manga. It’s just so sad that they only released four volumes, and nothing more was ever made.
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I have not. I have read イカ娘, but except for the similarity in titles, they seem completely unrelated 
Fruit basket is one of the manga I read in French, back in the 2000s (no idea about the exact year though) so I guess the art style wasn’t so old at the time
It was funny re-reading it in Japanese after all this time and realizing I don’t remember a thing about the plot. I should probably just keep reading it (one day).
Another one I really liked (and that was either the second or third manga I ever read) was Angel Sanctuary. Wait, is that shojo? I remember there was a lot of action in that… oh, it is! Otherwise, I just remember that the main character goes from male to female and I really thought it was nice… and that’s pretty much all I have. I guess my memory has specific priorities. I could also try to read that in Japanese Oh, and soon after that I read X by clamp, understood pretty much nothing (but the bits I remember seem to be related to Japanese culture so no surprise) followed by Tsubasa reservoir chronicle (also clamp). Again understood nothing (and it was in French gdi ) but the art was gorgeous. Maybe it would make sense to have a look at that again as well haha.
Looking up Tsubasa reservoir chronicle, it turns out it’s actually a shonen manga, but X is not? Huh, weird.
I’ve also read some random volumes of other stuff, but I can’t remember the title (one was Alice 19th I think?)
Ah! And also Paradise Kiss, Gokinjo Monogatary and a few volumes of Nana. I’ve then read both ParaKiss and Nana in Japanese once I could do it because I just love those series. I’ve also watched the anime of ParaKiss and sung the intro countless times at the karaoke. How could I forget.
Anyway, I have read more things than I expected, it seems
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Well Kuragehime might be up your alley? Top recommended anime (simply because anime get more recommendations than manga on AniList) are Paradise Kiss and Nana. Surely it would be the same for the manga.
Oh and speaking of Clamp, I have seen the anime Kobato, which was pretty good. It felt like a shoujo anime to me, though strangely the manga was published in a seinen magazine.
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reads about Angel Sanctuary on wiki
Wait, are there any Shoujo that don’t involve incest or marrying your teacher?
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Oh, yeah, that was a thing in there. But technically their souls are not related and they get different bodies so it’s okay? Question mark?
None of the other things I listed involve either (as far as I remember).
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That’s cool! I started learning Japanese because of reading a lot of manga in English (the specific catalyst was someone tweeting basically “Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko looks cool, someone should translate it. I could learn Japanese but I won’t, too busy” which made me realize both that it did look cool and I had a lot of time on my hands…), so it’s nice to hear that the manga → language-learning path can go the other way too!
While people are recommending shojo manga at you, I have to mention 萩尾望都 (Moto Hagio)!
Her バルバラ異界 won the 日本SF大賞 and blends her classic shojo manga style with interesting SF similar to like, a Philip K. Dick novel. I’m hoping to reread it in Japanese at some point in the near future now that I can probably get away with it. (it’s complicated but compelling enough I wanted to reread it to solidify what I thought about it anyway). I also look forward to reading 11人いる, and her other work in general.
Also, I feel like the labels completely break down as the age-range gets higher. ダンジョン飯 (and ハルタ in general) are supposedly classified for 青年 but I feel like that’s a sexist default kind of thing because I detect literally zero elements of targeting ダンジョン飯 towards one gender or another, and the author’s a woman. So that might be another direction to branch out in.
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… the more I think, the more things I remember. I read some volume of Sadako (君に届け/from me to you), read Othello and “l’infirmerie après les cours” (no that’s not porn; 放課後保健室/After school nightmare).
I really liked all of those at the time, but thinking back about the plot of the last one, my current reaction is “no. why.”
Also I should go to bed.
Still edited to add
I love other books which won that prize, so I’m probably going to read everything anyway, but I’ll put that one on the top of the list then!
Oh! I was curious about that one, but yeah, the label made me go “*grumble* not again”. I’m glad to hear it’s not as gendered as I feared.
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