Ah neat! That explains the logo!
It shows up between chapters bisected by the end of the page and I didn’t make a connection to the logo on the back cover and was like “what the heck is that, some kind of rune?” 
So that’s a mystery solved!
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I don’t know if it matters to anyone, but for the release of the 鹿の王 animated movie, the books are 30%~50% off on Booklive (so I assume it’s the case as well on Bookwalker). I already own the first 3 volumes in physical form, so I was planning to get the last one in physical form as well… but discount… uh.
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And on that note, I’ve decided to read 7SEEDS.
I just reached volume 3, and holy cow, that’s scary (for me).
I have to admit I kinda expected the parasitism part, though, based on the attitude of 柳, although I think it’s a bit unrealistic that he kept his higher cognitive functions (at least enough to be able to talk in a coherent way…)
Volume 1 was pretty fun, since I had no idea of what was going on (I went in completely blind, mostly went for this series because I saw it recommended a few times as well and the first 10 volumes are free for a couple more days). On volume 2, I thought it was pretty cheap that 花 was also a survivor. Like, what were the odds. I also don’t like that team much. It felt karmically satisfying that 柳 would mostly die soon, though. Also, there isn’t much going on, plotwise. It’s just stressful But fun, so why not.
Anyway, let’s see how the rest of volume 3 goes. I briefly checked the list of chapters, so I assume there’s going to be a team change again soon…
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OK bokujou!
Oh exciting! 7SEEDS is my favorite manga, so I’m looking forward to hearing what you think about it going forward.
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It might have to wait a bit more; reading manga on a screen is really destroying my eyes.
Instead, I’ve made a reservation for the first 12 volumes at my local library, but the wait time is about 1 year After all those years…
On a related note, I have finally analyzed my feelings about why I hate that 花 is a survivor. I am shipping なつ with 嵐 (as we are supposed to, I guess), but I can really see the development that, after 嵐 finally gives up and they get together, they randomly bump into the spring team… I was also happy that it was confirmed that summer B team is made of social rejects (although, then, why is 嵐 in there? I guess we’ll learn that eventually edit: yes, on the next fricking page). Also, I think 百舌 is in fact the guide from the A team, and he just replaced the real 百舌.
Ah, one extra thing I was thinking, maybe they didn’t wake up at the same time. Maybe one team will find the other team long dead.
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I can enjoy your thoughts (one year later if need be, lol), but I can’t really say anything back! I know all the things! However: good thoughts. 
I also went into 7SEEDS not really knowing anything. It’s quite a trip. 
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I feel exactly the same when I read people’s comments on 本好き.
I guess I will finish volume 3. Volume 4 will depends on how my eyes feel (I had to stop reading yesterday because they started to hurt, so I read 鉄コン筋クリート on paper which was no issue, confirming that the screen is the problem).
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I thought the anime was also a great addition (especially since reading the manga felt a bit sluggish for me in the beginning, since I had to get used to the art a lot). The opening of the second season (may contain slight spoilers since it’s the opening op S2) is soo great 
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Thought I would make a post every month or so with a summary of what I read. I haven’t started reading a book yet, as I still gotta order some. The ones I have are tied to media I haven’t yet read in JP, so it doesn’t really make sense to start them. So I mostly focused on reading manga and playing games.
Manga
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SPY x FAMILY (vol 4-5)
Continuing where I left it off last year. Reading the series has become a bit easier, although there’s still some tough spots. Volume 4 for example is one big mission and that’s usually where it gets a bit harder due to the background details that are filled in while the operation is underway. It centering around a big fluffy dog that can see the future makes it an easy motivation to keep reading. Volume 5 on the other hand is a bit more varied, showing more slice of life moments and the biggest thing is mostly Anya’s midterm exams. Near the end it gets a bit harder as a new character gets introduced, which is playing a bigger role in volume 6. It stays very cute and wholesome, while there’s plenty of action scenes to enjoy. -
ルックバック (one-shot)
Reading it in Japanese again makes me confirm that it is really one of the better one-shots I have read. It splits the narrative in two characters that are intertwined with each other over a period of time, showing their love for drawing. Surprisingly for a jump+ title it didn’t really have furigana except for names, so it was good practice for me. I didn’t expect myself to read it in a single day, kinda breaking my own record of pages read. Of course there’s also just pages with only panels where you’re just reading off visual information. It’s a great read and addition in my small collection. -
デキる猫は今日も憂鬱 (vol 1)
As my digital library grows, I really needed to read something on my kindle app. This was the one I had my eyes on. It has a cute big cat that takes over the household chores of its owner who can’t take care of herself. While the cat finds happiness in the small things, like cooking a great meal or cleaning, the protagonist is working hard at her job to provide cans of tuna. Cans (缶め) are the chapter counter in this manga. It not only has its cute moments, I was also able to learn some work related vocabulary from it. Feel that is really the direction I should pay more attention to this year, as I’m getting a better handle on the regular day to day vocabulary. -
デスノート (vol 1)
I think seeing a sample of volume 1 convinced me to give it a shot, as it looked more doable than I thought. I also happened to have some extra space to squeeze it in and the bookclub starting made it an easy choice. I went with the digital color edition, very pretty, but the furigana are still too tiny to make out sometimes. There’s some more advanced grammar and hard to follow sections (like the police investigations), but it really isn’t that bad for me. Reading spy x family made it a bit easier for me to parse denser works. Still needed to look up plenty of words. That said it was a great time revisiting the series in this manner and I like to continue it on my own later. I’ll keep an eye out for the book club discussions tho, as they prove to be valuable as well.
Read a total of 5 volumes in January and currently halfway in my 6th one as of this moment of writing. I think progress wise I’m well on track on my yearly goal of 50 volumes.
Games
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ポケットモンスターブリリアントダイヤモンド (NSW)
Started my playthrough of Brilliant Diamond near the end of last year and kept playing through it, just finished it this week as I beat the 四天王 and the previous champion. Now I’m just enjoying what post game has to offer, before I turn to Arceus. It took me around 50 hours to become the champion and it’s not that far off from my regular play times in pokemon games. I talked to all the npcs I could easily find in towns and cities, battled all the trainers I could find and tried to catch new pokemon as I went through the routes. Pokemon games come with two options, either kana mode or kanji mode. I picked kanji mode, it was a pretty comfy read due to the spacings between word sections and only displaying 2 lines of dialogue at once. The only thing that could go slower for me are the battle lines before a trainer sents out a pokemon. After learning the archetype names, I basically just tried to get the trainer’s name and pokemon’s name from it as the rest is less important. Learned a lot of new vocabulary and some kanji from playing it. I found the remake a nice way to revisit シンノウ地方 which is based on 北海道. Arceus is basically another take at it, so I’m curious how that will pan out. -
カタカナしりとりナンクロ (Android)
I had already cleared all the easy puzzles on it before and had done a few on normal. Just picked it up again this week as I want to do all the normal puzzles at least this year. It’s a puzzle game and the name basically says it all, a fusion of shiritori rules with nankuro (number + crossword) in katakana. There’s also kanji variants, but those might be a bit much atm. Pretty good to either start or end the day with a bit of brain work. The main strategy is to keep both shiritori and nankuro rules in mind. So if you have ン in your selection you can never start or end a word (even the last spot in the spiral grid) and this should hold for every word. Then you should look at common parts like ウ, シ, チ, キ, リ, ツ and く as they searching for nouns and common expressions. Might have to try out a few combinations on part of the grid to get a feel for the words. I don’t like grabbing a dictionary immediately, but usually use it check it against my guesses. Also helpful to know that ヨ, ユ, ヤ are often preceded by シ, チ, キ, リ and ツ is often used for doubling a sound. When I’m done with the puzzle I often look up the resulting words beginning at the start till the tail end. It keeps me occupied and it hits that sweet spot of puzzles and Japanese for me.
I beat 1 game in the last period and I’m looking forward to playing more soon. I tend to play long rpgs, so it’s unlikely I’m beating a new game every month, but that’s okay. Arceus will be my new source the coming month(s) and it is definitely interesting as it will be the first game I start in Japanese without having played it before. This is also the first pokemon that has consolidated kana and kanji mode to just use kanji with furigana, so I’m also interested to see how that pans out.
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If you are looking for interesting new books to read, and if you like to check out award-winning books, then maybe The Honya Taishou 本屋大賞 Reading Challenge is for you? You can find out which books won the prize, and keep track of those you’ve already read.
Happy reading
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I’ve been busy lately, so progress has been slow. But bedtime manga have become a really nice habit.
I’ve been reading ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 up until volume 4 and I’m starting to love it more and more. It’s slowly becoming one of my favorite manga. The sense of tranquility and the constant portrayal of people not being busy the perfect remedy after a busy day.
Unfortunately the 新装版 is out of print and I only own 4 volumes. The remaining 6 are quite pricey and very hard to acquire from overseas, so I will unfortunately have to stick to digital for the rest of the journey.
I’ve also picked up よつばと！ again, currently reading volume 7. It’s also easily one of my favorite series. There are plenty of manga that were inspired by or have tried to mimic よつばと！, but よつばと！ is just so masterful at what it does that no one really even gets close. The unique ideas, the sense of comedy, the portrayal of children etc. is just spot-on.
As for books, I’ve finished 星やどりの声, a slice-of-life story told from the perspective of six siblings. While I did like it overall, it didn’t win me over entirely. It was very good at showing how different all of the siblings are and that all of them have their own worries. But the writing lacked nuance and felt a bit sappy at times – especially when their deceased father was involved. It was heartwarming to read how they all deeply cared about him and his inheritance even years after his death, but that every single plot point basically tied back to the father who was elevated to a sacred status was a bit too much for me.
I’m currently reading 3 books:
貝に続く場所にて – Yup, finally making progress again. I’m confident I’ll finish it this time. Maybe in another week or two. I’m starting to enjoy it more and have passed the 50% mark today.
「作家」と「魔女」の集まっちゃった思い出 – A collection of biographical essays written bei Eiko Kadono. Not my focus right now, but the essays are very short, so I’m reading one every now and then.
キキとジジ 魔女の宅急便特別編その２ – The second Kiki spin-off about Kiki and Jiji’s childhood. It’s very short (160 pages) and makes for a relaxing bedtime read.
Hoping to finish these 3 books in February before continuing with 鹿の王２. I’ll still be busy for a while, so I probably won’t be reading a lot.
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Since I finally finished Tobira, I can unleash 多読力, and resume reading 
.
Current pick is Death Note vol 1. After that either Bakuman vol 1 (same mangaka) or SpyxFamily vol 1. Once that’s done, burning through Edogawa Ranpo’s detective club novels.
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YASSSSSSS 
I assume you mean this whole list? Or are you referring to a smaller subset?
Either way I’m here for it. I want to read them all too but I’m just sneaking them in between other books so far Too much I want to read.
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I meant the whole list, but somehow I wasn’t aware it’s that long. Well whoops…
I will probably read the one’s available on Aozora Bunko.
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I finally finished 貝に続く場所にて! Only took me what, about 7 months?
I really don’t know what to say about this book except that I never really knew what it wanted to tell me. It’s about a Japanese woman from Sendai living in Göttingen, Germany where she encounters the ghost of an old acquaintance who passed away during the March 2011 tsunami.
From there one her memories interweave with the townscape, sculptures of planets, art history, religious figures, the ghosts of other people. There’s a truffle dog who digs up objects that hold a special place in people’s memories and the entire book is full of symbolism and never really states anything in clear words.
I’ve read other books where I enjoyed the poetic, kinda flowery language (風立ちぬ comes to mind), but here I just had no clue what I was even reading for paragraphs on end. It wasn’t a vocabulary problem and probably also not a language problem first and foremost. I think could’ve gotten a bit more out of the book if I had done a bit of research. Survivor’s guilt is definitely a big theme, but there’s just so many things flowing together that it’s really hard to say what else.
I bought the book because of its premise, but I really struggled to get into it. I’m glad that I managed to finish it, but I don’t think I’d do it again and will probably drop other books that I just feel I can’t get into from here on.
That why I also won’t judge the book. It just flew over my head. It’s not unusual that I don’t completely get literary works – I definitely did have my problems with キッチン and 推し、燃ゆ. But 貝に続く場所にて was on a whole new level.
Maybe I’ll try to read some reviews. If anyone else reads it, please tell me your opinions.
Edit: I also thought it would be a short read with only 160 pages, but the text is so dense that it’s about the same length (93k characters) as many 300 page novels, so you definitely shouldn’t assume this is a quick read.
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Today I finished キキとジジ, the second Kiki spin-off book.
It describes Kiki’s and Jiji’s early childhood, from her birth to about age 10 when she decides to become a witch. It’s really endearing to read, especially because half of the book is written from Jiji’s perspective. Being a cat, he grew up faster than Kiki (but slower than normal cats), but their early relationship had some ups and downs.
It’s a very light reading, counting only 160 pages and plenty of lovely illustrations. Perfect bedtime reading material.
But my main reason to read both of the spin-offs now is because I want to buy the third one that came out last month. I’ll order it now so I can read it next month.
Next up is the essay collection 「作家」と「魔女」の集まっちゃった思い出. I’ve only read a few segments, will probably take it easy and focus on other hobbies for now. But I want to at least get started with 鹿の王２ this month. We’ll see how it goes.
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I just passed both 50% on ロクヨン【上】and 1000 pages read this year. Happy to say that after a few chapter ロクヨン went from an exhausting intensive read to a more comfortable and sustainable level of difficulty. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, though. I’m really excited that the plot seems to be developing into police corruption, as that’s probably my favorite subgenre of crime. Currently have 3 different plot threads running at once:
- The main character’s runaway daughter and the emerging details of family dynamics
- The breakdown of relations between media and police and the background as to why
- The famed ロクヨン case, a unsolved crime from 昭和６４
Also despite being over 150 pages in I think only 2 days have passed if I’m keeping track of my timeline correctly?!
I stopped reading 共犯マジック and put it back on the shelf after about 20 pages. I might pick it up later, but unsure. It was frustrating to read (some of the words I was looking up I didn’t even know in English as astrology/mysticism aren’t topics that interest me) and I just generally wasn’t that intrigued after dragging myself through the prologue.
I started reading パパの愛した悪女, another 赤川次郎 book though and have been enjoying it in a brainless way. It’s a very breezy read compared to ロクヨン especially. I’ve looked up <10 words in >60 pages and about half of those were just wanting to know the reading. Grammar is incredibly straight forward. Basically it’s about a girl whose mother ran off with another man and committed double suicide, bodies were never found, and then one day she bumps into the son of her mother’s lover.
To be honest the most interesting part of this book so far for me is the unusual formatting of the pages. Has anyone seen this before?
Two rows of columns per page.
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Only in magazines! 
Could there be a thematic reason to use this sort of styling/formatting/presentation?
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Oh interesting! I didn’t know magazines did this. I can’t really think of a thematic reasons for it, but I’m only a third of the way through the book. I will say another odd part of my copy is that it doesn’t have a summary on it anywhere, although it does contain the typical author details blurb inside the dust jacket. I got this off ebay and I’ve bought pre-print/not for public sale versions of English books used before so perhaps this is that? Or it’s a special “small” version as my copy is 186 pages and the listing on Amazon for the paperback is 280. 
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