I started and finished 超ビジュアル！日本の歴史大事典
thoughts about it
I must have been really starved for history, because I read straight through this! It’s by no means short, but it’s about as breezy as you can get with thousands of years of capital moves, 乱s, 変s, reforms, regents, shoguns, regents to the shogun, etc. Reading it reminded me a lot of devouring Horrible Histories books when I was a kid, although this isn’t anywhere near as sarcastic or charming.
Format-wise, it’s presented as a series of two-page spreads about particular topics, which makes for easy reading but also makes things feel pretty disconnected, and sometimes highlights just how brief the coverage of those subjects really is. I’m obviously by no means equipped to assess the book’s accuracy, and it’s obviously pretty shallow and toothless, but it’s not like I’m surprised by that, given it’s a primer for kids. The fictionalized illustrations are very hit or miss and can feel weirdly editorialized at times depending on how heroic or villainous a figure is made to look, and I also don’t love that the illustration for the occupation of Korea is some Korean students looking just sort of vaguely bored in a Japanese-language class. But I think it’s fine as an introduction source, and I like reading about history enough (and wanna read/watch jidai stuff enough) that I’m quite sure it won’t be my last source.
I enjoyed reading it and am happy to finally have at least a general outline of events and time periods in my head that I can already start plugging historical dramas into (“oh, that’s the battle from Kagemusha!” “Oh, that’s why those ghosts were sad in Kwaidan!”). My other main take away is like a billion historical names and terms I’ll probably regret putting into my anki deck once I start having to review them.
The next prose thing I drew is 世界から猫が消えたなら which I don’t really know anything about except it’s a novel and it seems like it’s sad.
I’m gonna be honest, I bought this one on impulse because professional wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi tweeted about having read it. I have no idea if he has good taste in books or not, I think I just see “oh 猫, it must have something to do with cats, cats are nice!” and that’s enough for me, apparently.
Anyway I’m looking forward to not reading non-fiction for a bit at least!