Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 葬送のフリーレン // Next: ウスズミの果て

chrisosaurus · December 20, 2021, 11:09am

王様ランキング (King Ranking)

_{gulp am I doing this right?}

Summary

The people of the kingdom look down on the young Prince Bojji, who can neither hear nor speak. They call him “The Useless Prince” while jeering at his supposed foolishness.

However, while Bojji may not be physically strong, he is certainly not weak of heart. When a chance encounter with a shadow creature should have left him traumatized, it instead makes him believe that he has found a friend amidst those who only choose to notice his shortcomings. He starts meeting with Kage, the shadow, regularly, to the point where even the otherwise abrasive creature begins to warm up to him.

Kage and Bojji’s unlikely friendship lays the budding foundations of the prince’s journey, one where he intends to conquer his fears and insecurities. Despite the constant ridicule he faces, Bojji resolves to fulfill his desire of becoming the best king he can be.

Availability

Amazon (Ja, Physical)・CD Japan
Amazon (Ja, Digital)・Kobo・Bookwalker
Pixiv (Digital)

Personal Opinion

Optional aside / boring background

I’ve been planning on reading this on my own and thought I’d run it by the BBC to see if anyone else was interested.

In the before times (Sept 2019) I was visiting Japan and that re-ignited my interest in learning the language, I decided to try pick up some easy and well known manga to eventually work towards.

While poking around the store I stumbled across this, I couldn’t find anything about it online in English (only making me more curious), and something about it just really grabbed my attention and to my naive eyes looked not absolutely terrifying.

Now there is an anime being released for it, so there is much more about it floating around, including a MAL entry.

I find the premise very interesting as it is rare to see disability explored in Manga, especially for a shounen/seinen fantasy protagonist.
More generally I’m also excited to explore more approachable fantasy / plot-driven series, as I find them a bit easier to engage and stick with than episodic slice-of-life.

I have started a best-effort vocab sheet covering all the Kanji words I found in the first 2 chapters and all the Kana-only words for at least the first chapter, but I’m still quite new to this so I’m not super confident in it yet (until I actually read through it proper). I’ve shared it now as it might be useful to get an idea of the vocab we would encounter.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Furigana
- Huh, I was able to find some screenshots online that lacked furigana
- my physical copy contains Furigana
- there are Amazon.ja reviews mentioning furigana, and the official twitter likewise mentions furigana
Not slice-of-life (subjective)
Evolving story and plot (subjective)
Grammar seems surprisingly approachable (caveat: I haven’t read yet, only sampled pages)
Anime currently airing

Cons

Not slice-of-life (subjective)
Fantasy (-lite?) vocab (sword, crown, queen, king, princess, prince, shield, spear)
Some sentences can be on the longer side (see additional sample pages, occasional info dump)
Page count is on the longer side for a Manga at ~220 pages (although many contain no speech)
Chapter 1 dialogue seems more complex / wordier than many later chapters
- see additional pages, I’ve tried to capture examples of the worst offenders
- as far as I can tell it settles down after chapter 2-3 (after it has finished info-dumping the world I guess?)