Checking in again with another update! I didn’t have as many shows to translate last week, but I did manage to finish Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling’s July 23 show (post about it here).
Here’s a photo from the show. This is this is the “fired idol” Maki Itoh doing a move that’s referred to as a Kokeshi, where she falls and hits her opponent with her head. Itoh was supposedly fired from being an idol because her head was too big, so as a wrestler, she often attacks with her head as her main weapon. The wrestler in the blue, Yuki Kamifuku, or Kamiyu, is Itoh’s tag partner in the match, and Raku (an idol and train enthusiast) in yellow is one of their opponents.
I also started reading the 新日本プロレス英語入門 book that I mentioned in my previous post! I started reading it yesterday, since I didn’t have a show translation to work on, and to my surprise I read, uh, the first 64 pages?
Granted, I was reading very much extensively and not intensively, so I did a lot of skimming over details I didn’t really care about, and didn’t really pause to look much up except for a handful of words that I was really curious about. But still, pretty amazing!
I have nowhere near this level of fluency with non-wrestling stuff, but this book is sort of uniquely suited for my strengths and weaknesses. I have very high kanji recognition, moderate vocab (specifically in this area), and relatively low grammar. Not to mention a high level of familiarity with the subject, so context is usually pretty clear to me.
The section I read/skimmed though mostly consisted of wrestler profiles. There were quite a few interesting details in there, haha. I talked about the ones that stood out to me here. Read this post to see how they handled the translations for moves like “Manifest Destiny” and “El Pinche Loco”, and how they chose to explain a wrestler’s nickname being “Dirty Daddy” to the Japanese-speaking audience.
The next section is a few interviews with wrestlers, presented in a parallel text format, but I’m going to skip this chapter for now and read the glossary next.
I also acquired a new book! This one is a picture book of a rather famous story. I found this particular edition of the book because I saw it on a list of picture books with beautiful art and thus appeal to adults. Will people laugh if I say that the reason why I decided to buy it is because of wrestling? 
Here’s the book on Amazon: ごんぎつね (日本の童話名作選)
I tried reading the first couple pages just to see what it was like. I could understand more than I expected, but I was missing some key vocabulary that made it hard to understand some parts. With picture books like this, I enjoy not looking up words and just watching my understanding grow and evolve with time. It lets me get more enjoyment out of the books, since I can reread them multiple times and get more out of them each time.