I am not formally signing up for this challenge or participating officially, but I thought since I just committed to a crazy ambitious reading project, I might as well post about it in here for some extra accountability!
So, Hyper Misao, a Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling wrestler, is really into tanka poems, and I bought a book called 推し短歌入門 (which is an introduction to tanka through composing poems about your favorite characters) sort of with her in mind, because she’s one of my favorite wrestlers, so the concepts of “推し” and “短歌” are already kind of linked in my brain. (For a bit about Misao’s history with tanka, see here).
Misao had her first produce show on May 25, 2023, and it was wildly ambitious and really stretched the bounds of what pro wrestling can be (here’s a description of the show. It involved dimension hopping/time travel and all sorts of nonsense). She has another produce show scheduled for April 19, 2024, which will likely be similarly genre-defying, though we have no hints toward what this year’s show will involve, at least not at this point.
Last year, Misao’s show was extremely well-received and many people (including me) shared their thoughts on twitter, and she went through the tag and liked pretty much every post in it.
So I started to get a crazy plan: what if I read 推し短歌入門 and learned the basics of writing tanka before her show, then wrote a tanka that was inspired by her produce show and shared it on twitter where there’s a strong chance she will see my poem? I feel like it might make her day to see her own wrestling work inspire someone to write tanka, so I really want to try it.
The only problem is that I have a whole lot on my plate reading-wise right now, because TJPW is about to be in the middle of an extremely busy period, so there will be a big show that I’ll have to translate next week, and then their show in America, which will likely include a press conference that I will also have to translate, and I’ll be watching a whole bunch of other shows on top of all of that.
Oh and also I still have yet to have actually finished reading a proper book in Japanese (just manga and some digital text and a few books with a lot of English in them), so this one would be my very first finished Japanese book, and it’s substantially harder than everything else I’ve read. And not to mention I’ll be attempting to compose poems in a language I’m not at all fluent in.
What could possibly go wrong? 
The book is a little less than 90k characters total, and I started it a few days ago, so I have to read it at roughly a rate of 3k characters a day to keep up. This is fine when I have no translation workload. It’s substantially harder when I do. So far, I’m doing an okay job keeping up, but the real busy days will be the end of March and the first week of April, so I’m hoping to get a bit ahead now while I still can in case I fall behind then.
As of right now, I have read 18k/90k characters!
I am not sure how often I’ll post updates in here, but it definitely won’t be every day, haha. My deadline is April 19, so I should be done reading the book before the challenge ends.
I’m just about done reading part 1, and just wrote my very first tanka. Here it is:
半時間あなたと俺のにらみ合い空き会場を照らす火花だ
(Inspired by this)