３月のライオン
Author: 羽海野 チカ
Page Count: 188
Natively: Level 31
Summary
Japanese
その少年は、幼い頃すべてを失った。夢も家族も居場所も──。この物語は、そんな少年がすべてを取り戻すストーリー。その少年の職業は──やさしさ溢れるラブストーリー。
English
(DeepL) The boy lost everything when he was a child. His dreams, his family, his place in the world… This is the story of a boy who regains everything. The boy’s occupation - a love story overflowing with tenderness.
Availability
Rakuten
eBook Japan
CD Japan
BookWalker
Honto
Amazon Kindle JP
Amazon JP
Kinokuniya JP
Personal Opinion
One of my personal favorite series of all time (I’ve recommended it to people all over the place, both on and off the forums) both in anime and manga form. Gorgeous art and reading it in japanese has a very special flow that I haven’t found in many other manga. It showcases an extremely deep love of people and the many complicated ways they can relate themselves to each other (a style you might be familiar with if you’ve read this mangaka’s other famous work: ハチミツとクローバー) it’s an extremely hopeful (although not always happy) view of humanity through a case study of the professional shogi world. It’s won or been nominated for like a bajillion awards in both anime and manga form, and imo they are well deserved.
Pros:
- One of the all time great seinen series
- Gorgeous art
- There’s a lot of it, if you like it (17 volumes, ongoing, but very slowly ongoing)
- Has a lovely anime adaptation from studio SHAFT (monogatari, madoka) that follows the chapter structure very well
- なんかコタツみたい
- Was recently on sale on bookwalker, and I know at least a few of you picked up the whole series
Cons:
- Dense some pages are literally columns written by an actual pro shogi player trying to help give you some context, and they can be a real challenge to read
- Lots of handwritten/stylized fonts, which can be a challenge for some people
- Can get very introspective/heady/philosophical at times, somewhat unrelated to the action happening (maybe a plus for some people)
- You will learn a lot of shogi words and very colorful poetic expressions, it gets very into the nitty gritty of how the game and organization works, and sometimes in ways that are plot important and you can’t really skim over (also maybe a plus for some people), or will have some expression that you can’t get away with looking up quickly in a dictionary
- The first few volumes were already run as an independent book club back in 2020
- It does take a little bit to show its true colors. In the service of making sure we get a good understanding of our characters and the world, it’s fairly slow. Just reading the first volume will not really give you a good picture of what the series is like
- Digital scan quality can be questionable at times
additional pages showing some of the high text density (from a later volume, but no spoilers)
Example shogi column, there are 4 of these per volume
Let me know if there’s anything missing, hard to navigate well on my laptop lol