Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 気になってる人が男じゃなかった // Next 葬送のフリーレン, then ウスズミの果て

熱帯魚は雪に焦がれる (A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow)

Summary

Sometimes you find what you yearn for…

Konatsu is about to start a new school in a new town, and she’s basically all on her own. Her dad just got a job overseas, and her aunt can only check in from time to time. It’s a lot for a shy, reserved girl to handle. But on one of the first days of class, she discovers that the school has an aquarium! The club that runs the aquarium is headed by an older student named Koyuki, and Konatsu is instantly drawn to her. Konatsu’s introverted tendencies are hard to overcome, but maybe she’s found something worth coming out of her shell for?

Availability

Physical: Amazon
Digital: Bookwalker

Personal Opinion

I wanted to read a similar story to やがて君になる and a lot of people recommended this manga. I don’t think it has that many simularities to the before mentioned book, but is a great manga on its own. The art is absolutely stunning and it does not shy away from putting very little text on a few pages to highlight that. The characters are very likeable and the problems they deal with are relatable (even if they are a bit “blown up”).

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Lovely art
  • As this a newer manga the scans are great
  • Furigana
  • Not to many characters
  • The last volume releases in June

Cons

  • Quite a bit of dialect

Pictures

First Three Pages of Chapter One


Additional Pages

Have a look at the preview on bookwalker (click on the manga cover)

https://viewer-trial.bookwalker.jp/03/9/viewer.html?cid=38d8fba5-e602-43d1-bafd-4e8cb51c4e81&cty=1

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this book?

  • 1 - No effort at all
  • 2 - Minimal effort
  • 3 - Moderate effort
  • 4 - Substantial effort
  • 5 - So much effort my head might explode :exploding_head:
  • I don’t know

0 voters

5 Likes

We will be voting next week!

I’m going to open the vote for our next pick next Saturday (which could mean Friday or Sunday depending on where in the world I decide the time is).

Please, if you have any interest in reading along with our next pick, take a look through the nominees listed in the OP and vote on how difficult you find the samples.

You don’t have to have read a book with us before at all - the only thing I ask is that you try to rate a fair number of the nominees if you’re going to rate any at all, because the ratings are only useful as a comparative measure between options.

(Any last nominations should be submitted by Tuesday, 2021-05-18T11:00:00Z, so that people have a chance to rate them before the vote opens.)

5 Likes

Thanks for the heads up. I noticed that the manga I nominated is not in the OP yet. Do I have to do that myself? Not sure how the procedure is on that front.

I don’t know if there’s a preference on who adds it, but since the first post is a wiki I figure it shouldn’t hurt to add it in yourself. Just look at how the others are done, and mimic that. But I went ahead and added it in for you, so it should be good to go =D

@Radish8, this was my first time adding in a nomination post, so I wasn’t certain where to sort it. I added it to the top of the list, so you can easily find it if it needs to be sorted in somewhere else. I didn’t add the difficulty rating because I don’t know when you add that. (My guess is you update the difficulties for each nomination after each voting session ends.)

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As ChristopherFritz said :slight_smile: you are very welcome to add it yourself, but if it hasn’t been added by Tuesday I will add it myself then.

(@ChristopherFritz - I update the difficulty scores as I put the voting poll together, so yeah, no need to do that - usually we put them as ‘tbd’ until they first get assigned a score. And there isn’t really an order, except that I vaguely group them by type sort of.)

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I went through the nominations and noticed the link to the nomination post for City doesn’t work. Did that nomination get removed or something?

Yeah, the one who nominated the entry deleted their post. Not sure if the info in the OP should be deleted too then :thinking: I guess if people still would like to read it with the book club, someone else would have to nominate it again.

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Oooh, thanks for flagging that. It actually looks like yukinet deleted their account entirely. I hope they’re okay.

@Redglare - I think that deleting the nomination post decidedly counts as retracting a nomination!

Yukinet was actually responsible for a couple of other entries in the list (Mingo and Plastic Elder Sister). I’m inclined to think we should remove them - it’s not like people always join books they submitted (life happens!), but there is a kind of expectation that the person who submitted the proposal will take part. If we know in advance that they’re no longer around it seems odd to keep the nomination.

People would of course be welcome to re-submit those books. It’s not like they’ve been retracted for being wrong for the book club.

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We also removed their nomination in the intermediate book club, for the same reason.

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Ah okay, that’s good to know - thanks. We shall be consistent then :grin:

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Hmm. Haven’t seen him in either of the Yotsuba live reading groups in a while either…

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At least it’s good to see they didn’t delete the ハイキュー book club threads when they left. It’s kinda scary to think that resources could just disappear.

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I’m not sure you can delete threads :thinking: I suppose they could have asked the mods to do so, but that would be a lot of effort to go to, and hopefully the mods would think twice before going “sure!”

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I’ve never deleted my account, so I don’t know for sure, but I guess there should be a way to just nuke the account and remove everything rather than the soft delete that just replace the name by anon+numbers?

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I’d guess that would also require some kind of admin approval though - but likewise, never deleted my account so I’m not sure!

(They did offer to run Nichijou as well, so I’m glad I didn’t take them up on that, unreliable as I am these days!)

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And hopefully it will stay that way! :slight_smile:

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From what I’ve seen, I think it is possible IF nobody has posted any replies in the thread within the 24 hours after you’ve deleted the OP.

There have been at least one instance of the mods hiding a thread from the public because of drama, other than the “usual” just locking the thread. So I think the mods make careful considerations when it comes to such decisions :slight_smile:

I can think of one such account that got all their posts and everything deleted by admins because of that user being a predator. So not only banned, but also complete erasure of their online presence. Was back in the days before I was active on the forum.

I’ve spent a bit much time reading through old threads :caught_durtling: :see_no_evil: So much interesting stuff and history to the forum!

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Uh, yeah, and I’m kinda worried about what would happen if people from work could make the connection with my online account (as unlikely as it is, considering they are mostly Japanese :sweat_smile:). I probably wouldn’t go as far as deleting my account, but there are a few posts I would panic delete if that were the case.

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question

Would that have been a user with “green” in their name? I’ve heard vague mention of him…

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No, that doesn’t sound like the same person. One other account suspected to be them had “oranch” (or something like that) in the name, which sounds a bit like a color, though.

(edit: it was orench not oranch anyway, and that user deleted their account as well)

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