Thanks for the warning, Adolf.

But if I see the following scenes from the novel brought to life . . . then we’ll talk.

What was this reaction… similar to a normal person’s?

Nagato’s eyes were tightly shut, and a blush of red began spreading on her ceramic-like pale cheek. Moans, like faint sighs, escaped from her slightly parted lips, and I finally noticed the quivering of her delicate shoulders under my hands, like a puppy under chilling air. A shivering voice reached my ears.

“Stop it…”

I confirmed that Asakura had left first before I whispered to Nagato.

“See you. Can I visit the club room tomorrow too? I have nowhere else to go to after school.”

Nagato fixed her eyes on me, and…

…Gave a faint but definite smile.

I was literally dazzled.

Show me this, KyoAni, and I will show mercy in return when I pass sentence over you for what I now realise is the longest, most expensive, and by far the most frustrating movie teaser I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through.

Remember when this show used to be good?

Remember when the next episode was something one used to look forward to?

Remember when the adoring masses wanted to heap bouquets on KyoAni’s doorstep, instead of burning tyres and Molotov cocktails?

Yeah, I do too.

So here, for a limited time only, is a reminder of happier times.

. . . on my present circumstances.

Not much to say, really. Work is proving a major drain on both my overall enthusiasm and my time at leisure, but that’s all par for the course – and the not-inconsiderable pecuniary fruits thereof are regularly being converted into fresh acquisitions for my manga shelves. If all goes well I may even be able to put away enough for a return journey to the Land of Raw Fish on Rice next autumn, a year ahead of schedule.

This blog will continue to be updated when time (and mood) permits, so no announcement of a hiatus is forthcoming. On the other hand, do expect a slower rate of publication than before, thanks mainly to my full-time commitments as a white-collar slave but also because I don’t see much worth blogging about in this year’s disappointingly bland fall anime lineup. (The good people at Random Curiosity will happily bring you up to date on that.) It’s not a good sign for the upcoming season that the only show with a reasonable chance of going on my viewing queue – for now at least – is about a chap who can understand catspeak.

Cheerio.

Let’s go for a stroll through one of Tokyo’s finest traditional gardens.

(NB: To put things in the proper context, I took these pictures on Sunday, 29 March 2009 – right in the middle of hanami season. Enter the garden now and there won’t be a single cherry tree in bloom, although I’m sure it’s still worth visiting.)

Nestled within the urban sprawl of Bunkyō-ku (north of the Imperial Palace), the Koishikawa Kōrakuen dates from the 17th century and was once associated with the Daimyō of Mito’s Edo residence. It’s not exactly off the beaten track, but for tourists seeking to escape the company of their fellow gaijin this place really hits the spot.

On the other hand, there’s no escaping the hordes of happy Tokyoites who descend on the garden every time the cherry trees start breaking out into clouds of pink and white blossoms.

Looking for a place to relax?

Look someplace else.

No worries – the garden is quite large and there are many quiet corners to which one might beat a hasty retreat.

Right, that’s about all the commentary I can wring out of my work-stressed brain at the moment. I’ll let the pictures do the talking from here on.

(Just one more piece of commentary – that is Tokyo Dome right next door. So close you can hear the crowds from the garden, although the cheering tends to be quite muffled so the atmosphere isn’t badly spoilt.)

The Koishikawa Kōrakuen is within easy reach of Iidabashi Station on the Toei Ōedo Line. 300 yen gets you through the entrance. There’s a fair bit of walking involved, on different kinds of terrain – from flat, meandering paths to long flights of stairs – so wear comfortable shoes and pack a bottle of water or two.

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Since it was launched on 9th September, Monopoly City Streets has seen thousands of armchair real estate magnates snap up hot roadside – or should I say on-road – property all over the world. Built upon Google Maps and the OpenStreetMap database, the free online game gives players $3,000,000 in site currency with which to start purchasing the digital equivalents of the world’s streets, put up buildings on them, accumulate profits from rent and capital gains, and in due course establish a global real estate empire worth billions.

Not that one needs to aim that high, of course. Some might be content with owning the digital twin of the street they live on in real life.

I stumbled on the game quite by accident (via the BBC) mere minutes before it was launched, and since then I’ve been stopping by whenever I can to cobble together a modest portfolio based in the Japanese capital (with a smaller presence in Osaka and my own city). I’ve been through the birth pains, too: with demand far exceeding expectations, gameplay on the overloaded servers during the first few days has been next to impossible, with the site failing to load most times and failing to work properly when it does. Even now the glitches haven’t been completely ironed out.

Deluged with cries of unfair play, serious bugs and other complaints, the production team have announced that there will be a game reset sometime next week. I’m not sure I agree with that decision. On the one hand, the problems at the outset really were quite serious (let the irate commenters on the official blog bring you up to speed on that), so wiping the slate clean seems like a sensible choice. On the other hand, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve done so far – including getting my hands on a well-known Tokyo street – and I’m not happy with the thought of it all vanishing in a puff of pixels.

But no worries. I’ve already had my fun with the game, and I’m not even sure I’ll need or want to jump back in after the reset. But I may just do so anyway in order to have another chance at bagging Chūō-dōri.

Taking over the world, one street at a time.

Last year, I said I didn’t believe in luck.

I still don’t.

But I still like the way the numbers line up.

The feeling one gets after spending way, way, way too much

It means “to drive oneself into penury”.

A glaring sign of how full my days have been recently: more than two weeks after returning home from Singapore, I have yet to finish emptying my luggage. But hobbies come first, so before I tip out the plundered hotel toiletries and souvenir air sickness bags, I’ll need to go through the spoils of my nighttime raids on the Lion City’s well-stocked asylum for committed bibliomaniacs.

Good bookshops are easy to find in my corner of the world, but when it comes to Japanese books in particular – raw manga, linguistic materials, artbooks, magazines and so forth – Kinokuniya’s main branch on Orchard Road is miles above anything we have back home. Needless to say, I made the most of my stay in Singapore by frequenting the country’s greatest national treasure as often as humanly possible. (The generous 20% anniversary discount they were offering on the National Day weekend added even more urgency to my mission.)

Here’s a quick rundown of what I burned my hard-earned cash on.

BOOKS AND MAGAZINES

The best things in life are expensive

An “official box” (= fanbook + box with special goodies) for the Hayate no Gotoku! anime series. I should wear the included Hakuou Academy official pin on my shirt collar one of these days – a form of undercover cosplay, if you will (since I don’t expect anyone at work to recognise the fictional school’s phoenix crest for what it is).

I already had the first volume of Tanigawa Nagaru’s Suzumiya Haruhi light novel series, but when I saw this new, slightly larger-format edition from Kadokawa’s Tsubasa Bunko imprint sitting on a shelf of books for younger readers, I cracked it open to see how it differed from the original release. The key difference: all of the kanji in this edition were given the full furigana treatment. I grabbed a copy for reading practice.

Two anime fanbooks, one for Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and the other for xxxHolic. Run-of-the-mill stuff – character profiles, production notes and so forth.

Magazines. Voice Newtype August 2009, featuring the Haruhi Five (with the K-ON! Gang, the Summer Wars Duo and other supporting roles thrown in for good measure). Haruhi also features in Newtype September 2009, which comes with a lavishly illustrated TYPE-MOON insert and a great poster of Nagato clad in summer kimono (from the Arc That Shall Not Be Named). Evangelion takes centre stage in Newtype August 2009, the bonus item for which is a small but quite well-made figure of someone called Mari Illustrious (these names… oh, the humanity…).

Yet another Nagato fanbook. That’s right, Diego has once again bitten the poisoned hook of the Dark Kadokawa Empire’s merchandising war machine. I have nothing to say in my defence, except that the caption on the cover strip (長門は、みんなの嫁です) isn’t far off the mark. Ouch.

Finally, we come to AVVENIRE – a collection of splendid full-colour art from all three seasons of the ARIA animated series. I could have gotten this in Japan for a much lower price and in better condition (together with the three hardbound artbooks for the ARIA manga series), but for some reason, I didn’t. Now that error has been rectified and my ARIA artbook collection is complete.

MANGA

Even the little ones can break the camel's back (or push your baggage over the cattle class weight limit)

Most of the series I’m currently following in English aren’t expected to see new releases until later this year, so Hayate 12 and Ouran 14 are the only translated manga in my haul.

The awkwardly-titled “Gorgeous Characters Guide” for the Hikaru no Go manga series. And yes, as a matter of fact there is a rather horrible pun in the book’s strange title (碁ジャス☆キャラクターズガイド, ahahaha) – but I’m prepared to overlook it for the wealth of content between the covers.

Volume 40.5 of TeniPuri. I’m not following this series at all, but I’ve been collecting the special character-guide volumes (identified by the 0.5 in their numbers) since I saw the anime a couple of years ago.

JAPANESE TEXTBOOKS

I completed my elementary Japanese studies using the Minna no Nihongo series, covering about three-fifths through regular classwork and the remainder through rapid self-study sessions (using materials borrowed from the Japan Foundation library) in preparation for JLPT 3. Wanting to thoroughly revise the parts I rushed through before last year’s exam without having to borrow and re-borrow the books every week, I picked up the main textbook and supplementary volume of MnN’s second half, as well as a kanji coursebook from the same series that should see me about halfway through the expected kanji content of JLPT 2.

After I’ve finished with MnN, I plan to take my Japanese a little further using the newly revised An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. The material covered in the book probably won’t fit seamlessly into the MnN system – it is, after all, linked to the rival “Genki” series of introductory-level Japanese coursebooks – but I did examine the contents beforehand and it seems compatible enough for my purposes. (On top of that, the audio in the included CDs is the best I’ve heard in a Japanese language course: crisp, clear, very natural in pace and intonation.)

OTHERS

Japanese books (either raw or in translation) comprise just part of Kinokuniya’s massive 500,000-title collection. But with the shops back home not lagging too far behind in their English-language offerings, there was no real need to stock up on tomes that would probably be available on my native turf anyway. A novel about the Third Punic War, a couple of children’s books for my sister’s collection, some freebies – that’s about it for my non-Japanese pickings.