Japanese Reading Report: 13 October 2024

It's the penultimate week of school so, despite the report length, I haven't actually had much time to get input in. This week's report has several short shows that I just happened to have a lot to say about. I was also able to read quite a lot, partially thanks to some long train rides through the week. Enjoy.

• あなた （１－１２６ページ）
• 君に届け （第１７－２５話）
• こえでおしごと！ （第１－２話）
• ダンダダン （第１－２話）
• 魔法少女リリカルなのは （第１話）
• ドリームハンター麗夢 （第１－３話）
• 絶対にラブコメしてはいけない学園生活２４時 （０－４５％）

あなた

I decided to read this book when a friend mentioned it and I noticed how short it was. I ended up reading it in about three days. The book is basically a single, slightly long short story about a multi-generational tragedy from its beginning to its end (sort of).

The story starts by establishing the first tragedy — 小栗貞子 attempts to flee her small town with the town's money and her lover, a man named  増田, but is abandoned by him when he snatches the money and rides off. The meat of the book then follows that man (going under the pseudonym 町田) returning to his home town as a business tycoon. He has spent the last 40 years building industry throughout Japan (presumably off the wealth he stole from the town) and has now decided to build a luxury hotel in order to "help" the town see more tourism money. A not-insignificant amount of dialogue in the book takes the form of townspeople being fairly sceptical about the value that 増田 is actually providing them.

「それがいやなの。この町に媚びてるわ。それでいて、稼ぎは全部東京へ吸い上げられて、町には何も残らない。町の人たちは、ボーイかウエイトレスか、窓拭きがせいぜい。それを、町長さんなんか『町の救い主』なんて感激して。何も分ってない」

君に届け

So I finished the first season. Overall I found this show quite enjoyable. 爽子 continues to be a delightful character, and her relationship with 風早 is as charming as it was last week.

With that said, I think the most interesting arc this season was the ちづる and 龍 relationship. I think ちづる is just a very relatable character. She's a bit tomboyish and her outgoing personality masks a tenderness that made my heart ache every time it was exposed. When her childhood crush comes to visit and she finds out that he has married, her idealistic, carefree spirit was really tested. It ultimately created a situation where she ruined the perfect moment she had built up in her head about giving 龍 his birthday gift. His relaxed and stoic temperament sort of lead to further misunderstandings, but also meant the situation didn't blow up much beyond that. He continues to be the best boy.

My favourite episode in the season was episode 22, クリスマス. In this episode 爽子 wants to spend Christmas with her friends (and 風早 especially), but she keeps having misunderstandings with her father about her Christmas plans. The episode is resolved when her father gifts her first mobile phone (a symbol showing the trust he has in her to be independent) and 風早 gifts here a 4-leafed clover charm that she quickly attaches to it.

こえでおしごと！

This two episode anime adapts a manga of the same name. I found it surprisingly engaging and thought provoking. The show wastes no time getting to the point -- the protagonist, 青柳柑奈, agrees to work as a voice actress for her sister's erotic game company. As a young girl there is some discomfort with addressing the sexual subject matter leading to a few gags and some drama for 柑奈. Visual storytelling like 柑奈's body/soul transferring into the characters she voices, バツ icons covering erotic words, and censoring phallic objects by making them magical, transparent, rainbow rods, were all fresh forms of expression and had a fresh, playful aesthetic. The art was also just stellar and made me want to seek out more works by the studio. 柑奈 gets into the role and begins to "get used to" the job is also interesting because I think it has potential to explore the ways work can change and desensitise us against taboos. She learns that she is able to perform better by entering a "trance" state. This wasn't unlike Evangelion's 碇シンジ, who also performs best by casting his inhibitions aside, synchronising with Eva Unit 01, and leveraging his connection to others.

One of the reasons I was interested in trying this anime was because of my personal history with erotic media. I've always been quite uncomfortable about the erotic vocalisations made in eroge, anime, and basically anything else. Just like 柑奈 for much of my life I've been unable to face a part of culture that made me mildly uncomfortable. And, also like her, I was able to find that "trance" state while watching the show. So basically I think it's a feminist masterpiece.

Unfortunately the show's only two episodes don't explore much beyond 柑奈's entry to the industry and an implied budding romance. A full anime exploring the ins and outs of an eroge development company sounds like the most interesting thing in the world to me right now. Perhaps I'll read the manga or play the VN at some point.

ダンダダン

Not too much to say here. This has been a pleasure to watch. I knew from the teaser trailer that this anime would be a worthy adaptation for the manga and it has exceeded my expectations. The manga was already gorgeous — it implied movement, scale, weight, and energy effortlessly. The anime adds the time and colour to all of those elements and floods your senses.
This is the kind of adaptation that feels like a 100% natural move from one medium to another. Very cool.

Just like the チェンソーマン adaptation, I think the biggest problem is my own expectations. Only 12 episodes in total means we probably won't get to the parts of the manga that truly blew me away when I read it. I'm still confident it will be enjoyable, but there is an awkwardness to knowing ahead of time that an anticipated anime will stop short of the parts where the anime "gets good".

魔法少女リリカルなのは

A property that was put on my radar by エロゲー文化研究概論 as, according to the book, this magical girl anime was originally a spin-off story of an erotic game called とらいあんぐるハート！. I saw a post on social media celebrating the series' 20th anniversary including a promotion to air the first season for free on YouTube, so I thought this was the perfect time to give it a try. This is also one of my first anime in the magical girl genre, so that may impact my impression of it.

The anime stars the titular なのは, a fairly regular school girl with a few close friends and a good relationship with her family. After saving a ferret in a local park she is wrapped up in the conflict of another reality filled with magic and monsters.

The animation is quite good, and the fashion stood out as highly detailed for some reason. In particular there were a few scenes in the family home where every character just looked well dressed, and the way the fabric of their clothes moved felt very high quality. I know it's a weird thing to latch onto but that's just what I noticed.

ドリームハンター麗夢

This series sort of fell into my lap after discussing media that transitioned from erotic to all-ages media forms during their development, putting it into a similar box as 魔法少女リリカルなのは. Apparently the first OVA release was R18, but all subsequent OVAs were made more in an M15 style (there is some spin-off content that still appears to be R18 on the official website).

Each episode is about 50 minutes long. The structure is episodic, each involving the titular 麗夢 solving some kind of supernatural mystery by entering dreams and expelling or purifying some evil spirit. The series is part magical girl and part crime thriller (though the mysteries are fairly straight forward). Episode 2 was probably my favourite. In this episode, 麗夢 infiltrates an all-girl's school and solves a haunting causing girls to go missing.

I think the strength of the series is how it uses dreamscapes as an excuse to create out-of-this-world settings while also allowing the action to return to contemporary (for the time) Japan. Dreams are also used to explore the emotions and memories of characters. It's a nice way to add a visual element to something that would otherwise just be discussed verbally or expressed via flashbacks.

絶対にラブコメしてはいけない学園生活２４時

Yet another property that was mentioned in エロゲー文化研究概論 since the character artist is 同級生's 竹井正樹. This book is 261 pages according to Bookmeter, but I'm reading it on my e-reader (a Kobo H2O Libre) so the page count is a bit unreliable.

I would compare my experience with this book to my experience with 『機動戦士ガンダム 異世界宇宙世紀 二十四歳職業OL、転生先でキシリアやってます』 (yes it's a mouthful). Both books are somewhat self aware of their genres and both cater to a readership that is also aware, but I think this book does a better job than the Gundam book (which sadly sits at the bottom of my all-time book rankings for books read to date). I think partially it has to do with the setting. While the Gundam book was literally set during key points in the Gundam UC timeline, this book is just a parody of any and all romance games which gives it a lot of flexibility with the form. While the main character of the Gundam book was rigidly insistent for the story to "follow canon", the motivations of the character in this book is purely internally motivated: survive and stay pure for the girl he likes back in the real world.

I should actually explain what the book is about. So the story follows 鈴瀬ユート, an average boy in highschool with a crush on 佐倉凛音. His crush asks him to help identify a mysterious disk that she was given while she also laments the mysterious absences of various students for the last week. As it turns out the disk contains software for a high tech VR game that traps ユート until he is able to complete the game - a romance-comedy adventure game. In order to escape he has to achieve the true ending on every girl in the game. By doing so he also frees the girls and allows them to return to the real world. Even though it doesn't make much sense to him right now, 佐倉 is also in the game as a helpful 妹 type character who manages his Save and Load data.

Chapters are separated by which route ユート is currently on. I've read through the entirety of 葉山撫子 and 水城先生's stories. The former tells a fairly pure-love story with a little bit of teasing. 葉山 is a year older and that plays into the story mildly. She also considers them 幼馴染 despite the fact that their only shared memory was him praising one of her drawings once when they were very young. The second story showed me that this wasn't just going to be a basic romcom parody. This story has a bunch of highly erotic choices that mostly lead to bad ends, but ユート actively starts choosing all the options (saving beforehand of course) just to see what will happen. In the end the best ending comes out of showing a pure admiration for his teacher, though it's still played very erotically. Ultimately it was just a fun parody of the format that doesn't get too bogged down in details.

I'm currently reading through the 桐野来花 route which has shown off the flexibility of the story even more. 桐野 showed up in all of the previous stories but was continuously forgotten in favour of other routes, but ユート finally decides to pursue her this time. As it turns out, they are *also* 幼馴染 (though this time it's a bit more legitimate), and, she is extremely yandere. Thankfully ユート has learned how to use his Save data at this point, so he's able to avoid the worst of it, but he came within inches of having his life end during this route so far. I can't wait to see what happens next.