Japanese Reading Report: 29 June 2025

This week I sort of thoughtlessly didn't end up watching any anime. It feels bad to do no audio immersion, but I did a lot of reading and gaming so I'm not too bothered about it.

感じない男

I became aware of this book last year after reading おかえりアリス, a manga series I liked quite a lot. That series was about three teenagers who are dealing with various levels of sexual and gender questioning. In the afterword of the final volume the author, 押見修造, mentioned how he was inspired to write the manga after reading this book. Last November when I was in Japan I spent way too much time and effort running around Book Off stores (that's a Japanese second-hand bookstore) trying to find it, but eventually gave up and decided to get it digitally. So now I've started reading it.

The premise of this book is that modern mens' relationships with their sexualities are in crises. What I've read so far has mostly just been setting the stage and the author explaining his core points. Basically, he seems to believe that studies of male sexuality have been inadequate in understanding the current epidemic. He claims that the reasons men enjoy watching and reading porn that depicts women being degraded is partly because of a desire to harm women and partly because of a desire to hurt themselves. He says that culture has positioned female sexual experiences as "higher" than male ones, and says that it creates a sense of inadequacy for men who believe they can't or won't ever feel something as good as a woman.

In an early chapter, the author wrote about why men like miniskirts. The multi-part breakdown of his own mindset and various example situations was pretty fun to read, but it also showed his own vulnerability.

It has been a fairly interesting read so far. My biggest issue so far is that so much of his perspectives seem to be from his personal experience. He's cited some science and studies which involved dozens or hundreds of men, but only in service of explaining why they didn't go far enough (fair enough, and I agree sexuality is understudied). I hope as the book goes on he will substantiate some of his bigger points with some more evidence.

英雄伝説　空の軌跡ＦＣ

I spent quite a bit of time playing this. I imagine I'm fairly close to the end of the current chapter, but I actually paused my game at a sort of awkward time before writing this report.

So Estelle, Joshua, and Scherazard headed west to Bose. We met with the young mayor, learned about the prickly relationship between Bracers and the military, and met with General Morgan to learn first hand how much the military distrusts Bracers. Following the tracks of sky pirates, we also visited a small town on the border of two nations, which was bombed in war and suffers greatly for it. We finally tracked down the pirates but, just like the last time we found them, they got away. This time we had nothing to show for it except the empty airship Estelle and Joshua's dad was aboard.
Oh, also, we met Olivert, the bisexual foreign bard. He joined the party for the shortest escort back to Bose after our first visit to Morgan's army fixture. His chemistry (or lackthereof) with Estelle was fantastic. I can't wait to meet him again.

The biggest thing keeping the writing strong for me is Estelle. She is easily the best character in the game, and I'm always looking forward to how she'll react to the next story moment. I think she's basically the perfect "anime protagonist". She's upbeat and short-tempered, but she's also motivated by a sadness from her childhood, and a desire to prevent other people from experiencing the same grief.

I'm still waiting for Joshua to get good.