Japanese Reading Report: 28 September 2025

Another busy week, and also a week of eclectic immersion. Fata Morgana has no voice acting, so I need to do audio immersion in another way. I decided to clean up my "watching" list on Anilist this week.

• ファタモルガーナの館
• 薫る花は凛と咲く （第７－１３話）
• Piece （第１巻）
• ラーゼフォン （第２１－２６話）
• NANA （第１巻）
• まったく最近の探偵ときたら （第３－９話）
• この素晴らしい世界に祝福を！紅伝説

ファタモルガーナの館

I've made fairly steady progress with this game considering how busy I've been over the week. To its benefit, while the vignetted stories (called "doors" in game) are somewhat lengthy, the stories are also broken up so that it's easy to take breaks with short sessions. The stories are all (mostly) narrated by an enigmatic unnamed 女中 (I'll just call her "the maid") who is also a continuous presence through the stories. Her goal is to encourage the player (her 旦那様) to recover their memories. All events pertaining to the house in the doors are narrated by the maid and she has an interesting storytelling voice, but the player has their own narrated "voice" during the in-between sections which is also interesting but for different reasons.

The First Door is set in the early 17th century. Mel and Nelly are both facing expectations about how male and female nobility fit into society. Nelly's love for Mel is incestuous yet never taken seriously because of her lack of power. Meanwhile Mel falls in love with the mysterious white-haired girl, thrusting his affection onto her even when his life is threatened by her. Mel's relationship is more healthy and realistic if only because it lacks the incestuous element, but Fata Morgana does a great job with its third act twist to make sure no one gets a happy ending. In Nelly's hour of need, Mel's last ounce of patience is exhausted and he reveals himself as no different to other men. I think he does it because he sees the white-haired girl as his escape and Nelly as a shackle preventing his freedom. Nelly retreats home in tears and then discovers a truth that changes everything: It turns out the white-haired girl is actually the family's illegitimate child and therefore also one of Mel's sisters. It's a twist that puts Mel in the same position as Nelly, and Mel responds to it just as Nelly has—by choosing to love in spite of everything.
There's a lot more going on in this door, but I don't just want to recap each moment. It was really easy to get caught up in Nelly's suffering during this story, and I liked it a lot.

The Second Door is set almost one hundred years later in the early 18th century. The family from the First Door has been completely lost to time and the house hasn't been used for decades, falling into disrepair. The story starts with the maid describing a day where she discovers an unidentified creature in the cellar of the house. She decides to show mercy, feeding it and slowly teaching it to speak and behave like a human. The creature names itself Bestia, the word that villagers yelled out to him before he retreated to the house. The maid teaches Bestia that the house fulfils its master's desires. Bestia says that he only wants to live in peace.
Eventually the house receives a weary guest who doesn't seem to mind a shadowy creature for a host, but after the guest, a travelling merchant, points out a weapon on his person, the creature loses itself in a panic and kills the man. More guests trickle into the house, each falling victim to Bestia's (re-)awakened bloodlust, until one day a mysterious white-haired girl shows up. The maid recognises her, and the girl says that she feels a sense of nostalgia towards the house, but it seems like she's still a different person from the girl in the First Door based on the way she talks about her family life.
When Bestia lures the white-haired girl in he expects to make her another victim, but the girl is blind and doesn't respond to him in the way he normally expects, dampening his bloodlust. They sort of fall into a peaceful everyday life together for a little while.

Meanwhile this door has an interesting second story thread; the travelling merchant's lover, Pauline. A noble girl with a seemingly peaceful life, Pauline's spends most of her days waiting on her lover, the unnamed merchant who goes away on long journeys. When Pauline hears of her lover's death she can't believe the news and decides to search for the truth herself. She visits the country of the house.
I found it noteworthy that the scenes with Pauline are narrated by her—the maid is nowhere to be seen or heard. The maid even comments on the player's unconsciousness when we return to the main story path, indicating that we are capable of experiencing relevant stories that escape the bounds of the house, and that we aren't limited by what the maid wants us to see. It makes me eager to see how else the game will play with the player's perception.

Speaking of perception, Pauline's side-story concludes with her arrival at the house, and it was another brilliant third act twist that recontextualised several of the assumptions of the story up to that point. I really like how the Second Door's story toys with the player about what makes a monster. I think it's reasonable to see the shadowy Bestia and, like the maid or the white-haired girl, insist that monsters can't speak or think and therefore Bestia must be human, and I love how the story concedes that yes, Bestia is a man, but he is also a monster, yet it feels like there was a real chance that he could have been saved as well. The ending did a great job of making me beg for more mercy from any one of the main characters.

After finishing the Second Door I had an opportunity to peer in to a mirror and chose to do so, leading me to a very short vignette where a girl called Giselle met a man called Michel who warned the girl of the witch of the house. The witch's name, apparently, is Morgana. It's still unclear how much this applies to me.

I've only just entered the Third Door, set in the mid-19th Century. I'm curious to see how the stories change as things get more contemporary.

薫る花は凛と咲く

I finished this series (sort of had to fudge my week start and end dates to include episode 13 which I watched on the day I'm writing this). Ultimately it was a pretty good pure love story, though I felt like it sort of lacked any tension for Rintarou and Kaoruko, the main couple. Subaru remained a standout character for me. Her visual design is distinct, her body language was well expressed (especially in episode 12), and I think she best embodies the feud between the rivalling school. To be fair to the other cast, five out of six are all boys so they don't really have much to resolve amongst themselves, and Kaoruko is a bit too socially adept to let such a minor hurdle trip her up.

I was a bit worried that the final episode would disappoint me. The previous episode ended with Rintarou's semi-accidental confession, so the uncertainty through the final episode is "will Kaoruko return his affection?" Except it's not really uncertain, is it? Anyway, before the fated scene Kaoruko explains the events leading up to their first meeting from her own perspective to help us understand her life and history a little bit better. It's fine, though I sort of feel like even that story is filtered to Kaoruko's detriment. We still don't know what she likes, what her routines are like, who she's friends with (outside of Subaru), what her family is like, what motivates her to do well at school. Her "backstory" reveal is just detailed enough to confirm that their relationship has been mutual from the very beginning.
With all that said, I still think the series was pretty good, and a single line from Rintarou was enough to make me see the value in the story. After Kaoruko finally returns his confession, Rintarou says to himself:

勇気出してよかった

Piece

I found out about this manga sort of randomly. I heard it was a good shoujo manga that wasn't solely focused on romance, so I decided to try it out.

The story kicks off with a young adult woman, Mizuho, finding out that a former classmate, Origuchi, has died of breast cancer. The most notable thing about Origuchi at first is that she's completely unremarkable. No one has any strong memories of her, she was occasionally bullied, but otherwise she was sort of a shadow in the class. But Origuchi's life wasn't plain or uneventful, and her relationship with the class slowly reveals itself to be more complicated as the story goes on.

This manga basically asks the reader to recognise that even the most unassuming people in our lives are experiencing their own dramatic stories. It's also a bit of a "who-dunnit" except the protagonist is solving a secret relationship instead of a crime (well, maybe a crime will be revealed later). I'm interested to read more when I get the chance.

ラーゼフォン

I finally finished this series. Overall I really enjoyed it and I sort of wish I just finished it earlier. The final few episodes are just moment after moment of revelation, character death, or some metaphysical exploration of humanity. I once heard that this anime was a reconstruction/response to Evangelion and I sort of see it, though I think both series have a lot in common towards the end. I really liked Ayato's relationship with Kuon and Haruka.

NANA

This is a shoujo manga that always comes up in lists of the greatest hits, so I wanted to see what the hype was about.

This manga is about a girl who has trouble with love. After a separation from an older man at the outset, the story focuses on Nana trying to develop more healthy relationships with boys and men into her adulthood. Nana is really close to her best friend, Junko. When Junko plans to move to Tokyo, Nana is willing to change her life to stay close to her. It's a sweet friendship, but I would also hope to see Nana eventually learn that she needs to become an independent person if she wants real fulfilment.

In an interesting twist, the second half of the volume is about a different woman called Nana (maybe I'll call her NANA to differentiate them). NANA is a popular singer in a band. She has a good relationship with her band mates, but she also has a sexual relationship with Ren, one of the guitarists. When Ren decides to move to Tokyo to try to build his career NANA is torn between loyalty to the other band members (particularly the other guitarist, Nobuo) or loyalty to her casual partner. A lot of subtle (or not so subtle) story moments influence her decision and I found it fairly satisfying.

Broadly speaking I'm a bit torn about this manga. The writing is sharp, and at times you can hardly tell it was written in the early 2000s, but the formatting can be a real struggle at times. Text is very low resolution and sometimes very tiny, and some pages are just full of text. It's not a "smooth" manga to read. I also know that it's a series that has no ending. The last volume was released in 2009, so it's unlikely I'll get any long-term "payoff" for committing to the other 20 volumes. It might be a series I put on a slow burn with the hope that it sees a revival in the next 5 years or so. The Nanas are very cute, though, and I sort of regret not getting far enough to see them both interact.

まったく最近の探偵ときたら

Slowly getting through this series which I started a little while ago. It's fairly consistently funny, though I think a lot of the referential humour goes over my head (beyond just being non sequitur) and I find myself losing focus on it over three episode sessions.

In episode 3 a rival detective and his own assistant are introduced, and they add some good texture into later episodes. Generally I think the cast work well together, even some of the weirder recurring characters like the oiled-up naked guys who like to do good deeds.

この素晴らしい世界に祝福を！紅伝説

Added September 30: I completely forgot to include this in my report. I watched it on September 23, but I guess I forgot it even happened despite liking it quite a lot!

This is a movie set between Konosuba season 2 and 3 (I think?) and features a pretty cool villain, a complicated feminine chimaera called シルビア. The story is set in Megumin's hometown, a village that consists entirely of wizards so specialised that even the chefs are adept at spellcasting. The movie largely focuses on coupling Kazuma with Megumin and it does a fairly good job of advancing their relationship, though I wonder if it will even matter when I finally get to season 3.