Category: All Posts

December 21, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. The light novel series The Combat Baker and the Automaton Waitress follows Lud “Silver Wolf” Langart, a former captain and mech-operator who retires after a long and bloody war between empires and starts a bakery. Given his scars, perpetual scowl and huge dough-punching arms, he scares the locals and struggles to sell […]

December 19, 2021 · 0 comments

The actress Sayaka Kanda, who died yesterday, will be remembered as a media hyphenate – on stage and screen, and a voice performer not only for animated characters, but for their songs. She was, in fact, even more than that – a lyricist under several pseudonyms, and a producer for her own record label. Throughout […]

December 18, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. It’s hard not to compare Culinary Adventures of the Court Flower by Miri Mikawa with The Apothecary Diaries, as both are heavily inspired by imperial China and more specifically set within an imperial harem. But the two don’t simply have very different heroines; the approach to the translation and the frame are […]

December 17, 2021 · 1 comment

The manga artist Hiroshi Hirata, who died last week, spent his formative years struggling to make ends meet in a poverty-stricken Japan. He was born in Tokyo, where his parents were preachers for the Tenrikyo Buddhist sect, but was evacuated to the order’s heartland, Tenri, in Nara to avoid Allied air raids. He drew his […]

December 16, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted some of its animation work to a studio in Japan, only to send back the materials on the grounds that the Japanese work was not of high […]