Tag: books

May 29, 2022 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the boggling weirdness of Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, that animated oddity in which the child-hero from Japanese school textbooks is reimagined as a patriotic general, leading animal marines in an assault on foreign devils. But its not just the premise of Sacred Sailors that […]

May 14, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Yuri Kitayama’s Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles has several different beginnings, and to be frank, I am not sure that it has stopped beginning yet, even as I get to the end of the first novel. Sometimes it’s a sprawling political saga about feuding nations, and sometimes it’s a path to power of […]

May 8, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. Belying his humdrum title, Hitsuji Gamei’s novel The Magic in This Other World is Too Far Behind kicks off with an original and exciting double-bluff. Using the language of fairy tales, he chronicles the rise to power of Felmenia Stingray, a nobleman’s daughter who masters many magical arts at a young age, […]

April 26, 2022 · 0 comments

By Helen McCarthy. A book can be a ground-breaking work of scholarship and still accessible to any intelligent reader. Language capable of being understood by the average well-read media fan is also capable of carrying the most challenging ideas. So, I’m always delighted to read new work that takes its subject and its readers more […]

April 23, 2022 · 0 comments

By Shelley Pallis. And then he died. In his sleep, because of a particularly powerful sneeze. Ryoma Takebayashi wakes up at tea party in heaven with several gods, and accepts his fate with customary light-novel equanimity. A downtrodden salaryman in a dead-end job, he had seen many of his co-workers die from overwork and a […]