In the realm of contemporary fantasy, I see dead people is always a useful addition to the resume of the main character.

Donna Howard investigates the provenance of relics and antiques with the help of people from the past who are only visible to her.

For Natsume, his second sight (inherited from his grandmother) often results in the supernatural Shinto world intruding on his otherwise ordinary day-to-day life.

Mieruko can see dead people too. Her name is a pun on the verb meaning "I can see." That makes her privy to an extensive and weirdly thriving ecosystem of the living dead invisible to all but a select few.

Unfortunately for Mieruko, she has a hard time telling the good dead people from the bad dead people.

Even the guardian deities (inari) at the Shinto shrine are fierce and intimidating. Most of the dead people and creepy crawlies look like mutating corpses. Which is bad enough, except when they realize she can see them. Mieruko has gotten good at maintaining a look of deadpan indifference.

The rules governing Mieruko's abilities mirror those in Natsume's Book of Friends (which just debuted a new season). Creatures from the spirit world can only physically interact with you if they catch you looking at them first. Maintaining an attitude of stoic indifference can be the best recourse.

Which brings me to a new word I learned reading the manga: suruu sukiru (スルースキル), a transliteration of "through skill." Weblio defines it as the "ability to ignore bad things happening to you." In other words, the skill to work through a problem by tuning out and not getting upset about it.

But like Natsume, a girl's got her limits. There are times when Mieruko has no choice but to lend the ghouls an ear. Occasionally she discovers their intentions are benign. At other times, not so much. It's easier when the monsters behave like monsters, but even there she can jump to the wrong conclusions.

The occasional Sixth Sense twist will also fool the reader. And there's a touch of Dexter in the cat killer arc as well (which is featured in the anime).

Her best friend Hana is a ghost magnet ("Like moths to a flame," an old soothsayer ally observes), though not having second sight herself, she's clueless about their presence. One of their classmates also has second sight, though not being as powerful as Mieruko, she misjudges their respective abilities.

These moral dilemmas lend Mieruko-chan depth without being depressing or nihilistic. Some of the stories are genuinely heartwarming. If you're a fan of Edward Gorey or Charles Addams, Mieruko-chan is right in your wheelhouse.

Written and illustrated by Tomoki Izumi. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Yen Press in the United States. The anime is based on the first three volumes of the manga. A live-action film adaptation is scheduled for release in 2025.

Related links

BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)
Crunchyroll (anime)

Labels: anime, bookwalker, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese culture, kindle, manga, manga reviews, movies, religion, shinto

Since her adventures in Coin, Donna Howard has become an established investigator of relics and antiques, with the help of deceased historical people only she can see. This time around, her investigation takes her to Salem, Massachusetts, where she delves into the town's haunted history and the modern world of antique hunting.

Her research into the provenance of a silver spoon leads Donna to a stash of unexpectedly valuable junk in an old man's basement, an old man whose death Donna begins to suspect was less than "accidental." Along with opportunistic antiquers, she must also contend with a possible murder, a possible possession, and a possible boyfriend.

Because nothing can make the dead past and the living present more precarious than the unpredictable complexities of human relationships.

The Kindle and paperback editions can be purchased at Amazon worldwide. The ePub format is available at Apple Books, Google Play, Rakuten Kobo, B & N Nook, Smashwords and many other ebook retailers.

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Donna Howard Mysteries

Coin
Silver Spoon
Apron
Clasp

Labels: donna howard, ebooks, kate, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, publishing, spoon

GKids has agreed to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toho International.

Founded in 1932, Toho is one of the biggest film producers and distributors in Japan, most famous for the Godzilla franchise (including the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One) and the films of Akira Kurosawa and Studio Ghibli. Toho Animation has done much of its work behind the scenes, regularly showing up on the production committees of top-tier anime series such as Spy x Family, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and The Apothecary Diaries.

But then earlier this year, Toho purchased animation studio Science Saru, known for The Heike Story, Scott Pigrim Takes Off, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! as well as an upcoming addition to the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

Toho also bought a minority stake in CoMix Wave Films, the production home of Makoto Shinkai.

The GKids catalog already includes the films of Studio Ghibli, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, Hideaki Anno, and a wide selection of animated productions from across Europe. So it looks like a good fit in the content department too.

Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, movies about japan

Jane Austen's Persuasion has the reader rooting for the protagonists to rekindle their estranged affections. But what of the novel's nemeses? In the end, the wily and impious Mr. Elliot casts aside his carefully groomed reputation and persuades the infamous Mrs. Clay to become his mistress.

But every persuader needs a persuadable partner, and Mrs. Clay is no ingénue; she'd send a Willoughby or a Wickham packing. Though no less calculating than those romantic villains, Penelope Clay and William Elliot discover in each other the kind of kindred spirits they fail to find among the titled Elliots.

While highlighting and transfiguring classic scenes from the novel, this unconventional version provides a romantic pairing on a par with that of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. In the process, Persuadable illustrates an eternal Austen truth: love is wholly individual, no matter the age or time-period.

Who says a couple of shameless gold diggers can't find true love?

The Kindle and paperback editions can be purchased at Amazon worldwide. The ePub format is available at Apple Books, Google Play, Rakuten Kobo, B & N Nook, Smashwords and many other ebook retailers.

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Labels: books, ebooks, kate, peaks island press, persuadable, publishing

I let my Netflix, Crunchyroll, and HIDIVE subscriptions expire at the beginning of the year and spent the next six months mostly watching live-action Jdrama on Rakuten Viki, Tubi, and Jme TV.

The result of this little experiment? Far and away, anime remains my preferred medium for scripted entertainment. So I dropped Jme TV and won't renew Viki. Netflix stays on hiatus until its anime catalog refreshes.

It's not just me.

As Miles Atherton reports on Anime News Network, according to recent data released by Netflix, in terms of total hours viewed, anime not only overperforms in its category overall but makes up almost 80 percent of all Japanese language content viewed.

Starting with deep wells of proven source material, the inherent constraints of anime production sufficiently discipline the process (no anime studio has the resources to crank out a $200 million CGI flop) so that when everything comes together, a watchable work of art is the result on a reasonably regular basis.

Good stories told well.

To start with, this isn't about production values. HD video technology has largely leveled the playing field in that regard. Rather, the underlying problems come down to how the stories are structured, paced, and told.

Many hour-long Jdrama episodes should be thirty minutes shorter. (So should most movies.) I usually skip anime compilation films but doing the opposite works better. Editing Demon Slayer: Mugen Train into seven episodes improved on the movie. When it comes to single arc stories, a runtime longer than that just drags everything out.

The extended Yor arc in the second season of Spy x Family could have been easily compiled into a two-hour movie. But it works better in a five-episode format. And, frankly, I would have rather seen Code White handled the same way, creating a complete second season instead of a single cour.

A half-hour live-action show like Kamen Rider: Zero-One is thirty episodes too long. Past a certain point, filling the available time results in mindless repetition. I made it to the end of Kamen Rider: Kuuga solely on the strength of Joe Odagiri's performance and a fine supporting cast that created a great Scooby Gang.

Incidentally, comparing Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) and Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) illustrates how extraordinarily far budget CGI has progressed in the past two decades.

Yet despite the superior production values of the latter, the acting and dialogue elevate the former, even with its near-fatal plot holes and running a full two seasons (that's one season too many).

When Hollywood is running on all cylinders, it gets episodic television exactly right, with standalone episodes loosely linked by season-long dramatic arcs running in the background. So Fuyuhiko Takahori has the cause and effect backwards. The common point of failure is stretching a single story over more episodes than are needed to tell it.

There are writers who have mastered the formula. 99.9 Criminal Lawyer and Unnatural both run standalone episodes against background narrative arcs that pay off reasonably well. Three Star Bar in Nishi Ogikubo tells a complete story in six half-hour standalone episodes and completes a satisfying series-long arc.

But more often than not, you feel like you're stuck on a hamster wheel, spinning around and around and going nowhere. Anime is not immune to the problem. Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen spend too long on the hamster wheel (a rut the battle shonen genre easily falls into) while Frieren jumps off before overstaying its welcome.

This is why I prefer the slice-of-life genre. Challenges are taken on episode by episode, with an emphasis on the character arcs. In Komi Can't Communicate, Komi struggling toward her goal and Tadano simply being a genuinely good person (harder to depict than it sounds) make the story compelling.

Likewise, in the plot-heavy My Happy Marriage (Cinderella in early 20th century Japan), I find myself more interested in Miyo's self-actualization (that tired term actually applies here) than the tangled web of political machinations.

Interesting characters create interesting stories, not the other way around. In Jdrama romances especially, the realization too often dawns that, aside from the sturm und drang of the romance itself, these are really boring people. That and a smattering of common sense would fix most of their issues.

Both the abstract nature of anime as an artistic medium and the physical constraints of the production process make it easier to align the story to the viewing time in ways that are both more concrete and rewarding to the viewer.

Related posts

Anime reassessed (pacing matters)
Anime reassessed (culture matters)
Anime reassessed (numbers matter)

Labels: anime, anime lists, japanese culture, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, jdrama, jme, netflix, streaming, tubi, viki

In this largely autobiographical account of the author's two-year proselyting mission to Japan during the late 1970s, a Mormon missionary is confronted by an overzealous religious bureaucracy and faces his own growing doubts as the work of preaching the gospel gets turned into a cynical and self-serving game of numbers and spiritual one-upmanship.

The first chapter of Tokyo South, "Lost in the Works," was the innagural story of my writing career. I'd signed up for a computer programming class at BYU and discovered that I liked using the Pascal editor as a crude word processor (this was back during the Apple II era) more than programming.

Then "Number Games" won second place in the 1984 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Awards, my first solid bit of external validation. (I doubt the story would be so well received today; I like to call the first half of the 1980s at Brigham Young University under President Jeffrey Holland its glasnost era.)

Over the last two decades, a series of reorganizations and consolidations and force reductions finally resulted in the the Tokyo North and South missions being reunited in 2007. This Ted Lyon interview makes it clear that the shenanigans I describe in Tokyo South were by no means unique to Japan.

If anything, time and nostalgia and the detached sense of sang-froid that comes with age and experience led me to pull my punches a bit.

The Kindle and paperback editions can be purchased at Amazon worldwide. The ePub format is available at Apple Books, Google Play, Rakuten Kobo, B & N Nook, Smashwords and many other ebook retailers.

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Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.

Related posts

The evolution
Tokyo South is alive
Tokyo South is dead
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Labels: books, BYU, ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south

International media distributor Remow teamed up with Nihon Eiga Broadcasting to bring historical dramas to overseas audiences with its Samurai vs Ninja website and YouTube channel. Remow has also gotten into anime licensing and continues to refrain from exclusives, sharing content on Tubi and YouTube.

Tonbo! (2024) is the best title in their anime portfolio so far. The manga by Ken Kawasaki and Yu Furusawa has been serialized in Weekly Golf Digest since 2014 and currently totals 52 volumes. So the viewer would do well to keep in mind that this isn't your usual shonen sports drama. It is written for golfers.
In other words, if you don't find Tonbo's inventive use of a 3 iron inherently fascinating, then the series probably isn't for you.

The plot merges the premises of Barakamon (2014), in which a professional calligrapher with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island and meets a bunch of quirky kids, and Rising Impact (2024), in which an eight-year-old golfing prodigy from the sticks is recruited to the elite Camelot Academy.

For idiosyncratic reasons I never divined, the names of several characters in Rising Impact are derived from the aforementioned Camelot, like Gawain and Lancelot. And speaking of Gawain (Misaki Kuno), a good part of the fun is listening to him (her) speak in a Tohoku accent you could cut with a knife.

In Tonbo! a professional golfer with a troubled past exiles himself to a tiny island in the Tokara archipelago and there encounters a quirky island girl named Tonbo, who turns out to be a golfing prodigy. He sees in her great potential, potential that will remain dormant and untested if she remains an island girl.

Along with smoothing out her more eccentric golfing habits (while not interfering with her unique approach to the game), he nudges her to leave the island when she graduates from junior high. The island has no high school. Students continuing their education live with relatives or attend boarding schools.

The Tokara archipelago is collectively governed as a village of Kagoshima Prefecture, so the favored destination for transfer students is the port city of Kagoshima and the surrounding areas.

While thoroughly entertaining, Birdie Wing (2022) and Rising Impact are so over the top that they more resemble superhero franchises that have to constantly invent new comically overpowered villains (and golf courses designed by M.C. Escher) to challenge the skills of the comically overpowered protagonists.

Tonbo! is far more realistic and treats the subject with the most technical accuracy. The main characters have actual character arcs, so there's no need for vaudevillian villains to create dramatic conflict. Instead, we focus our attention on how Tonbo evolves as an already gifted golfer and grows as a human being.

It's been an entertaining journey so far and I hope we can follow her all the way to a professional career.

The second cour is a continuation of season 1 starting with episode 14.

Related videos

Tonbo! (Tubi YouTube Prime)
Barakamon
Birdie Wing
Rising Impact

Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, geography, japanese culture, manga, remow, samurai vs ninja, sports, tubi