Eugene Woodbury unexpectedly passed away at the age of 65 early January 2025. His blog will remain for the indefinite future.

From Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Labels: deep thoughts, literature

Glimmeridge, the mystical home of a clan of Fairlies, lies deep in Dunbar Woods, hidden behind an invisible Veil. As Watcher or guard for his clan, Tam uses his magical Watchfire to protect his family and keep tabs on the Humans who live near the woods.

One fateful night, Tam's sister, the clan Storyteller, forsakes the clan when she elopes. Their mother, the cold and powerful Queen Morna, accuses Tam of negligence and threatens to throw him into the dark and mysterious Pit. To avoid this terrifying punishment, he makes a rash bargain: he will convince a human girl to take his sister's place as Storyteller.

Tam chooses Keely Ellingsen, a high school student who loves the woods and loves writing stories. Keely considers herself an ordinary teenager burdened with chores and homework. But Tam's friendship, her dreams of success, and a family secret draw Keely to Fairlie culture and the prospect of becoming a Storyteller.

Tam's growing affection for Keely and her family obligations complicate their relationship. While she ponders the best course for her future, he struggles between his clan's strict rules and Keely's human ingenuity. Together, they confront the darkness that lurks at the edges of the Fairlie world.

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: beth, books, dunbar woods, ebooks, fantasy, kate, peaks island press, publishing

Based on the manga created by Toshinao Aoki and Studio Bones, the animation in Dragon Pilot brings to mind the comic strip art of Bill Watterson. The premise of Dragon Pilot as well is the crazy kind of gross but hilarious and yet clever idea that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes would come up with.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world (and most Japanese), a select few of Japan's military aircraft, including an F-15J and an F-2 (Mitsubishi's made-in-Japan version of the F-16), are dragons disguised to look like fighter jets.

Hisone Amakasu is a rookie airman at the Japan Air Self-Defense Force Gifu Air Base. One day out of the blue she learns she has passed a "qualification" (she wasn't aware of) and is summarily transferred to a huge hanger way off in the corner of the base that no one seems to know about—except for an odd old woman who pushes a food cart around the base.

When Hisone finally finds the hanger, she walks in and is confronted by a huge dragon (she later names "Masotan") that promptly eats her.

The ground crew is delighted. It's been a while since a pilot passed muster with this particular OTF (an "Organic Transformed Flyer," as the military labels them). You see, the pilot doesn't ride atop the dragon like a horse. The dragon swallows the pilot, who "flies" the dragon from its guts. And when the flight is over, regurgitates her back out.

And, yes, the pilots have to wear special flight suits to keep from getting digested.

Needless to say, the dragon has a lot of discretion about who gets swallowed, and some, like Masotan, can get picky. The dragons are perceptive about the personalities of their pilots. They can even pick up mechanical issues with the real F-15Js they fly with (via the heads-up display in the helmets the pilots wear). But they don't talk.

It's eat or don't eat. Once they've formed an attachment, the one thing that really gives a dragon an upset stomach is his pilot forming a romantic relationship with another human being (which reminds me a similar plot device in My Zhime). No surprise, then, that the girls who make the best "D-Pilots" are not very socially adept.

For all its inherent silliness, Dragon Pilot raises fascinating questions about choice and free will. Hisone got something she didn't know she wanted. Nao wants something she can't get. Elle got what she didn't want instead of what she did. Moriyama gave up what she wanted and walked away to happily make another life for herself.

As Hisone tells Okonogi, a member of her ground crew and also, by family lineage (not something he had a lot of choice about either), a Shinto priest, "It's always best when the things you like and the things decided for you are in agreement."

That religious angle is no small matter. One of the old gods of Japan is a whale-sized monster, literally the size of a small island. It briefly comes out of hibernation every seventy-four years. The job of the dragon pilots is to escort it to a new resting place before it goes all Godzilla on Japan, and put it to bed with an ancient Shinto ritual.

The old school ritual required one of the miko attendants to stay behind in the "belly of the whale," so to speak. As far as Hisone is concerned, that is very much not okay. As it turns out, the food cart lady is the last living member of her squadron from the last time, when her reaction was the same as Hisone's.

In Calvin and Hobbes style, Hisone figures out an unlikely solution. It's a credit to the writing that the series manages to take these serious turns—and turn back again—without spoiling the comedic mood created earlier or making light of the dramatic decisions that Hisone faces (but be sure to stick through the final closing credits).

Masotan ultimately gets a character arc too, which suggests that perhaps the dragons will figure out how to compromise on the whole personal boundaries thing, and not force their pilots into the kind of all-or-nothing choice that Moriyama was left with. We have every reason to hope that the dragons will mature alongside their pilots.

Dragon Pilot is streaming on Netflix.

Labels: anime reviews, japanese culture, netflix, religion, shinto

Richard St. Clair struggles daily to suppress less-than-appropriate feelings for his new assistant. He's an engaged man, after all, and a recently appointed civil servant. He's sure he's got the situation under control. Until an unknown adversary slips him a love potion that unleashes his true affections.

Now with the help of his once-enchanted sister, his policeman brother-in-law, and the woman he really loves, Richard must scour Kingston for his foe and find a way to ethically express the desires of his heart.

Book two in the Roesia series, Richard continues the story of the St. Clair family that begins with Aubrey. Roesia is a Victorian world where magic is real and spells and potions are the focus of academic study. While sharing characters and events, the books can be read as standalone stories.

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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The Roesia Series

Tales of the Quest
Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah
Richard: The Ethics of Affection
Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation

Labels: books, ebooks, fantasy, kate, magic, mystery, peaks island press, roesia, science fiction

Sony has been on an anime buying binge of late, having purchased streaming services Funimation and Crunchyroll, along with retailer Right Stuf, which were rolled into Funimation under the Crunchyroll brand. To top that off, Sony then set its sights on Kadokawa, a much bigger prize.

Kadokawa is one of the top three publishers in Japan, ranked slightly behind Shueisha and Kodansha.

In late 2024, Kadokawa and Sony confirmed reports that Sony was in talks to acquire Kadokawa. A buyout is not off the table, but effective as of January 7, Sony will instead take a 10 percent stake in Kadokawa (in newly issued shares) as part of a "strategic capital and business alliance."

Sony does not have a traditional publishing arm. As Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki explained earlier this year,

Whether it's for games, films or anime, we don't have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We're lacking the early phase (of IP) and that's an issue for us.

Sums up the Financial Times,

Sony is betting on a multibillion dollar push into producing more original content, as part of a creation shift the Japanese tech giant hopes will win it a greater share of the three trillion dollar entertainment industry.

The alliance will give Sony first dibs on Kadokawa's enormous catalog of manga and light novels. In exchange, Kadokawa ends up with much deeper pockets that it will use for "creating, developing, and acquiring new IP." Collaborative projects being discussed include initiatives to adapt

Kadokawa's IP into live-action films and TV dramas globally, co-produce anime works, expand global distribution of Kadokawa's anime works through the Sony Group, further expand publishing of Kadokawa's games, and develop human resources to promote and expand virtual production.

Crunchyroll obviously stands to benefit from the deal too. The acquisition of Crunchroll made Sony the dominant anime distributor in North America, though with Hidive, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Tubi actively acquiring content, it can't be technically said to hold a monopoly position.

In publishing specifically, Kadokawa still has a huge competitor in the Hitotsubashi Group.

The Hitotsubashi conglomerate includes Shogakukan, Shueisha, Hakusensha and related subsidiaries, such as Viz Media in the United States. Given that Shueisha alone is bigger than Kadokawa (and together with Shogakukan is twice its size), the Kadokawa deal likely won't trigger any antitrust issues.

The bigger risk with these sorts of mashups is that the customer, responsible for the success of the enterprise in the first place, gets lost in all the bigness.

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, kadokawa, manga, netflix, publishing, sony

First published in 1740, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the story of a maid who marries way up, was scandalous in its time. For those familiar with its profound influence on the romance genre, it continues to be scandalous now, though for quite different reasons.

Unfortunately, the book is largely forgotten outside of academia. Fortunately, Katherine Woodbury has read it so you don't have to!

As she did with A Man of Few Words, Fitzwilliam Darcy's version of the critical events in Pride and Prejudice, Katherine has again taken a classic novel written from a woman's point of view and flipped the narrative around to the man's.

This time, though, with a postmodern twist.

In a world where characters from novels can be put on trial for their literary crimes, Mr. B, the famously redeemed rake of Pamela, must defend his actions before a panel of skeptical literary scholars. Can he salvage his good name and win back his wife?

Step into the courtroom and judge for yourself!

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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The Gentleman and the Rake is the omnibus edition of Mr. B Speaks! and A Man of Few Words.

Labels: books, criticism, ebooks, kate, kindle, peaks island press, publishing, romance

Back in 2016, Jason Thompson opined on Gizmodo that "Manga publishing is dying." Unable to adapt to New Media, "most Japanese publishers have no coherent digital strategy and the extra step of licensing [manga] in America makes them even slower to react to change."

Yeah, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but that bit of prognostication aged rather badly. In less than a decade, Japan's manga market practically turned itself upside down and is currently the most profitable it has been in thirty years.
The shift has been reflected in the content itself, from the traditional pen and ink approach depicted in Bakuman (2013) to digital drawing tablets in Sleeper Hit (2016) and Eromanga Sensei (2017). By 2022, the digital manga market in Japan was twice the size of the print market.

I once bought Japanese manga from Honto. To take advantage of Honto's more affordable shipping rates (compared to Amazon-Japan), the entire process took about a month. Now Honto no longer stocks and ships paper books and I can get Japanese manga from BookWalker instantly.

Customer convenience is only half of the equation. Industry observer Haruyuki Nakano notes that

For some years now, publishers have been switching emphasis from traditional publishing to the rights and IP business. Shueisha had income of ¥51.1 billion for nondigital publishing in the period from June 2023 to May 2024, compared with ¥72.0 billion for digital publishing and ¥75.3 billion for business including publishing rights and sale of goods.

Hence Sony's interest in acquiring Kadokawa. Having Kadokawa under the same corporate umbrella would let Sony tap into the licensing income streams while eliminating the need to shop for content on behalf of its studios and streaming services. Because Sony would already own the IP.

Successful businesses adapt to new technology and the evolving marketplace. Traditional publishers like Kadokawa and the much bigger Hitotsubashi Group remain powerhouses in the industry. Japan's keiretsu can't turn on a dime. But once they get their bearings, it's full steam ahead.

Publishing is publishing, regardless of how the content gets distributed.

To paraphrase Seth Godin, they figured out they were in the storytelling and information business, not the newsprint business. Compared to magazines, higher quality tankoubon (print digest) sales have remained fairly robust.

Physical media is seeing a decline in video as well. Panasonic and Sony haven't updated their Blu-ray player lines since 2018. Samsung stopped making new players in 2019. LG stopped manufacturing Blu-ray players altogether. When the current inventory runs out, LG will not restock.

But just as vinyl LPs are still being pressed, there will be an ongoing demand for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. And I am also sure that print books will outlast them all.

Labels: anime, bookwalker, business, crunchyroll, ebooks, japanese tv, kadokawa, manga, publishing, sony, viki

The last princess of Japan's doomed Southern Court, Fujiwara Ryo has an offer she can't refuse: a marriage proposal from her archenemy. As the shogun's royal prisoner, she could live a comfortable life in a gilded cage. But Ryo isn't the kind of girl to take the easy way out, so refuse it she does. Not long thereafter, a failed revolt against the shogunate puts a price on her head and her spurned fiancé hot on her heels.

Ryo escapes with Sen, her loyal lady-in-waiting. Atop sacred Mt. Koya, Sen's uncle summons the mighty Kala Sarpa. If all goes as planned, the "Serpent of Time" will transport Ryo safely out of the shogun's reach. Except Kala Sarpa bears a grudge of its own against the Fujiwara clan and seizes the chance to even the scales. Their fates fully entwined, Ryo will have to travel back to the past to save her future.

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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Names follow Japanese convention, the surname given first. Romanization is according to modified Hepburn. Long vowels (such as /ou/) and double vowels (such as /oo/) are indicated by a macron or circumflex. Long and double vowels are held for two syllable counts.

It was common in medieval Japan for members of the aristocracy to refer to each other by their given names plus an honorific. When a shogunate remained in power for any length of time, the proliferation of the same surname would otherwise become hopelessly confusing.

Labels: ebooks, fantasy, history, japanese culture, peaks island press, publishing, serpent of time

In Japanese, the terms honne (本音) and tatemae (建て前) refer to a person's true self versus their public image. It is a compelling subject in the field of social anthropology. The distinction is equally useful in fiction.

In my review of Spy x Family, I argue that in the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—ultimately determines the direction of the narrative.

As Kate points out, Lloyd and Yor in Spy x Family are "decent, family people who just happen to be a spy and assassin rather than a spy and assassin pretending to be decent people."

Spy x Family puts Yor in the same moral position as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." The Yor-centered stories make clear that her targets are, by and large, reprehensible human beings.

Lloyd is more conflicted than Yor, but he is not an enemy of Ostania. He often ends up working tangentially toward the same goals as Yor and her brother, and does his level best to inflict as little collateral damage as possible.

The climactic ending of Code White being a case in point. Lloyd, Yor, and Anya end up saving the day for Ostania.

After all, his overall mission is to establish a diplomatic backchannel with Donovan Desmond. Killing him, he admits, would be easy, but would also not be in any of their interests (and certainly not Desmond's).

If the intelligence services in Westalis suspect that the Berlint Wall is about to collapse, then it would be in the self-interests of both sides for a moderate government to survive and steer the ship of state between the political extremes.

This is a far more politically and intellectually challenging task than saving the world on a weekly basis. Lloyd and Yor spend much of their undercover time picking off extremists on both sides.

The old James Bond was a spy who happened to be a suave English gentleman. Efforts to infuse the character with moral depth, especially during the Daniel Craig era, were never going to work. That's simply not who James Bond is.

When your job is preventing a world apocalypse on a regular basis, those kinds of qualms are bound to fall by the wayside. To start with, you're not going to have the time.

Lloyd's more real-world missions require that he keep his honne and tatemae in close alignment, even though they may seem as far apart as night and day. His ultimate struggle is to accept that he is a family man at heart.

Since the start of the series, his success as a spy and his success as a father have become inextricably intertwined.

The Forgers are a pair of eccentric but otherwise ordinary suburban parents (like Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mike and Vanessa Baxter from Last Man Standing) who happen to be a spy and an assassin.

The order matters. If you get the happens to be rule wrong, you may end up with the wrong audience tuning in. Nothing will doom a series faster than the feeling a bait and switch is going on.

The premise of Moonlight is right up my alley. But halfway through the first season, it turned into a melodrama about a vampire who happened to be a private detective rather than a police procedural about a private detective who happened to be a vampire.

I believe that is why Moonlight lasted only one season (despite everything else about the series being pretty spot on). The audience tuned in for a mystery show and got a contemporary gothic soap opera about vampires instead.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But in a ratings-based world, the core values of the viewers (as expressed by tuning in to watch) must largely overlap with the values of the characters (as expressed by the writer and director).

The same things goes for message-based entertainment. If a show runner wants to preach a message, it had better be one the audience wants to hear or at least is able to ignore because everything else about the show is so good.

One of the great advantages of anime and especially manga is that quantity has a quality all of its own. You are all the more likely to find titles that match up the honne and tatemae of the characters in an order that matters to you.

Labels: anime, criticism, japanese, language, movies, thinking about writing

Aubrey St. Clair awakens in a locked room, having barely survived a misguided enchantment that turned her into a cat. Kidnapped by unprincipled magicians and exploited by ruthless politicians, her only recourse is to literally claw her way to safety.

Safe in body but not in soul, Aubrey is forced to confront the slippery memories of her own bespellment. Is forgetfulness really the best defense?

In her hunt for the truth, Aubrey is aided by a cool-headed police officer. His interest in her, however, may be more than merely professional. But how much more? It slowly begins to dawn on her that perhaps the most powerful spell of all is love.

Aubrey is the first book in the Roesia series. Roesia is a Victorian world where magic is real and spells and potions are the focus of academic study. Although sharing characters and events, the books can be read as standalone stories.

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.

Kindle
Paperback
ePub
Read an excerpt

The Roesia Series

Tales of the Quest
Lord Simon: The Dispossession of Hannah
Richard: The Ethics of Affection
Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation

Labels: books, cats, ebooks, fantasy, kate, magic, mystery, peaks island press, roesia, science fiction

The traditional police procedural is one genre where live-action Jdrama holds it own. Hollywood could do a lot worse than license a series like Partners just for the premise and the plots.

Much of the credit goes to Ranpo Edogawa (1894–1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery novel in Japan. His pen name is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe. Edogawa is best remembered for the Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club young adult mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.

His efforts are widely acknowledged today. The mystery genre is prominent not only on prime-time television and the best-seller lists, but has long been a staple of young adult manga and anime.

Kindaichi Case Files, based on characters created by mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo, has been published by Kodansha since 1992. The ongoing Case Closed (titled Detective Conan in Japanese) was launched by Shogakukan in 1994, with the accompanying anime totaling more than 1140 episodes.

The main character in Case Closed sports the nom de plume of Conan Edogawa, an additional tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle as well. There is no shortage of detectives surnamed Akechi in contemporary Japanese crime fiction.

Speaking of Conan Doyle, Great Britain and Japan share similar cultural elements that make them ideal settings for the cozy mystery. Namely, generally accepted rules of propriety and a veneer of "polite society" easily disrupted (but not deeply damaged) by an otherwise "ordinary" crime. The world need not end in every episode.

Like a returning tide, we expect the greater cultural forces at work to wash away the disruptive elements and reset the stage for next week. So we shrug off the comically high murder rates in Midsomer and Cabot Cove, and the body counts in Kindaichi Case Files and Case Closed that can exceed that of the entire country on a weekly basis.

To be sure, a gun is rarely the murder weapon. But watch out for knives, rope, stairs, and every kind of blunt object! Reality forces Japanese crime writers to get creative, and they embrace all the plausible possibilities. It follows that the geeky appeal of the CSI subgenre has made it a favorite with audiences.

The CSI guy on Partners played a supporting role for twenty-one seasons. Kasoken no Onna ("Woman of the Science Research Institute") is in its twenty-fourth season. Like Crime Scene Talks (seven seasons), the plotting is pretty much by the numbers. But the reason we follow a recipe is because it works.

Viki has a handful of localized live-action police procedurals. For now, though, your best bet for subs or dubs is anime.

Crunchyroll has a boatload of Case Closed episodes. Sticking strictly to the puzzle-solving cozy mystery formula, five of my anime favorites are Holmes of Kyoto, Hyouka, In/Spectre, Beautiful Bones, and Onihei.

Hyouka and Holmes of Kyoto are classic whodunits that closely follow the classic formula, even though the cases often don't involve any actual crimes.

I love the clever English language title for In/Spectre, a supernatural detective series. It can get overly talky, especially in the first season, but Kotoko takes us through her reasoning process step by step. Though she is an often unreliable narrator, manipulating events to produce the outcome she prefers.

In Beautiful Bones, Sakurako Kujo is an even more eccentric osteologist than Temperance "Bones" Brennan, the series that inspired the English title. The Japanese title translates as "A Corpse is Buried Beneath Sakurako's Feet."

Onihei is an action-heavy Edo period police procedural that doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights for suspects at the time.

And although she only appears in a couple of episodes in a series that can't be classified in the genre, the hard-boiled vampire-hunting private eye in Call of the Night is such a great noir character that I'd like to see her get a show of her own.

Related posts

Ranpo Edogawa
Boy Detectives Club
Scene of the crime writer

Labels: crunchyroll, dlibjapan, edogawa, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, mystery, streaming, tubi, viki

Buried inside a cache of religious relics from Medieval England, the ghost of a young boy knows only that he must protect these holy treasures. But as his era recedes into history and the relics scatter hither and yon, all he can do is rage against the collectors of the last remaining object, a silver spoon.

Centuries later, he encounters Donna Howard, an antiquities appraiser who can speak with the spirits. Donna's research has convinced her that a sixteenth century skeleton recently discovered in England is the boy's remains. Now in order to free himself from the spoon, the boy must confront his own murder.

Even when the crime is five hundred years old, Donna Howard is determined to solve the case.

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: books, clasp, donna howard, ebooks, history, kate, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, publishing

Seven Seas Entertainment has licensed the Twelve Kingdoms novels by Fuyumi Ono. (Just for the record, I am not involved in any way.) Shadow of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea (part 1) will be released in July 2025 in paperback format. The ebooks will also be made available on digital platforms. (Fuyumi Ono has resisted releasing the novels in electronic format. The Japanese editions are still not available from BookWalker or the Kindle store.)

TokyoPop published the English translations back in 2007. The license was not renewed and the books have gone out of print. When it comes to localizing manga and light novels, Seven Seas has a much bigger presence in the market. It makes sense that they would be handed the baton this time around.

Let's hope they make the most of the opportunity. Though it's not encouraging that only part 1 of Shadow of the Moon is being released first, rather than an omnibus edition. At that pace, publishing the entire series could take a long time.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, business, publishing, shadow, translations