December 21, 2024
Mr. B Speaks!
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
December 18, 2024
Manga goes digital
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
December 14, 2024
Serpent of Time
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
December 11, 2024
The happens to be rule
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
December 07, 2024
Aubrey: Remnants of Transformation
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.
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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
December 04, 2024
Murder, they wrote
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
November 30, 2024
Clasp
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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Coin
Silver Spoon
Apron
Clasp
Labels: books, clasp, donna howard, ebooks, history, kate, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, publishing
November 27, 2024
Twelve Kingdoms novels licensed
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
November 23, 2024
The Space Alien
A day after that alarming incident, a woodsman stumbles out of the forest and reports the landing of an alien spacecraft in the mountains southwest of Tokyo. A month later, Ichiro Hirano's neighbor goes missing. And then reappears as abruptly as he vanished, claiming he was kidnapped by a mysterious winged lizard creature.
That same lizard creature is now stalking Ichiro's own sister. Where did the space aliens come from? What do they hope to accomplish? These are the kind of questions that only master sleuth Kogoro Akechi and the Boy Detectives Club can hope to answer.
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 Phantom Doctor
Big Gold Bullion
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien
The Space Alien takes place in the year following the end of the Occupation (1945–1952). Stark reminders of the war remained, such as a concrete storehouse standing alone in a city block that was once home to a neighborhood of wood-frame houses.
Rice paddies could still be found throughout Setagaya Ward, located in the southwest corner of Tokyo proper. No longer "sparsely populated," this mostly residential ward has since grown to a population of nine-hundred thousand, the largest in the city.
Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.
Check out Kate's interview with me about the translation process (also here, here, and here).
Visit Peaks Island Press for more information about the series and the author.
Related posts
Ranpo Edogawa
The magic mirror
Murder, they wrote
Last storehouse standing
Scene of the crime writer
Labels: ebooks, edogawa, japanese culture, kindle, mystery, publishing, space alien, translations
November 20, 2024
Scene of the crime writer
He made his literary debut in 1923 with the publication of a mystery short story.
Edogawa would go on to become a tireless promoter of the mystery genre and is largely responsible for its current popularity in books, manga, movies, and television in Japan.
In commemoration of Ranpo Edogawa's 130th birthday, the Detective Conan anime series (also titled Case Closed) will use his real home as the setting for a two-part episode.
Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan manga debuted in 1994. The anime followed two years later. Both are still ongoing, with the anime at over 1140 episodes.
The pilot episode has high school detective Shinichi Kudo getting transformed into a child half his age while investigating a black ops organization. He adopts the alias Conan Edogawa and moves in with private detective Kogoro Mori and proceeds to solve most of the cases Mori takes on.
Conan Edogawa is a dual homage to Arthur Conan Doyle and Ranpo Edogawa. Kogoro Mori shares his first name with Ranpo Edogawa's Kogoro Akechi, a name with the same metaphorical resonance in Japan as Sherlock Holmes.
The series has gone on so long by now that the premise is pretty much beside the point (unless Gosho Aoyama decides to wrap up the series). Regardless, Detective Conan reaffirms my admiration for the cozy mystery format, that ties up the loose ends at the conclusion of every episode.
Writing genre fiction that tells a good story and leaves the reader wanting more is much harder than it looks and deserves as much respect as anything carrying the literary fiction label.
Thanks in no small part to Detective Conan, Ranpo Edogawa is best remembered today for his Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.
First serialized in the young adult pulps, these early versions of the light novel are fast and fun reads, with recurring characters and an emphasis on action and clever but not overcomplicated plots. I have so far translated four of the novels and am working on The Underground Magician.
The Phantom Doctor
Big Gold Bullion
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien
At last count, Crunchyroll has nearly 400 episodes of the Detective Conan anime. The manga are available at Amazon (English) and BookWalker (Japanese). "The Ranpo Residence Murder Case" debuted on November 16 and 23, 2024.
The Ranpo Edogawa estate that appears in the anime is managed by Rikkyo University at the Edogawa Ranpo Memorial Center for Popular Culture Studies.
Related posts
Ranpo Edogawa
Murder, they wrote
Boy Detectives Club
Detective Conan (part I part II)
Labels: anime, crunchyroll, edogawa, japanese tv, manga, mystery, peaks island press, publishing
November 16, 2024
The Phantom Doctor
The ingenuity of this archvillain knows no bounds. Living up to his nickname, the Fiend dons one disguise after the other. He soon has the police chasing their tails, and even shows up to investigate his own crime! Obsessed with his vendetta, he pursues his quarry through haunted houses and limestone caverns inhabited by giant bats.
The Fiend won't be satisfied until he finally confronts Detective Akechi and the members of the Boy Detectives Club in a life-or-death struggle deep underground in the dark.
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 Phantom Doctor
Big Gold Bullion
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien
Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.
The Phantom Doctor was edited by Katherine Woodbury. Check out her interviews with me here, here, and here about the translation process.
Visit Peaks Island Press for more information about the series and the author.
Related posts
Ranpo Edogawa
Murder, they wrote
Scene of the crime writer
Labels: ebooks, edogawa, japanese, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, phantom doctor, publishing, translations
November 13, 2024
Crunchyroll 360
Plus an annual subscription saves around sixteen bucks over the monthly rate.
Though then I recalled that my last annual subscription ran out a few days earlier than I expected it to. A little research confirmed that, according to Crunchyroll itself,
Our subscription services are billed on a 30-day cycle (or 90 days, or 360 days), not a fixed rate. Since all months do not have exactly 30 days, the billing date can fluctuate, which can result in these changes.
Ah, now it makes sense. With the more typical month-to-month payment systems, we don't mind getting screwed over in February because the seven 31-day months will make up for it. The whole system is still more irrational than it needs to be.
If I ruled the world, I'd create a calendar of twelve 30-day months with four one-day festival days for the equinoxes and solstices, plus an extra day for the New Year. Then I'd shift the year forward ten days so that the Winter Solstice fell on New Year's Eve.
In ancient times, kings and emperors issued debt relief decrees on special occasions to win the loyalty of the masses. Given the complexities of modern economies, that wouldn't work today without creating all sorts of moral hazards.
I would stipulate that no rents or interest could be charged during those five festival days. This rule would not apply to all the common per diem expenses, only to rolling monthly and yearly accrued charges.
I'm sure it would take no time at all for retailers to come up with all sorts of "Interest free!" sales.
Oh, and I would get rid of Daylight Saving Time too.
Related posts
The relative time of day
Daylight Saving (waste of) Time
Labels: business, crunchyroll, geography, hidive, netflix, politics, science, streaming, technology
November 09, 2024
Big Gold Bullion
The hiding place of what came to be known in family lore as the "Big Gold Bullion" was entrusted to Fujio Miyase's equally eccentric uncle. But succumbing to a sudden illness, the only clue his uncle left behind was a secret message with no decryption key.
Now it is up to Detective Kogoro Akechi and Yoshio Kobayashi, his able young assistant, to crack the code and recover the treasure before small army of cutthroat villains gets there first. This time around, they are going to have a fight worth millions on their hands.
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 Phantom Doctor
Big Gold Bullion
The Bronze Devil
The Space Alien
Big Gold Bullion was the last Boy Detectives Club novel published before the war. The series resumed a decade later with The Bronze Devil in 1949, after which Edogawa wrote an average of two installments a year until 1962.
This time around, the Fiend with Twenty Faces is still in the slammer after getting arrested at the end of The Phantom Doctor. The Fiend would also have to bide his time for ten long years before returning in The Bronze Devil.
Family names follow Western convention, the surname given last. Long vowels have been shortened to a single character with no diacritics.
Visit Peaks Island Press for more information about the series and the author.
Related posts
Ranpo Edogawa
Murder, they wrote
Scene of the crime writer
Labels: big gold bullion, ebooks, edogawa, kindle, mystery, peaks island press, publishing, translations
November 06, 2024
Matt Alt on minimalism
To begin with, ascetic practices attributed to Zen Buddhism are not the same as the disciplined use of space due to the fact that there isn't that much of it.
Ongoing population decline notwithstanding, Japan is still home to 126 million people who live in a country the size of California. Only 11 percent of the total land area is arable and less than a third of that is actually usable for housing.
That certainly sounds like a good argument for a less-is-more lifestyle. Except what space is available is nowadays bound to be crammed to the gills with stuff (as George Carlin delightfully put it).
After all, Kondo wrote originally for a Japanese audience, that had apparently forgotten they were supposed to be minimalists living in the land of minimalism.
Though to give Kondo the benefit of the doubt, I believe this is largely a postwar phenomenon brought about by both a booming economy and the additional confidence that all your stuff will still be here tomorrow.
As I discussed in a post about how Edo-period cities handled the constant plague of massive urban fires, perhaps Japanese minimalism simply evolved as a way to cope with that pretty grim reality.
Starting with the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, fire was such ever-present fact of life that the average Edokko could expect his house to burn down at least once during his lifetime.
This expectation didn't end with the Meiji. As Edward Seidensticker writes in Low City, High City, "From early into middle Meiji, parts of Nihonbashi were three times destroyed by fire. There were Yoshiwara fires in 1871, 1873, 1891, 1911, and of course in 1923."
To be sure, the effervescence of life notwithstanding, the denizens of Edo weren't nonchalant about losing their stuff. Row house residents dug root cellars to stash their valuables during a fire. Wealthy landowners built fireproof storehouses away from the main house.
As late as 1995, the widespread damage from fires throughout Kobe following the Great Hanshin earthquake was a big wakeup call. Fire is no longer the threat it once was in Japan's urban centers, which has allowed clutter to proliferate.
When one of those old Edo period storehouses shows up in a modern mystery series, it will be crammed floor to ceiling with a haberdashery of clutter, that the detectives will have to comb through to find the critical clue.
As Kyoichi Tsuzuki points out, "Simplicity isn’t about poverty at all. It’s about wealth." It's about being able to buy all that stuff and then being able to afford to store it someplace else. Or replace it on a whim.
It's also a good way to have your minimalist cake and eat it too. Before the fussy relatives come over, cart all that materialistic excess to the storehouse and show off your splendidly simple life.
Or I guess you could hire Marie Kondo to eliminate the need in the first place.
Labels: economics, geography, history, japan, japanese culture, religion