Shizukanaru Don (The Quiet Don)

My review of the Shizukanaru Don (The Quiet Don) manga is now up on the Japan Subculture Research Center site.

Lingerie designer by day, yakuza by night: Shizukanaru Don (The Quiet Don)

Anime and Manga for Grownups

A week after doing panels at Fanime Con I will be doing a presentation at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Click on the image for a better view.

Bringing lunch from home

This week's entry is a common sight in classrooms and offices in Japan.

I bring you the humble bentō bako (bentō box) 弁当箱.

Do you use one for your lunch?

Mine is a Crez which came with an insulated bag and is made from steel.

From here to there, but how?

This week's new entry to the Anime Companion Supplement is something any urban dweller or experienced traveler is likely to have used. Train schedules.

This falls into the: "not seen in anime and manga often but important in real life" category.

Of course it also falls into the: "Gilles wanted to write about this" category.

In any case I present you with:

jikoku-hyō (timetable) 時刻表

By the way, my main two sources of information were articles in JRTR Japan Railway & Transport Review, a magazine that has all of the issues online in PDF format for easy downloading.

Small ordinary, seen often

This week I'm adding an entry to the Anime Companion Supplement for something you commonly see in stories set in the Edo Period. Modest as this is it has a name, it is the :

kanzashi dama (hairpin bead) 簪玉

Back to the Yōkai

I'd been holding off on adding more yōkai entries until I got the copy of The Great Yokai Encyclopedia I had ordered.

The book has finally arrived so am I now returning to adding more yōkai entries.

This week I bring you:

tankororin (persimmon yōkai) たんころりん

As for The Great Yokai Encyclopedia it is an ok book. It would have been nice if the author had spent more time on many of the entries and I was surprised that he did not include Mizuki Shigeru's book on yōkai which has been available since 2008 in a French translation as Yōkai: Dictionnaire des Monstres Japonais. On the whole The Great Yokai Encyclopedia is a useful book used in conjunction with other works just not as detailed and fleshed out as it could have been. Perhaps we shall see a better second edition in a few years.

A most wonderful fool

I finally pulled the first Tora-san box set, released by AnimEigo, from my pile of unseen DVD discs. What a great series, from the opening dialogue of the first film (1969) to the ending of the fourth I found myself wanting to see the next film. Atsumi Kiyoshi's portrayal of Kuruma Torajiro, aka Tora-san, is a delight. The bighearted fast talking Tora-san is enough of an idiot to get himself into all sorts of situations, usually complicated by his good intentions. Tora-san always manages to work his way through the mess he got himself into and in doing so drags others into it to our amusement.

If you are looking for a classic series of highly entertaining films I recommend these. You will see why they were popular enough to become a 48 film series.

One of the places I plan to visit in my next trip to Tokyo is the Tora-san Museum in Shibamata, the neighborhood much of the stories take place in. I even intend to take the Yagiri Ferry to Chiba and walk the banks of the Edogawa river just like Tora-san does in the movies.

I have now added two new entries to my Anime Companion Supplement. These are:

Atsumi Kiyoshi 渥美清

Otoko wa Tsurai Yo (It's Tough Being a Man, aka: The Tora-san movies) 男はつらいよ