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Kaoru Mori mentioned a manga called Chihayafuru in the blog post I translated. Since her taste is impeccable, I looked it up.
It's sort of the shoujo version of Hikaru no Go. The heroine, Chihaya, is a little girl with a big mouth and a strong sense of justice, who decides to make friends with a nerdy boy the rest of her class has been cruel to. She makes an awkward visit to his family's apartment, where he excitedly offers to show her how he plays the card game karuta. She thinks this is odd at first, but when she sees the intensity with which he goes at it, she's entrance. When his glasses go missing during their school's karuta tournament, she decides to defend his honor by taking his place.
(Incidentally, I for whatever reason thought "karuta" was just a general word for card games when I did the translation, so I've fixed that.)
If you've ever taken a Japanese class with the more hyperactive kind of teacher, you may well know karuta as "that slapping game." The teacher lays out a bunch of flashcards with the katakana or hiragana syllabary on the floor, then calls out a sound - "ka!" "ne!" - and the players race to find and slap the card with the correct kana. This form of the game is more commonly played by, uh, Japanese pre-schoolers. (Mee and Conan's parents gave me a deck of these cards. I'm just going to assume that they did that because I always started class with ABC-Variant karuta, and not because they just felt I probably needed some kana drilling.)
When you're just doing sounds, that's iroha-garuta, but there's apparently a variant where you match lines from poems called uta-garuta. This is the one the kids in Chihayafuru are playing. Obviously this is an eminently suitable subject for the shoujo version of Hikaru no Go! The characters can blushingly compare each other to poems, and remembering the poem that her new friend associated with her will help our heroine win her first match! They're all so adorably dorky.
The art's really good. It reminds me a little of Moyoco Anno, but brushier and less stark. Amazon.co.jp seems to agree with me about the art, as Chihayafuru volume 1 is presently their splash image for a manga promotion they're running.
I cannot say much more about it because I've only read the first few chapters, ahem, cough, yarr. But the moral of this story is that Kaoru Mori's every word must be taken as gospel.
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I can only handle Ezra Klein's blog in small doses; he's too alarming. He sets off my fight-or-flight reflexes. Possibly he feels the same way about himself, given his propensity to take a break from being Ezra Klein once or twice a day, and post about Scott Pilgrim or monkeys.
But today he said something that I found, for him, uncharacteristically soothing:
I think that maybe if I can replace the "writing" in the last sentence with "thinking" and start following this rule, my blood pressure will get lower, my head will hurt less, and my dreams will have fewer apocalypses.
It's sort of the shoujo version of Hikaru no Go. The heroine, Chihaya, is a little girl with a big mouth and a strong sense of justice, who decides to make friends with a nerdy boy the rest of her class has been cruel to. She makes an awkward visit to his family's apartment, where he excitedly offers to show her how he plays the card game karuta. She thinks this is odd at first, but when she sees the intensity with which he goes at it, she's entrance. When his glasses go missing during their school's karuta tournament, she decides to defend his honor by taking his place.
(Incidentally, I for whatever reason thought "karuta" was just a general word for card games when I did the translation, so I've fixed that.)
If you've ever taken a Japanese class with the more hyperactive kind of teacher, you may well know karuta as "that slapping game." The teacher lays out a bunch of flashcards with the katakana or hiragana syllabary on the floor, then calls out a sound - "ka!" "ne!" - and the players race to find and slap the card with the correct kana. This form of the game is more commonly played by, uh, Japanese pre-schoolers. (Mee and Conan's parents gave me a deck of these cards. I'm just going to assume that they did that because I always started class with ABC-Variant karuta, and not because they just felt I probably needed some kana drilling.)
When you're just doing sounds, that's iroha-garuta, but there's apparently a variant where you match lines from poems called uta-garuta. This is the one the kids in Chihayafuru are playing. Obviously this is an eminently suitable subject for the shoujo version of Hikaru no Go! The characters can blushingly compare each other to poems, and remembering the poem that her new friend associated with her will help our heroine win her first match! They're all so adorably dorky.
The art's really good. It reminds me a little of Moyoco Anno, but brushier and less stark. Amazon.co.jp seems to agree with me about the art, as Chihayafuru volume 1 is presently their splash image for a manga promotion they're running.
I cannot say much more about it because I've only read the first few chapters, ahem, cough, yarr. But the moral of this story is that Kaoru Mori's every word must be taken as gospel.
-
I can only handle Ezra Klein's blog in small doses; he's too alarming. He sets off my fight-or-flight reflexes. Possibly he feels the same way about himself, given his propensity to take a break from being Ezra Klein once or twice a day, and post about Scott Pilgrim or monkeys.
But today he said something that I found, for him, uncharacteristically soothing:
I try to hew to a simple rule when it comes to crazy books or, similarly, crazy scandals: Could I easily imagine a world in which no one cared about this? For Dinesh, the answer is obviously yes. For the Cordoba House, the answer is also yes. And if the answer is yes, then the reality is that this story probably has no actual implications, and the only thing I'm doing by writing about it is helping it survive for one more day.
I think that maybe if I can replace the "writing" in the last sentence with "thinking" and start following this rule, my blood pressure will get lower, my head will hurt less, and my dreams will have fewer apocalypses.
