Well I see it as some kind of commercial for the authors, so it’s quite interesting that they are able to sell it for 500円 even 
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Have you ever looked into one of those 6€ to 9€ magazines over here? 
I once bought the Balkan Vogue because a friend (who is a successful author over there) wrote a short story for it and outside of this short story there were maybe a handful of other articles and the rest was ads. 
Like, not promotions of young authors, like straight up ads for cars and what not.
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I’ll have to read it to see, if the short stories are actually good, and I even like 20% of them, then I’ll be quite happy to have paid 500 yen for a mix of curated stories! I like the short story format but find it hard to find ones I like (in any language), and then often being disappointed for a €20 anthology gets expensive and I gave up for a while
I was attempting to find other mooks for comparison. There must be many more, but with my limited Japanese search abilities I found 2 more literary looking ones for 1000-1500 yen:
文藝
文學界
(affiliate links)
Don’t worry, my eye is not wandering 
I have a work trip coming up, but after that I’ll have a look into this GOAT one.
@sadgremlin I really appreciate the effort you went into getting the TOC up, thanks!
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I mean if you take that view, it’s curated advertising of producers and products that are actually likely to appeal to you, and not just random crap you’re being bombarded with. And the promotional material itself is interesting. So that doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me
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Yes, that’s true. I put it in worse terms than I actually feel about it. 
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Hey guys! Sorry for not uploading the other 2 TOC yet, life has been pretty busy, hopefully I’ll get around to do that soon 
In the meantime, would people participating in the mook club mind adding a column in the “table of content” table with your name as the header? This column will act as your own tracker, once you are done reading something and have some thoughts to share, you can link it (or simply mark it as read) in the corresponding row of your column. Kinda like this (here OP uses volume numbers, I wrote the title of the articles instead):
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I think it must be partially because of the ads (which I don’t mind at all considering they aren’t invasive at all), and partially because it seems very well marketed and connected.
You probably already saw the collab with monogatary.com for the writing contest (which they are running again, in case any of you is an aspiring author), but they also partnered with the Book Hotel in Kyoto, which is a must visit for me.
It’s also a relatively new Mook, so they might up the price in the future as they gain popularity 
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I put mine in! I also inserted a link on my name so I can find my total issue related notes easily, hope you don’t mind
The only tricky thing I foresee with a table in this direction (growing it in readers to the right), is that each time you read something new and add a link to notes you’ll have to be really careful to add the correct number of spacers each time. (From the fourth person on)
Since the club might have 5-6 people reading along, another option could be putting the toc as a bullet point list, and then we add a line when we read one of there’s comments.
Like this:
- ＜小説＞高瀬隼子「ふたえ
- sadgremlin: Reading
- someone else: reading
- ＜私のGOAT本＞yama
- mitrac [link to post with notes]
- ＜小説＞九段理江「Beauticide」
- ＜インタビュー＞池田エライザ
- etc
Not sure, disadvantage is for that style it gets long. I’m sure we’ll manage either way!
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There’s an Edit Table btn that lets you do it graphically. Only downside is if you have | in the text, it might not process it correctly and break the table. You’d want to put \| to be safe
(No opinion on how to organize the OP, just commenting about general discourse functionality)
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Oh right I forgot that was an option, adding a column with that function sounds easy enough!
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Has someone added the magazines to Natively yet? I don’t want to cross wires but last I checked they’re not there.
I’m on a work trip and have some down time this evening and bought the winter 2026 issue on Bookwalker. I’m pleased with how they rendered it digitally. So far I’ve only had books that are either totally rendered as text or as image. This magazine is a mix, so some columns and the more creative layouts with embedded images are images, but longer sections of prose are text, which makes lookups a lot easier!
Also, there is a section on a book I just nominated for the IBC club on Wanikani because it’s the next book I’m going to read. The section is called 「ぎんなみ商店街の事件簿」シリーズ完全ガイド and the book is ぎんなみ商店街の事件簿 Sister編: Sister編 | L31
I’m curious to read the article, but I also don’t want spoilers…
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Idk but the Kindle links are in OP, so easy enough to add. If it’s already been added, the adder won’t let you duplicate it anyway (even if it’s not Approved status yet)
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Oh I thought I saw someone reporting multiple version issues… I’ll just wait a couple days and if no one has then I’ll add it
There’s very occasionally ways that can happen, but I don’t think you’d run into it with that. For one thing there’s no series page for these, so no risk of 2 separate things importing the same related books (which I assume is how the double entries happened)
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mitrac’s GOAT Winter 2026 home post
Well I cracked it open and read / looked at the opening designed pages and extensively read my first mini article.
Front matter
Front matter/ comment on reading names generally
Something I found intimidating just looking at the cover of the magazine was all those names I can’t read. Thankfully, I very quickly discovered the solution is at hand because it’s not (always) obvious for a native speaker either. So in the front matter I was happy to see the reading for the person’s name in the graphic design when it’s introduced or in kana in a small blurb somewhere. For the book rec articles I found it in their profile at the end of their blurb, and all the short story authors are profiled (with names in kana) at the very end of the issue. Phew!
私のGOAT本 : yama
I decided to start with one of these because they are very short, 1 page 
thoughts and links on my rabbit holes that you might enjoy even if you haven't read this
- 私のGOAT本 by: yama, a musician, debut 春を告げる
- The book: 花ざかりの森・憂国 by 三島 由紀夫 (Yukio Mishima)
- Context needed: 二・二六事件. I didn’t know about this (or forgot): February 26 incident - Wikipedia
I sampled some of yama’s music. It’s interesting, not what I enjoy but I imagine it’s popular. A couple of tracks made me wonder (worry?) what kind of book she would recommend. I skimmed her blurb and looked up the book before deciding whether to read the blurb more intensively. The book is a collection of 13 stories, not my themes, and not something or an author I would read at my current Japanese level, or at all tbh. Content warning: suicide
I had imagined I might find the rabbit holes here interesting and that didn’t disappoint. This one page blurb introduced me to (links above): a popular singer, a historical incident, and a controversial author. None of them I would have sought out but part of the background most Japanese are aware of.
I’m surprised this one is the first rec featured (>50 year old text by such a controversial figure), but I’m not exactly going to add anything insightful speculating about a cultural context so far from mine, so I’ll leave it at that!
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Ok so I started adding it but what category do you all think?
What Natively category should these be?
- Short story (because it’s a collection)
- Other (because it’s a mook)
- Novel (because it’s long)
- Something else? (Please comment)
0
voters
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I have a vague memory that Short Story is specifically not for collections. Maybe @brandon can confirm? Nevermind, I was wrong
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Unfortunately it’s just the other way around: Short Story (despite the name) is used for collections. And for single short stories. sigh
Naming is hard. I would so much love to have a “Short Story Collection” category besides the already existing “Short Story” (and to have each assigned properly) …
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Ahh, yeah appears you’re correct (Product Updates & Casual Natively Discussion - #468 by brandon)
Tho my vote for Other still remains
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I would say Other, because the mook contains interviews and essays as well, right?
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