Final haul of 2024
If I wasn’t in the middle of マリア様がみてる | L29 I’d start 声優ラジオ, but it will have to wait for now. 徒然日和 book club starts Jan 5th!
Looks like you also have a new cupboard 
oh yeah, I got 2 of the IKEA Billy bookshelves b/c the shelve on my other ones were bowing. They’re sturdier, taller, and wider! Didn’t realize I hadn’t posted yet… I’ll have to get a full pic soon, after I finish arranging a few more things
Btw in case anyone’s interested, there’s a number of physical books I’m looking to get rid of:
One last cdjapan order arrived before the end of the year:
It was a big one because my tbr pile was almost empty and the 300 yen coupon pushed me into bumping the order up over 6500 yen. It’s been a while since I bought a manga; this one is mostly an “encourage the publisher not to cancel the series” purchase since I’ve already read it in English.
文庫版 魍魎の匣 | L40?? is a thousand page monster:
I’ve had this on my TBR for a while but am scared by the utter length! 
I do wonder why they didn’t make it multiple volumes; maybe the author had a weird preference, like his insistence that he never has a sentence crossing a page break…
From what I understand, that book is already part of a 9 volume series (though I’m not sure if all the books are connected), so maybe that is why… 
The covers of all of them look gorgeous together, but I’m not sure I’d want to brave a physical edition. You’ll have to let me know how the difficulty is whenever you get to it.
This book is volume #2 of a whole series of nine mystery books of that author with mostly more than 1000 pages. Oops wrote the same.
Ah, as it seems you already read volume #1 about 14 years ago: 文庫版 姑獲鳥の夏 | L30??
I came across a used version of this behemoth at a used book sale and almost got it at the urging of my partner (I guess it’s been translated to English and he liked it?) but I ended up not getting it because it would take up a lot of shelf space for something I knew nothing about
Yep, but 姑獲鳥の夏 at less than 650 pages isn’t quite so silly to print in a single volume. I liked the first book and am a fan of the author in general, but somebody said that 魍魎の匣 wasn’t as good, which is why it’s taken me so long to get round to it.
I’m assuming it’ll be about the same as 姑獲鳥の夏; quoting from my 2010 review of that:
This isn’t an easy read for a Japanese learner. It’s a long book, and the discussions about consciousness for example I found a bit challenging on the vocabulary front. The kanji usage is slightly old-fashioned; I don’t know if this is intended to match the 1950s setting or if it’s simply the author’s personal preference. There is usage of pre-simplification forms, and grammar words like せい and はず are written in kanji rather than the more usual kana. There are also a few quotations of Classical Japanese, although these are largely skippable or guessable.
There’s a jpdb deck for 魍魎の匣 so I have been doing some pre-read vocab study.
My biggest order ever!
Historical (1920s-40s):
Modern:
I know this might not be obvious, but I’m a huge マリア様がみてる fan! So this is basically everything besides novels 33-37, S3-4 DVDs/Blu-rays, the live action move, and the drama cds (those are hard to find). The novels are already getting put to use (switching on and off with Kindle)! And the manga art style looks pretty fun, so it seems like they’ll be a fresh experience when I get there. The DVDs weren’t really the most prudent choice, since I already have the eps on my computer, but w/e. I didn’t read the novels listing carefully… turned out it was for vol 1-32, the bonus book, and the companion series.
Otherwise I’m incredibly excited about the historical stuff! I’m reading 花物語 in my lessons right now. It’s not so hard, but it’s the first 大正時代 work I’ve ever read. 屋根裏の二処女 (semi-autobiographical, by the same author) is out of print, and I couldn’t find it digitally… so I wound up with an antique! Unlike a lot of Class-S literature, it presents an explicit lesbian relationship. 乙女の港 is another famous work, from the 昭和時代
This was all from Cdjapan (some of it via Mercari) - so it was very convenient, except for the shipping 
The only other thing I’ll be getting this month is Yurihime, and probly the remaining 5 novels (assuming Suruga-ya has them)
It’s so awesome seeing you pick up all the related media! I love seeing posts like these, with the wide variety of goods and media and such.
Are these what you’re looking for? Or something different?
Thx - Glad to hear! 
That does seem to be what I’m looking for. The fact that there’s only one set w/ all 9 discs makes me wanna jump on it. But I’ll have to wait for next month, and hope there’s something then. Thx
I’d be fine just finding a digital copy through other means… but even those I can’t seem to find everything when I’ve looked
I had seen the fist listing (expensive!!)… Looking it up more, it turns out there’s 15 drama cds… so between the 2 sets, it looks like they’re maybe/almost there. Maria-sama ga Miteru - Wikipedia seems to have links to individual ones, starting in the 90s/100s… so I guess I can use that to help put it together
There’s also a complete bluray box set, I’ve seen on 1-2 sites, but it costs almost as much as this entire order did…
That’s pretty cool. I’m slightly surprised that a 1920s book has the title in left to right hiragana rather than right to left kana, but maybe that’s a factor of the book’s intended audience. This must have been really popular at the time – the National Diet Library has records of editions from four different publishers in the 20s and 30s, plus another did a reprint in 1947 (I wonder if that was to print it in modern kana spellings?), and a few more modern reprintings after that.
So I found what I think is the original listing, and it says 昭和22年 初版本 - which should be 1948. Frustratingly it doesn’t seem to say in the book. I am not very knowledgeable about either 大正 or 昭和
Where/how did you find the info about publications? I’ve never looked that stuff up in JP before
Honestly I’m kind of mixed about having something that old. Makes me a bit anxious tbh
I searched for the title on the National Diet Library website. (This even sometimes has digitised scans of books, but often only if you’re physically in Japan, which I am not.)
For the copy in that Mercari listing, the publishing date is in image 7:
To the right of the logo in the middle of the page it says it was printed in 昭和22, i.e. 1947. I think this is the first edition of the version from 家庭社 (but not the first ever printing of the novel from any publisher).
It looks like it is not new kana spellings, judging by the images.
Ohh I wonder if VPN will fool that, or a fake address
Ahhh I didn’t understand what I was looking at when I saw that page. That makes more sense now!
I managed to find a digital version with modernized kana (and kanji choices). Quite interesting to compare:
Some differences:
