A few old yuri magazines someone sent me. The Sayurihime is a bunch of shorts. I know a few in the YH & Galette - including some nostalgic ones - but not the majority. Specifically interested to check out galette, since I’m less acquainted
10 Likes
A friend of a friend was clearing out some books, so I acquired these:
These all date from the early 1980s. The 群ようこ are volumes of short essays. The history of Gunma place names is volume 1 of 2 only, and not on Natively as it has no ISBN.
The cookbook is fun because it’s rather of its time: some recipes I might actually try, quite a lot of Western style dishes which I am assuming were aspirational stuff in Japan at the time, in the same way that cooking various kinds of foreign cuisine was taking off in the UK around that time, and also a scattering of some of the sort of dubious dishes you can find in 70s English language cookbooks (there’s a recipe for mackerel and banana in here). Oh, and it has a recipe for how to serve cornflakes!
This is the stuff that I didn’t take – a few random volumes of manga, a diet book, Japanese translations of a few English books, etc. (The 心 on the far left is not the Soseki novel, but 心 : いかに生きたらいいか by a Buddhist priest who Wikipedia tells me was quite famous.) These are destined for either a local charity shop or the recycling (though I might still pull the Buddhist book from the pile; I have a few days to decide).
Not pictured are a dozen or so volumes by the founder of twentieth century new religion Seicho-No-Ie, which I didn’t think anybody could possibly want and are definitely headed for recycling.
If anybody is in the UK and actually wants any of the stuff in the discard box and lets me know in the next two days, I can post them to you: drop me a DM.
11 Likes
Way bigger haul than I had any right buying… all from Mercari JP via FromJapan:
- シムーン S1 | L31 (one of my top 5 anime & top 2 yuri)
- 君は少女 (Adult) | L18 (very disturbing, due to realism)
- ふたりとふたり (Adult) | L18 (age gap + cheating. I like the plot, and the end is relatively wholesome)
- いおの様ファナティクス volume1 (電撃ス EX 88-1) | L24?? (unread, same author as 飴色紅茶)
- 少女セクト 2 (Adult) | L26 (wild af, beautiful artwork, but a lot of SA… decent enough plot)
- 飴色紅茶館歓談: 2 | L19 (cozy age gap, in a cafe)
- 夢の端々(下) | L26 (unread)
- さよならローズガーデン 3 | L26 (unread)
- 悪いが私は百合じゃない | L20 (unread, but skimmed scanlation… kinda wild)
- ロックは淑女の嗜みでして | L21 (ojou-sama school + secret rock band)
- 冷たくて 柔らか | L23 (unread, josei yuri)
So originally I was just after the limited edition Simoun dvds… I’ve had some terrible luck trying to acquire those in the past. Anyway, I had to buy via proxy… so I tried to make the shipping worth it. It came out to about $6.70 per item in the end (counting DVDs and figures). Anyway, I started looking through my list of older yurihime stuff that I don’t own yet, and wound up with the ones in the first shot. I really love a lot of the early-mid 2000’s yuri aesthetic. Past that, I started looking for odd volumes I’m missing, or unread series.
I’m starting to get tighter on space now, and don’t really have room for another bookcase now. So I’m gonna have to start getting creative… but also I’m considering selling/gifting a number of series or miscellaneous books. In any case, I won’t be ordering more stuff for a few months 
8 Likes
Stopped by Kinokuniya today to look for some English books, but I of course ended up picking up some newer entries in some JP series I’m following:
憂国のモリアーティ 22 | L30 and 光が死んだ夏 9
Sadly they did not have 憂国のモリアーティ 23. 
10 Likes
Tried selling stuff at BookOff, and they didn’t take any of my JP stuff. Otoh I grabbed these at Kinokuniya. I was originally thinking to get history of a different region, but I didn’t see any in the limited amount of time I had
I’m expecting the history one to be moderately challenging, and will read at a relaxed pace (多分). Kaguyahime I’m expecting to be fairly easy at this point
7 Likes
Have fun with 魔法少女育成計画. I read the first one when I was not remotely at the level needed to read it. I read the first 8 or so in the series before I lost interest.
4 Likes
I’m currently travelling around Japan, and that doesn’t go without leaving some traces in my luggage 
So far I have managed to pick up these:
plus one more which already travelled back home with @Myria, which is 飛族 (文春文庫 む 6-6) | L30?? (the author won the Akutagawa prize, but for a different book).
I’m especially happy about the book in the bottom row with the cherry blossom tree - it’s the favorite book of my Japanese host mother, and I am literally searching for that book for almost 10 years now 
Then on the left hand side we have two Naoki prize-winning authors (again with different books), then two Higashino Keigo commemoration books, and the second column from the left features 王国 which is the continuation of the WaniKani Intermediate Book Club pick スリ, and the top one is a book by an author whose biography I recently read, and who was a very prolific writer, so I was already thinking about which of his books I should try. It’s basically all historical novels, so I expect some difficulty in each of them. That was when this book found me ^^ I was in Nagano in a tiny second-hand bookshop (not a book off!) and so I looked around and the title’s “Portsmouth” caught my eye. When I looked at it closer to find out whether it was written by a Japanese auther or was a translation, I noticed who the author was! So I simply had to buy it. It’s about Komura Jutarou, Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs. That doesn’t sound easy either…
13 Likes
I need to know more about this. It’s around N1 isn’t it? What was your current level then and how hard or even frustrating was it to read and about how long did it take you to read the first volume?
1 Like
Leave some treasures on Book Off for me! I’m there in 10 days! And also Sushi and Japanese Curry.
4 Likes
I finished the first book late 2019, right before taking and passing N3. Granted I was probably between N3 and N2, but no way I would have passed N2 at the time. I don’t remember how long it took me to read, but it was at least a few months.
I read the next two volumes in 2021 and they were much easier due to more studying and reading experience (and switching to digital), but still challenging. Honestly, even reading them as recently as 2023 was still challenging. They are hard books and the level 35 on Natively is well earned.
6 Likes
Yeah, but you can get around it by buying sets. I think I managed to get about 62 in one order because of sets 
They also limit by weight as I couldn’t get all of Honzuki part sets and the extra books in one order, had to split it across 2.
4 Likes
Recently I’ve been rereading some of my favorite manga. Good stuff:
- I have a better vocabulary now than I did during the first go-round, which means that I have the energy to be diligent with my remaining lookups and therefore enjoy full comprehension!
- Damn I love these manga
- Noticing how nice 単行本 manga feels in my hands compared to Western softcover comics I’ve read recently. The size is just right for my hands, the cover and paper and binding are flexible enough that the book wants to be held open, and the slipcover is smooth (rubbery “soft touch” covers seem to be popular in Western books right now, and I hate the way those feel).
8 Likes
If they’re the ones I’m thinking of they collect grime like crazy too
7 Likes
The curse of Book-Off haunts me wherever I go while in Japan
So here’s some Book-Off damage so far, I tried to contain myself because I still have to lug around my stuff to two more hotels.
(Yes, I know I could send my stuff between hotels, but with all the weather shit going on, I wouldn’t want to get stranded without my luggage)
Also due to the train suspensions, and getting stuck for a few hours in “Salty Ass” station, I didn’t make to the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum collab, which made me quite sad.
But doing casually the stamp rally, I found this book in the Yamanashi Culture Hall for sale!
16 Likes
Just where did that get its name from??
3 Likes
The Japanese Wikipedia page for 塩尻市 tells that it actually does have historical reasons:
信州には海がないため塩を生産することができず、かつては日本海から塩売りがやってきていた。各地を回って売り歩いていると、ちょうどこの近辺で品切れになるため、塩尻という名前がついたと言われている。
7 Likes
Belated physical book post. It’s a mix of Japanese, French, and one English book (not really in theme for Natively but bought in the same day thus photographed as a group):
I asked and they unfortunately didn’t have the 下 of 愚かな薔薇 
I already own the audiobook for ツミデミック but it was a bit of a struggle for me to do listening only (or was a year-ish ago and I haven’t really been practicing listening to much besides crime procedurals so probably still true) so I figure now I listen with text and get more out of it.
グラスホッパー is by an author I enjoy and I’ve heard it’s one of his better works so I decided to pick it up.
I’ll skip explaining the other two books as this is the Japanese side of the forums
9 Likes
