The 吸血鬼 Appreciation Society 🧛

I do not, sadly. orz I was going through your 吸血鬼 lists in the hopes I’d see something I recognized, but my 吸血鬼 game is too weak to be able to suggest anything good. It’s not a book, but I can at least recommend the PURE BLOOD (series) | L25 manga; it’s only two volumes, so should be pretty quick. Only downside to that is that I’m pretty sure they’re both physical-only at the moment (I edited the Natively pages to reflect that).

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To be fair, most of the stuff on the list is pretty obscure. Like, I wouldn’t even be surprised if I was the only person ever to read through 吸血鬼の劣等感 | L31 (searching for it on google brings up the Natively page.) Either way, this is why object 2 is great. We get to improve our 吸血鬼 game while also letting our fellow 吸血鬼 enjoyers know which out of the hundreds of weird, obscure books might actually be worth reading. :laughing:

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Very true! I’m hoping to expand my 吸血鬼 repertoire starting in the new year so I can some recommendations on what’s good/what to avoid.

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Good afternoon, enjoyers of 吸血鬼. I recently remembered that this cool site called http://www.vampyre.jp was a thing. It’s basically a Japanese 吸血鬼鑑賞 blog/database that reviewed a whole bunch of 吸血鬼 works. It seems like it hasn’t been updated since 2018, but I still think it would be useful to any 吸血鬼 appreciator.

I actually went through 吸血鬼の館††幻想館††[吸血鬼の手帖]: 日本 アーカイブ a while ago when I was first making the 吸血鬼 list, but I didn’t add all the old books without kindle versions. Maybe I should go back sometime and add them just for completion?

Either way, I think I’m definitely going to use the reviews on this site to help me choose my future reads. Considering how relevant the site is to this thread, I think I might as well put it in the OP. I can’t believe I forgot about it!

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l don’t remember where I saw it, but I somehow added 月とライカと吸血姫 to my wish list.
I started listening to it on audible, but at the 20% mark, the plot seems really basic so far.
“Oh no, I, a man who barely ever interacted with a woman, have to become the ‘manager’ of this incredibly hot vampire lady and basically be with her 24/7; what am I going to do?”

… half-vampire babies, I guess?

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The plot picks up more once they start moving around to different perspective characters and exploring other parts of the space race I think. The series is absolutely riddled with historical references too.

To some extent until it diverges more widely with reality later the plot is pretty limited by its very strict adherence to the real life space race (although that’s personally what I found interesting about it)

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Little known fact, the USSR did send vampires in space :eyes:
(I’m joking)

More seriously, I finished the first volume and it went exactly how I expected, so I’m unlikely to keep going with this series :sweat_smile:

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Yeah that’s fair. The series is pretty slow and I do wonder how much enjoyment I’d get if not for all the fun finding the references :sweat_smile:

And yeah definitely no vampires in the real one :laughing: Mostly meant with the technology, the dates, world events like in the NASA volumes after they switch protagonists they go to the Seattle Century 21 Expo, there’s the Cuban missile crisis, they even replicate the debate about how exactly to get to the moon (what kind of rocket, where to rendezvous), and the one I laughed at the most was FORTRAN code showing up in the LN along with a description of how programming worked on those 50s/60s computers

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That’s super interesting. :eyes: I love learning about the real-life stuff, and Fortran even making an appearance just ups the cool factor for me. The premise of “vampires in space” already sounds neat, but the real-life tidbits knocks the book from “that’s cool” to “wow, maybe I should read this if I get a chance.”

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That’s what we all say before we throw another poor book into the boundless abyss known as “the Natively wishlist”

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Yeah, my To Read pile for 2023 is basically already full at this rate. :unamused:

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Good afternoon, 吸血鬼 enjoyers.

I read through some more 吸血鬼 stuff. Maybe I just had high expectations going in to them (they are both from authors I read before and liked), but they both felt a bit underwhelming…

First was ほんとうの花を見せにきた | L33. The basic is plot is that a young boy gets his entire family killed before his eyes and he gets saved by a 吸血鬼 man. His (step) father was in some type of gang, but fucked his boss’s wife and stole some money. As you can imagine, the boss wasn’t very happy about that! So he sent his goons after his family, killed them all, except for the youngest son who was saved by a 吸血鬼美青年. So, he ends up being raised by two 吸血鬼 men who live in a small house in a not-so-good 町. In order to prevent protagonist guy from being found out, his new 吸血鬼 dads say that he has to start wearing 女物 clothing as a disguise. That’s the basic premise (for the first part.)

I think it could have been good. I really thought it would have been. However, this book made me feel very little. I think one big problem is that a lot of the plot just didn’t make sense. Did protagonist guy just never go through puberty at any point? I find it hard to believe that the protag could hide his identity simply by wearing a skirt and growing out his hair for that long. That’s not even mentioning the fact that he took on the name of his sister who already got killed by the gang that’s after him. Isn’t that a huge red flag? Later in the story, he has to hide from 吸血鬼 who are after him, so he drops the “disguise” by simply cutting his hair and all of a sudden, simply by doing that, no one recognizes him as a woman anymore. Something just doesn’t add up.

The other problem is that I find the main character totally incomprehensible. His entire family gets killed and two 吸血鬼 men suddenly tell him “you’re wearing a skirt now” and he accepts it all pretty easily. I feel like he had no real reaction to everything that was going on around him. The characters just didn’t feel real to me. I understand that one of the main themes is that the author was trying to convey was that the 儚さ of life gives it 意味, but the characters all felt too shallow/unreal to make me actually feel that.

Really, it’s all pretty boring. I won’t even bother talking about the other stories. The first was more than half of the book anyway.

The other book was 吸血鬼はお年ごろ | L26. I dropped it midway. I usually like 赤川 次郎 but this one was just way too childish for me. @basilsauce’s review says it feels like a light novel, but honestly I would say it feels more like a kid’s book. I dropped it since most of the book is just absolutely dry dialogue. The only good thing I can say about it is that it’s easy.

In a bit of a reading slump right now. I think BITTER×SWEET BLOOD | L28 will be my next 吸血鬼 book. (It’s free on Kindle Unlimited. That’s usually a huge red flag, but I will take the chance since I like the art.)

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Seems legit to me. Just think about it this way: you’re giving free publicity/a chance to these Japanese authors who just want to write 吸血鬼 trash literature who (presumably) aren’t successful enough yet to make it out of that free zone. It’s a civic duty. And at some point you’ll definitely find at an 8/10, which will then validate all the 3/10s you were before, and the cycle will continue.

I’m enjoying your reviews as always, though! Keep up the good work!

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Good afternoon, 吸血鬼 Appreciators.

It’s been a while, so I have 3 吸血鬼 works to talk about tonight. I’ll be brief.

BITTER×SWEET BLOOD | L28 - This one is okay. It’s romance/drama. It seemed to be 女向け but I’m not entirely sure since all the author’s other works are 男向け. The plot is basically this: mysterious (hot) vampire guy is a new transfer student at mc girl’s school, vampire guy 吸血s mc girl, vampire guy gets possessive and swears to keep her 血 all for himself. Then there’s also the subplot of mc girl’s 姉 getting 吸血鬼化’d. I liked the beginning the most, the setting of wandering around the 吸血鬼 infested part of town on a dark, snowy, winter night was just perfect. Unfortunately, most of the second half feels more like a generic romcom and the mood of the first part was totally lost. A lot was left unresolved in the end, but there is a sequel, so I will excuse it until I read it. Vampyre.jp’s review of it says that the sequel is “1冊目より面白い,” so I guess I have no reason not to try it out. Overall, excelled my expectations for a Kindle Unlimited book.

吸血鬼に天国はない | L32 - I couldn’t really get into this one. I guess you could say it’s drama and romance with a bit of mystery. Here’s the plot rundown: Mc man runs an illegal 搬送 business in what is basically 1920s New York without ever mentioning New York, one day he has to transport a 吸血鬼 girl, turns out the mafia is after the 吸血鬼 girl!, so now he has to save her from the mafia. I really tried to like this one. This is likely just a matter of my tastes, but my problem with it was that it’s just non-stop car chase scenes! I felt like more than half of the book took place in a car. From a 吸血鬼 appreciation standpoint, it was very weak. Probably a better read for the 車 appreciation society. Overall, not really recommened unless you really want to learn absolutely essential driving vocabulary like 片輪走行.

ごちそうの嫁入り~独占欲強めな吸血鬼の濃蜜な求愛~ | L30 - This one is okay too. This is a pretty short 女向け romance. Here’s the plot rundown: fantasy city where 吸血鬼 and 人間 live together, 吸血鬼 man gets beat up in the slums, 貧乏 mc girl saves him by giving him 血, but wait! 直接吸血 is illegal!, 吸血鬼 man takes responsibility by marrying her (直接吸血 is allowed if you are married.) It’s a nice, sweet, somewhat smutty story. They bond over their love of 映画, 吸血鬼 man saves mc girl’s dying 映画館, nothing too crazy, but I don’t think it’s bad. Overall, okay if you want something short. (Also on Kindle Unlimited)

That’s it for this year! My favorite of 2022 will have to be ぼくが恋した吸血鬼 講談社ノベルス | L26. It just fit the October mood perfectly. My least favorite would probably be 人外サーカス | L33. Not really 吸血鬼, not really horror, not really mystery or anything else it claimed to be, just (really bad) action. For a future read, I have my eyes on クリスマスローズの殺人 | L30??, It’s a direct sequel to Vヴィレッジの殺人 | L34, which I thought wasn’t bad, so I will probably like it. I’m sure I will have lots of new 吸血鬼 stuff to explore in 2023 :smile:

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Ooh, thank you for the write-ups! I sadly read no 吸血鬼 this past year, but 2022 was also the first year I really jumped headlong into novel reading, so I aim to be better prepared in 2023. Been making my new year’s resolutions the past few days, so I need to add some 吸血鬼 to it.

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I just finished https://learnnatively.com/book/395b16ea28/ and feel like I should drop it in here as a book you all might find interesting…

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Huh, that’s interesting. There’s nothing in the description that really hints that it might be relevant. I would ask what makes you say that, but I feel like that might ruin the experience. It’s only a one-shot manga, so I guess I’ll just have to give it a try myself! :thinking:

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To keep you from being too disappointed, I’ll say that 吸血鬼-ness is not a primary focus of the story. I just didn’t expect it to show up here like it did :man_vampire:

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One of Fujimoto’s short stories have a vampire in it, will only say which one in spoilers to keep the surprise.

Shikaku

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Considering how high-quality さよなら絵梨 | L24 was, I think I’m going to have to give this one a try sometime. :thinking: Or maybe I should actually start one of the 200+ manga series that are already on the list. :sweat_smile:

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