So confusing! Well now I understand why I was finding more items than the last time I tried. Back to not finding any manga sets and generally not anything I want. 
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They have infinity BL sets (although, annoyingly not 3 sets I really want).
Someone once said that they’d move things to the international site if you asked. I don’t know how that works though.
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Speaking of jp surugaya:
In case anyone is curious, that’s because they are separating the costs in two:
- shipping (free if buying 1000 jpy or more)
- processing (free if buying > 5000 for most of Japan or >10000 jpy if buying from Hokkaido or Okinawa)
If you buy for less than 999 jpy, you have to ALSO pay shipping, which is silly in most cases.
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Based on the price difference between the JP and international sites I don’t think I’d buy them anyway. I’d almost always rather spend 30-40% more for new, at which point I’d only buy used for series that are out of print.
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The few sets I’ve bought have been competitively priced with mandarake’s, but there you have to pay shipping.
I agree that the single volume prices are pretty outrageous unless you’re making a smaller order and the free shipping makes it worthwhile.
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If you’re on the global site, put it in Japanese, and the search suddenly works (no guarantee you’ll find everything you’re looking for of course, but they do have a lot)
Yeah I have it set to Japanese. Once shitsurei pointed me to the right site I remembered that trick being mentioned before.
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Ah kk, a lot of ppl I’ve mentioned the site to didn’t realize you could switch the language, and for w/e reason the search engine barely functions on English. So thought I’d mention, to be safe
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So I’ve been (slowly) reading through 流沙の記憶 | L30?? lately; I’m about 50% of the way through. This book was originally published in 1994, and then re-printed in 2014. I have both printings of the book (the original is in a nice hardcover!), and since both have illustrative work I’ve been going back and forth between them to look at the different interpretations of the scenes.
So I was flipping through the old copy today, looking for an illustration, and couldn’t find it, so, thinking I had somehow flipped to the wrong part of the book, started scanning the text to figure out where in the story I was. I found out two things: I was in the right place, and the illustration I was referencing was only in the new version, and that the book’s text had been revised between the printings! 
I’m not sure the extent of the revisions; I’m really hoping the author’s note at the end of the new version talks about it a bit. But now I want to read the old version as well to see what was changed. 
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I just read オレが私になるまで 1 | L20 and was pleasantly surprised. I was really unsure about it from the preview, but between a small sale and the good reviews here on Natively I decided to give it a chance. This is a good lesson in why longer previews can be important. The first chapter shows the basic premise, but not really what the manga is about, if that makes sense. If the preview was longer I probably would have picked it up months ago. Part of me wants to get the physical copies for this, but they are out of stock and who knows if they’ll come back in stock. I’ll decide in the next few weeks when I will likely place another physical manga order.
Other than that, I caught up on どれが恋かがわからない | L21, finished 箱入りドロップス | L20, read 夜の名前を呼んで 3 | L24 (two more volumes left), and read スキップとローファー 4 | L24 (last volume I own).
I also started 君は放課後インソムニア 1 | L23. It’s fine so far, but there’s one thing that I find so distracting. Literally every speech bubble ends in punctuation. If there’s no question mark or other tone-clarifying punctuation, there’s a period. Even in a bubble that just has ”あ” it’s written as ”あ。”, which has got to be the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in a manga.
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Hi together. I am new in this forum and on this website. I am at least at JLPT N4, have tried to get this last year , but failed. Now i am trying to challenge it next year or so.
Now i am trying to read my first novel ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 1.
I find it very difficult to understand at my stage but i try my very best. The vocabulary sheet on google docs help me a lot. I am writing parallel my own list.
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Welcome! Great to have you! I’m case you haven’t already found it, there was a book club hosted for that book a little while ago. If you have any questions, feel free to post them there; there are a lot of folks here who’ve read the book, so I’m sure they can help!
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted in this thread because I took a month off of reading to go join the August listening challenge. Many hours of listening logged later, I am back!
Even though I was “away” and not “reading”, I did listen to some audiobooks that I really enjoyed, so I will share them here as an update:
秘密 | L40 - Short, charming little short story that is quintessentially 谷崎潤一郎. Would recommend this to anyone wanting to get into him!
斜陽 | L38 - Everyone. This was amazing. Amazing! Amazing I tell you! Surprisingly fresh and modern and not as hard as you’d think for an older book by 太宰治 either. The caveat for enjoying this is you should probably have a bit of knowledge about modern Japanese history, especially the Showa era right before/during/after the war.
ヴィヨンの妻 | L30?? - I loved 斜陽 so much I listened to all the short stories in this book also from 太宰治. A mix of funny and tragic (by tragic I mean a cry for help tbh) - they have a similar vibe to Russian short stories (I was reminded of Chekhov) and Dazai even references Gogol in one of the stories, so the influence is clear.
夢十夜 | L38 - Ten dream sequences. I liked that these really lived up to the name “dream” - some of them were bizarre and it really felt as if you were watching someone’s dream. A lot of people may know some of them already from the book Breaking Into Japanese Literature.
さらば、欲望 資本主義の隘路をどう脱出するか 幻冬舎新書 | L40 - A series of essays from the same author focusing on Japan’s place in a globalized world as well as the direction that the global economy and capitalism are potentially headed in. Very interesting but not at all chill to listen to, I had to give this some proper focus and could only listen to it in the mornings when my brain was still fresh.
ミシン | L30?? - It was giving “story written by a 14 year old who decides they want to become a writer” and not in a genius kind of way. 
Not for me lol
イン・ザ・プール | L30 & 空中ブランコ | L30 - イン・ザ・プール was kinda fun, 空中ブランコ had slightly less charm, and I decided not to move on to the 3rd book…kind of entertaining, but not the best books ever.
本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第二部「神殿の巫女見習い1」 | L31 - I loved it! I’m finally getting super hooked on 本好き. The audiobooks are just too fun!
Now that the listening challenge is over and I am back to reading, I’ve picked up:
うんちの行方 | L32?? - This book is literally all about poop, and more specifically what happens to poop after it’s flushed down the toilet. It is absolutely riveting lol 
I am learning so much about drain systems and waste water treatment that I never even considered before. 
The book also answers the question “what would happen if everyone living in a tower mansion flushed their toilet at the same time” - I never knew I needed to know the answer to this question!
「させていただく」の使い方 日本語と敬語のゆくえ 角川新書 | L32?? - All about the pragmatics of させていただく. I’ve often felt some confusion about all the ways I’ve seen/heard させていただく used before vs. what I know it means, and this book is clearing all my doubts and is very interesting stuff. I enjoy reading books about Japanese sometimes to boost my meta-knowledge of the language!
Besides those two, I’m also taking some time to gasp read in English! I have two books that I recently found on a shelf of free books (well, more specifically the friend I was with found them and came up to me holding them 
so grateful since they are some real gems!!) that are about Japanese literature! They are called Modern Japanese Fiction, 1868 - 1926 and Contemporary Japanese Fiction, 1926 - 1968 by Mitsuo Nakamura and appear to be from the 1960s and quite out of print. I’ve started with the Modern volume which covers the birth and origins of the Japanese novel during the Meiji restoration and it is some really interesting stuff. One of my goals for this year was to read both harder and older stuff, and reference materials like these indirectly support my efforts. 
Ok that’s long enough so I’ll stop writing now - that’s what happens when I don’t post here for a month. All the updates pile up. 
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Working my way through 山椒大夫・高瀬舟 | L44 and it’s taking longer than I’d like. Although I’ve heard great things about the stories on the cover, there are 160 pages of other short stories before reaching them. One in particular, 妄想, took a lot of energy to get through. I usually don’t mind difficult text, especially when it’s rich in interesting kanji or unfamiliar Japanese expressions. However, it turns out my kryptonite might be extremely frequent references to 19th century European culture, science, philosophy and so on. I had to reread a section of the book after taking a break to look up Hartmann, Max Stirner, Schopenhauer, Kant, etc. along with the endless German jargon that was used. In the end I appreciated many of the ideas presented, but I think that for some reason the additional research made it many times more tiresome than the usual lookups about Japanese. Anyways, I guess I should stop procrastinating and get back to reading 
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One of the threads of argument in 増補 日本語が亡びるとき: 英語の世紀の中で | L40 is the author’s take on why that happened and why it produced so much great literature, incidentally.
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Have you reached the one that’s all in 候 classical letter grammar yet? 
I forget whether I skipped that one but I suspect I did…
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Has anyone read 放課後保健室 | L24??? @Naphthalene might’ve, from a previous thread. It’s got a Horror tag on Natively, and I wanted to check whether that was at all accurate.
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Wishlisted!
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I haven’t read it but did look at some of the reviews which point to it being psychological horror and teenage dark fantasy. Not sure if that helps though.
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If you want it to be non-psychological horror, you might get disappointed.
I just skimmed through the first few chapters for you, and it seems (chapter 2 beginning spoiler) that all the horror elements might be happening in dreams.
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