I’m confused. Aren’t you sending stuff to yourself? Even sending stuff to my family abroad (including books), I never paid any customs.
Ah, I guess some countries have customs on literally anything that pass the border, even if not for sale?
I did it once since the new rule (just after it got implemented actually, so I was caught off guard). The website you need to use was pretty easy to navigate. You can print the label at the post office, too.
The amount of time I’ve spent in Book-offs trying to figure out how the hell stuff is organised…
I remember when I left Japan and like a dumbass spent something like 5sen at least just on shipping back a box of 100y manga I got at bookoff. What a fool! Oh well, I’m putting it to use now I guess…
By book type: non-fiction, novels, light novels, manga, and large (? forgot the term) manga.
Non-fiction is organized by topics (say, “education” or “cooking”) then author name.
Novels are organized by author name.
Light novels are organized by publisher then author name.
Manga are split in different area depending on target demographic (e.g. 少年) then organized by publisher, label, and author name (in that order).
For manga that have at least some popularity, wikipedia will have the publisher and label. The link of the label will also tell you in which category to look.
For instance, to find AQUA/ARIA, I need to go to Mag garden (マ in the Japanese dictionary order), then look for Blade comics (it’s their main label anyway, so it’s not much of a challenge), then look for the name of the author… but at that point the title usually jumps at me if I am familiar with the series. I usually only check the name to make sure I didn’t miss it when they don’t have any volume.
Yes, we used to have the 22€ “import free” leeway, but they have since removed this too.
Before you could fill a box with 25 books of 100 yen and it wouldn’t even stop at customs.
I might do a test shipment just for the sake of experiment. As I have a slight plan to return in November too.
Thanks for the info
Oversized?
How large does it have to be to count?
ご注文はうさぎですか size.
Cool, I was going to use ご注文はうさぎですか as an example. You read my mind.
Calling out that there’s an informal reading group (join whenever, read at your own pace, but centralized discussion) I just kicked off for 推し、燃ゆ | L35 which can be found here: 推し、燃ゆ Informal Reading Group ❤ 🔥 - Book Clubs - WaniKani Community
I have a long-ish flight tomorrow and the audiobook is only 3.5 hours so I plan to finish it in one go, but I’m looking forward to discussing it after 
I’m back from my trip! Paris was awesome, to the point where I barely read anything, haha. I’m a bit over halfway through おいしいごはん and something like 20% through コンビニ人間; they’re both so short that I don’t anticipate any trouble finishing them this week, though. Shout-out to @nikoru for taking me to the Paris BookOff so I could wander and grab more books. Among others, I picked up my first 赤川 次郎 book @cat: 妖怪変化殺人事件 | L30?? . Picked it up purely based on title, so we’ll see how it goes. 
I had a two weeks slump during which i didn’t feel like reading at all, but I suddenly picked 西の善き魔女 1 today and read 150 pages 
Can’t really understand how my mood is going.
My backlog has been growing too… I just noticed that a book I have been waiting for since February 2022 is finally out as well! Since I heard nothing about it, I thought the publisher had just silently dropped the series. I’m glad I was wrong!
A fantastic title to start with. Never read it, but it sounds like it will be fun. Be sure to fill out your bingo card 
https://learnnatively.com/book/13f4cb524e/ done! I purchased and listened to the audiobook about 60% of the way through, and I think it really enhanced my enjoyment of the book. Also kept me moving along instead of looking up stuff.
Anyway, the book was interesting. This definitely felt like Literature, something you can really have fun digging into and analyzing (like the WK club did over on that forum; I had a good time reading everyone’s thoughts!). Unfortunately, I did not walk into the book expecting that; instead, I thought it was going to be more oriented towards straightforward petty coworkers and workplace bullying. While the book did have some of that, it wasn’t quite in the form I was expecting, so it took me a while to come around and understand how to read the book.
I thought the book length was perfect for what we got; any longer and the author would need to introduce actual character growth, which would start twisting the book’s message. I wish there was an English version of this book; I bet my roommate would really enjoy reading it.
I can see now where your thoughts for this come from. I was kind of leaning towards the same camp when I started reading it; not active dislike per se, but the book just felt like a time filler. I think the key ingredient for me to elevate the book to a higher tier was the realization that I would need to read the book through a much more analytical lens than I tend to with fiction, since capital-L Literature isn’t my typical preferred genre. I don’t even know if I would want to call the book character-driven. I guess it probably technically is, but the characters felt more like symbols/representatives than real people, which oddly helped me connect with them and their actions more.
Not saying you didn’t realize all that yourself, of course. 
Just wanted to mention that while I did find a groove, it took me a while myself.
In terms of a Natively review, I’ll probably give the book a 3/5; I didn’t think it was a bad book, and I definitely enjoyed parts (like 二谷’s ruminations on food and his opinions of it, which I haven’t seen often in literature), but it’s the kind of book I’d probably only pick up to read with a group, like in this situation. It’s nice to pick up a book every once in a while that’s different from your usual, though; keeps you on your toes, and brings different perspectives for when you do return to your usual trash genre of choice. コンビニ人間 next!
I finished reading コンビニ人間 | L29 yesterday; oddly, I don’t have a lot to say about it, probably because I read it right after おいしいごはん, and they’re very similar books. I enjoyed it; I don’t know if I’ll specifically seek out any of the author’s other works (except for 殺人出産 | L30, which @nikoru recommended to me a while back), but I’m glad I read this one.
Not sure what I’ll start next; I’ve got both レバダン・希望の花 4 | L29 and D.Gray-man reverse 2 四十九番目の名前 | L29 partially started (I really need to actually finish that latter one; it’s been on my reading pile for forever now -.-; ), and I’ve been continuing to chip away at the bonus stories in the F&B series. We’ll probably be starting FLESH & BLOOD 12 | L33 soon, come to think; I’m both anticipating and dreading it. I can feel the promise of actually finishing the series at some point this year, and I’m not ready for it to end. 
I’m planning to start あの家に暮らす四人の女 | L30?? (learnnatively.com) today. I really enjoyed reading ‘The Great Passage’ In English by this author. The difficulty of her other books seems to go to about mid-thirties, so it’s on the more challenging end for my reads. SInce JLPT sign ups filled up immediately in my location (full by 11am on the day applications opened…) I figure that I have plenty of time to work on my vocabulary and kanji by reading. My goal is to sit N2 at some point, but as I have never sat any of JLPT exams due to covid/oversubscription I am not sure how the books I read compare!
Heh, I was bored to death reading コンビニ人間 and was meh about the overall message. おいしいごはん I finished in one day because I couldn’t put it down
They’re both “profoundly weird” books (as in the WK club of that name) but the writing styles and atmosphere of the books felt very different to me.
If you aren’t yet aware of it, her other works are pretty different from コンビニ人間 in my opinion (as in, much more extreme and much more explicit regarding nonconforming behavior, or she depicts worlds that might be “shocking” to us but are of course normal to the protagonists). You can read a bit more on here: Sayaka Murata - Wikipedia
I’m totally with you on that one; I’d even say the feelings they evoked in me after finishing them were pretty much opposite in nature.
Wow, really? I got very similar vibes from both books; they both felt like very “calm” books to me, almost meditative. The endings were definitely different, both in the protagonists’ decisions and the overall message for the future, but at the same time they felt…similar to me? Idk. Everyone felt true to themselves, at least, and that felt “right” to me, even if it was a path towards destruction they were headed down, so I didn’t notice any mental dissonance in comparing the two.
Ah, yes, I can relate to that. The tone of writing was quite similar and “calm”, in a way. But I thought that in コンビニ人間 the protagonist really arrived at her own true self and found her place in the world (and the world agreed with her choice) which left me with a feeling of deep harmony (and I did not notice any destructive energy), while in 美味しいご飯 the protagonist for some reason willingly accepted a (for him) unpleasant future, which felt extremely grating to me (and I didn’t think that he was true to himself, just… careless or thoughtless, maybe?).
Hmm. I definitely see what you’re saying, and agree with you, but from a certain point of view, he was being true to the behavior he’d exhibited and seemed to have internalized up until that point. His decision may have not been what would have made him most happy/fulfilled, but it followed through on “this is my place in the world”, at least for me. 恵子 did the same, but just lucked into it being something she was happy with imo, haha.
The books definitely make for good discussion, if nothing else!
Ah, that’s an interesting perspective, and I agree that it’s consistent from a certain point of view.
Absolutely! I must say I really like this new-found genre 
For my own reading (while I’m at it), I’m currently cleaning up my “reading” pile a bit, and today I finished 穴. It is a book with 3 stories where the 2nd and 3rd are closely connected to each other. (Some people say the first one is also connected but I’m not really sure about that - the narrator changes, and other than that there is no deep connection that I’d recognize, at least).
I read the first story quite some time ago and only now got around to finishing the book.
While the first story was of the kind “normal people in weird situations” and had some fantastic elements to it, the two others were more like “normal people in normal situations” 
I mean, I liked them all, but I thought the first one was definitely more interesting, and there was more of a puzzle contained in it.
Also, either the first story is written in a significantly more difficult style, or I’ve improved more than I am aware - I could follow basically everything easily and at a good (for me) reading speed.
Now on to the next book that is rotting on my “reading” pile - I think I will try to have another go at ifの悲劇. The last time I tried, I was having lots of trouble with the casual dialogues, and the story took a bit of a twist that I didn’t like as much, so I decided to pause it. Let’s see if my reading skills have improved regarding that book as well!
