Chiwa has been attacked recently by someone unknown. It could be someone from her husband’s family company who wants to get rid of him and take control. It could be his ex-girlfriend, president of a rival company. Either way, it provides some important drama to give this series by Maki Enjoji, which has been spinning wheels for a while, a jump start. It also shows how Chiwa is different from his previous entanglements — Hokuto cares about what happens to […]

I continue to adore this cute and happy series by Kazune Kawahara and Aruko. Even when events become exaggerated — as here, where the young couple go picnicking and end up trapped in the wilderness after falling off a cliff — the love between gorilla-ish Takeo and fairy-ish Yamato is inspiring and heart-warming. Their innocence is adorable. Yamato’s friends assume that the two have lied to their parents so they can spend the night together, but the sincere young couple […]

It’s been a long time — five years and nearly 20 volumes — since I last checked in with Case Closed by Gosho Aoyama. It launched in the US in 2004, and it’s quite impressive to see how it’s still going strong. Although this is the latest book out here, there are 85 volumes in Japan so far, where it began in 1994. Volume 52 was a great choice to try again, since all the mysteries are self-contained, starting and […]

Honey Blood is a strange choice to translate. It’s only two volumes (with a bonus book of short stories), because it got cancelled in Japan, and its plot is both very familiar and sadly unresolved in its short length. The author, Miko Mitsuki, isn’t well-known here — I couldn’t find any mention of anything else she’s done that’s been translated — so the question arises: why this series? The answer seems to be “vampires” (as you might guess from the […]