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20/12/11 23:24![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyWhen I was watching Tatami Galaxy a while ago, in one of the episodes the main character's frenemy Ozu lends him a novel which the main character describes as a silly love story, and I did a double-take because I actually recognized the cover. It was everywhere at Kinokuniya a couple years ago.
Turns out, this is a bit of an in-joke, because Morimi Tomihiko is the author of both Tatami Galaxy and the book in question -- "Walk On, Maiden, For The Night Is Short." It sounded like the sort of book I would like because the cover is cute and described it as a pop fantasy romantic comedy. However.
It's about two university students in Kyoto. The boy has unrequited feelings for the girl, the girl doesn't realize that the boy likes her. So, it's pretty typical. Except that.
The girl goes out drinking because she loves rum so much she wishes the whole ocean were made of rum, and ends up getting sexually harassed by a pornography seller who had just had his goldfish business devastated by a tornado. [There are a lot of funny things about this book, but I don't happen to think girls getting sexually harassed is one of them.]
She gets rescued by a dental hygienist and a tengu. The tengu can make gold maneki-neko come out of his ears.
Then they spend the night going around to bars and trying to drink for free.
Meanwhile the boy who has a crush on her [neither of the main characters is given a name] is sort of trying to stalk her/ accidentally run into her, except that a loan shark steals his pants and his underwear.
And the whole thing is done in this weird style where the author uses tons of kanji that nobody uses anymore and lots of hard words and he spells whiskey as ウヰスキー, using a kana that has basically been out of use since the postwar language reforms. I should have expected this. I had to watch Tatami Galaxy with my eyes on the subtitles because the main character would do these ridiculous long high-speed monologues with all kinds of vocabulary I don't know.
It's a strange, strange book. I am probably going to at least attempt to finish it because I was sufficiently charmed by Tatami Galaxy, and the style is unique and I actually want to know what's going to happen to these people. But why does it have to be so difficult? And am I going to continue to be ticked off by background sexism? (Almost certainly yes!) And why is it so hard to spell whiskey the ordinary way?
Turns out, this is a bit of an in-joke, because Morimi Tomihiko is the author of both Tatami Galaxy and the book in question -- "Walk On, Maiden, For The Night Is Short." It sounded like the sort of book I would like because the cover is cute and described it as a pop fantasy romantic comedy. However.
It's about two university students in Kyoto. The boy has unrequited feelings for the girl, the girl doesn't realize that the boy likes her. So, it's pretty typical. Except that.
The girl goes out drinking because she loves rum so much she wishes the whole ocean were made of rum, and ends up getting sexually harassed by a pornography seller who had just had his goldfish business devastated by a tornado. [There are a lot of funny things about this book, but I don't happen to think girls getting sexually harassed is one of them.]
She gets rescued by a dental hygienist and a tengu. The tengu can make gold maneki-neko come out of his ears.
Then they spend the night going around to bars and trying to drink for free.
Meanwhile the boy who has a crush on her [neither of the main characters is given a name] is sort of trying to stalk her/ accidentally run into her, except that a loan shark steals his pants and his underwear.
And the whole thing is done in this weird style where the author uses tons of kanji that nobody uses anymore and lots of hard words and he spells whiskey as ウヰスキー, using a kana that has basically been out of use since the postwar language reforms. I should have expected this. I had to watch Tatami Galaxy with my eyes on the subtitles because the main character would do these ridiculous long high-speed monologues with all kinds of vocabulary I don't know.
It's a strange, strange book. I am probably going to at least attempt to finish it because I was sufficiently charmed by Tatami Galaxy, and the style is unique and I actually want to know what's going to happen to these people. But why does it have to be so difficult? And am I going to continue to be ticked off by background sexism? (Almost certainly yes!) And why is it so hard to spell whiskey the ordinary way?