(no subject)

[owlectomy]

In the most recent issue of Yom Yom -- the magazine I pick up sometimes that has a mix of fiction and personal essays, making it the one Japanese magazine I can reliably and enjoyably read -- there is Three Kingdoms fanfic by Makime Manabu! It has a lot of words I don't understand and I keep having to flip to both the dictionary and Wikipedia to find out who these people are, so I've only read two pages -- so far it's just Zhang Fei and Zhao Yun on a boat. But I'm kind of delighted by it anyway (knowing absolutely NOTHING of Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it's just too many people to keep track of.)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It has been cold here in Tokyo past few days.
Are you ready to come to here in chilly weather?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Sympathy. I clearly remember trying to read 3K set manga a few years ago and giving up in despair. At least I now know the kanji for Liu Bei's Liu, a name that crops up a lot, being the surname of the Han dynasty emperors. In lieu of reading the Roamnce, a fast viewing of Red Cliff will impress everyone's features on your memory, which helps.

Otherwise, all you need to know of their reps is:
Zhang Fei (aka Flying Man)-- hothead paisan.

Zhao Yun (aka Whee Clouds!)-- chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Saves babies by tucking them into his breastplate.

Zhuge Liang when he shows up and ohh he will (aka Smrtrthnu)-- mysterious magical Daoist tactician; brilliant and knows it.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Japan is different from the US in that they have fiction magazines. The US SF magazines are in serious trouble, and there are various literary journals and smaller zines, but we don't have anything like Yom Yom. Maybe because so few Americans commute by bus/subway, which is where it's nice to have something short and disposable to read, I don't know.

I wouldn't consider Yom Yom that highbrow. There is a panda on the cover, and the essays are more on the order of "Here's my experiences playing softball in high school" - not super intellectual territory, though they get a lot of good authors to write pieces for them. Obviously I don't know a huge amount about publishing and book marketing in Japan, but to me, a short personal essay doesn't demand the same investment of time and emotion as a short story does. It feels a lot less intimidating to read a magazine that has a bunch of little 4-page essays thrown in than to read a magazine that's all short stories (a lot of which are more like 50 or 60 pages, so not really that short.)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I suspect most New Yorkers do what I do, which is read one of the free papers on their commute, then read the Times for free online while eating their morning bagel or donut.

I don't know about the economics of it, but it's kind of astonishing that you can get 400 pages of fiction or manga or news for $6 in Japan, with just a little bit of advertising. There's no way you could do that in the US. I don't know if there's a difference in the cost of printing, or the publisher is willing to absorb the loss to generate cheap publicity for their authors, or what.