It’s been a tough year for many of us and personally, it was a challenging one. I was so busy with the last stretch of my dissertation that I hardly read any manga at all! When things finally slowed down in December, I started thinking of the titles I should put on this list and honestly, I hardly remembered five titles! I know I enjoyed a couple of reads, but I can’t even remember why I enjoyed them! Isn’t that sad!?! My head was totally out of it that I spent the last week recalling all the good things I read. Thankfully, there were a few that reminded me of good things about 2016. Just like before, these are titles that I have read in the last year and are not necessarily published that same year.
2015 came and went so fast and I feel like I haven’t read enough manga. OTL. More like, I feel like I haven’t written much about the manga I read in the last year. I remember making a call for more josei this year but I ended up reading so much shonen (and dojinshi) for my thesis. OTL. However, I did have a few favourite reads and as I jotted them down, I realised they were mostly by female authors! Yay! I guess I did josei up this year, after all! Well, technically, they’re not titles in josei magazines but I guess I’m quite happy reading a diverse set of reads from female authors (and 2 dudes with awesome titles). I guess having online readers such as Line Manga and Comic Fleur helped. I started reading a lot of these titles because they were initially available for free online. But I really should be reading the physical manga I’ve bought but hahaha. OTL.
Again, just like every year, these titles are not necessarily published on 2015 but ones that I’ve read in 2015. So, here’s my favorite reads from last year!
There was a time when nobody knew who Vincent Van Gogh was. Nowadays, everybody knows about him. And in different versions too (like the Dr. Who Van Gogh or the Cumberbatch Van Gogh). Most representations of Van Gogh show this miserable soul whose art was either too early for his time hence he was ‘unloved’ as an artist. Hozumi, on the other hand, thinks that’s not the case. In Sayonara, Sorcier Hozumi shows us how loved Vincent was by his younger brother, Theodorus ’Theo’ Van Gogh.
Takarazuka is a world that blows me away every time I get a glimpse of it. The sparkles. The glitter. The handsome otokoyaku. And did I mention the sparkles? The posters alone have a lot of sparkles and despite grabbing my attention each and every time, my only knowledge of Takarazuka is based on its relation to boys’ love ((check Jennifer Robertson’s book on Takarazuka)). Not that there’s a direct relation but the fanfare of women over the genderbending otokoyaku has often been cited as a cultural origin of girls’ fascination for the androgynous bishonen. There are texts who would refute that claim, of course, but either way, Takarazuka looks and sounds like an awesome thing, right? In Zucca x Zuca shows me what it’s like to be a fan of Takarazuka.
A display of Taishou Romantica by Odawara Mizue in Tsutaya.
As I was writing down my favourite reads of last year, I sat back and wondered, how much attention did I give to josei that year? I remember writing last year about the silence on josei but did I even make an effort to tackle josei, let alone understand this genre which I have claimed to have personally appreciated?
I kinda did but I kinda didn’t. I didn’t walk the talk on josei. At the very least, I read a number of josei works but I didn’t, in any way, give some thoughts on josei. I hardly even talked about the titles I read! And I keep mumbling about josei this and josei that but what do I even mean when I say josei? Am I referring to the genre? The writers? The audience?
In the last year, I’ve struggled to find answers for this because I didn’t know where to stand or even where to start. Am I raising some kind of orientalist feminist banner that demands attention for josei writers and the genre because they epitomise feminist cool? More so, on whose feminist lens am I reading josei? More so, is it just josei? Can I neglect the contributions of Yoshinaga Fumi with What did You Eat Yesterday or even Nakamura Hikaru with Saint Young Men simply because these titles run in a seinen magazine? What about the likes of Cuvie who write eromanga? And the countless of artists who draw the likes of TL and Ladies comics which has been conveniently identified by people as meaningless and senseless smut. Are these josei also meaningless? Will I read only those that are meaningful? How do I even define what is meaningful in josei?
I’ve given myself a headache over these questions until I’ve lost track on what was really clear about the entire thing: I don’t really know so much about josei. To be precise, I don’t fully comprehend the extent of what female Japanese comic artists write.
The truth is, as readers, we’ve been educated by countless of books on manga on which female artists mattered. Think Takemiya Keiko, Hagio Moto, or Ikeda Riyoko. I am not saying they don’t matter. All these ladies have contributed amazing things to manga but the problem lies in how attention to these women trapped us non-Japanese readers to think that these authors, and works similar to theirs, are the only ones that matter. It ticks me when people say “I only buy the manga classics like Tezuka because it’s only the good manga.” This attitude narrows the whole world of manga because there’s still a lot of manga out there, many of them vibrant, many of which are written by women.
Hence, this year, for this blog, I will make an effort to discover more about the world of women’s manga. I will read more manga written by women, from genres spanning from shoujo, to actual josei, to BL, TL, and even doujinshi and eromanga. I’ll also do my best to share some of the awesome texts written about women writers I’ve crossed in my research.
It’s all about the women in manga in 2015! I can’t help but feel excited! From time to time, I’ll still be sharing some things about other genres but yeah, I’m refocusing my fujoshi lenses by adding a josei grade. It should be fun and if you’re interested, let’s josei up this year and read as many titles written by women!
It was a big mistake to read In Clothes Called Fat on the train home. I was excited to read the book. I knew exactly what the book was going to talk about and I wanted to see how Moyoco Anno would pull off this fragile title about women and their body issues.
To be honest, I wanted it to fail. How could someone like Moyoco Anno understand what big women go through? When the entirety of Japan is going through a “forgiving†chubby trend, I honestly didn’t feel that Moyoco Anno, the blessedly beautiful and sexy Moyoco Anno, would ever understand how obese people think and feel. To a degree, I was the spiteful plus-sized woman who thought Moyoco Anno would treat this like one of those “fantastic†cases that was too out of this world that it would make a good story for manga. In the end, my spitefulness left me in tears. I had forgotten that Moyoco Anno was a woman and she is not privy to matters that we women go through. There’s brutal honesty In Clothes Called Fat. I wasn’t ready to see that in a manga.
A week came like a whirlwind, didn’t it? But I had so much fun eating and cooking these meals, as well as seeing everyone’s awesome meals that I am full to the brim!
Anyway, I’m happy to announce the winners and random.org was helpful in listing them out! I didn’t have a lot of entries so it was a tough battle!
Congratulations to @dodogitu and @kitchencow, you folks won your copies of What Did You Eat Yesterday vol. 1! Just look at their awesome meals!
Now be awesome and send me your addresses so that I can stalk you – NO! – I meant so that I can send your prizes! Send me your address at punkednoodle-at-gmail!
Thank you so much for the awesome folks who sent in their favorite meals for the last week! If you missed some recipes I made over the week, you can view all of them here!
If you didn’t win, that’s all right! You can get your copy of What Did You Eat Yesterday from Amazon or Book Depository!
When I first started blogging about cooking meals from What Did You Eat Yesterday, someone was telling me about how he just can’t have the time or the chance to cook it because the ingredients were hard to find. I suppose that raised the challenge for me to find recipes in the series that were not difficult and were fairly easy to recreate in places without Asian groceries.
In this recipe, I try out Shirou’s dinner after an interesting day at the Tominaga’s.
Yesterday was such an odd morning because it started out as a really hot day and so I prepared a really cold breakfast I learned from What Did I East Yesterday. I was hoping this breakfast would keep me cool, but as soon as the rain poured, the cold breakfast was not seemingly.
But that doesn’t mean this wasn’t good eats though! It’s a very simple breakfast with the warm intention of putting a smile on your face.
