Manga-loids

I am somewhat surprised at how hard it is to find a Peanuts collection in this country. Everywhere I go I see students with little plush Snoopy or Woodstock figures attached to their bags along with tiny, tinny, annoying little bells. I suppose it is symptomatic of my general inability to find even the books I'd settle for (much less need), more often than not winding up with something that isn't quite good enough but in general resembles the kind of information I need. I'm starting to realize what a wealth of Lit. there is on these here interwebs.

Literature (of course, to pronounce that correctly you need to suck your bottom lip back a bit and slur the word into lit-chruh-chuuuuuur) does not seem to be much of a priority to the Japanese. As Colleen can attest, many students can barely remember having ever read a book much less one they enjoyed or read recently. I'd like to think it's differnt [sic] in the old US of A, but perhaps it isn't.

So, I walk into the Book Off (not its cousin the Hard Off, which, as I feel the need to point out to anyone who'll listen, is the opposite of a hard on) in Toyohashi to look for a few books, nothing major just some pop crap to read on the trains. Your average used book shop in DaiNippon is roughly 50% comics, 20% "other books," 20% digital media (CDs, games, DVDs, etc.), and 10% porn of various stripes. The porn is particularly perilous as a faulty sense of how the shelves wrap can lead you from the hardcover M's right into a wall of innocent (buxom) animated schoolgirls being raped by intergalactic sex demons. Generally speaking, I wind up looking about for 10 minutes trying to find a copy of Murakami's Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which supposedly sold several million copies here), giving up, and heading over to the manga section to buy an old issue of Hikaru no Go or occasionally the weird Tale of Genji manga.

Comics in Japan have something of a throw away quality to them. In the US, pimple-faced barely pubescent nerds (and their fat, middle-aged counterparts) treat their comic books with something of a reverent awe. Generally, after the most mild of readings with perhaps a pair of tweezers or rubber gloves, the comic book is locked away in a mylar bag to protect it from 1) any acids that might discolor the paper and 2) the general wear and tear that might result from transport or a particularly uncooth manhandling. Manga here are, for lack of a better term, cheap pieces of crap, generally published on the lowest quality newsprint one can find. The weekly anthologies in which the newest chapters of each publisher's running series appear are typically given a once over and tossed in the trash. Incidentally, train station trash cans are something of a trove of reading material.

So as a dedicated word nerd, I am sometimes saddened to live where books just aren't made to last.