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some manga review
I never properly most of the manga I read. I justify this to myself by saying I don't like reviewing little bits of stories, but I don't even when I suddenly devour a huge chunk or even complete series - so, yeah. Let's try to remedy that.
Natsume Yuujin Chou - titled the "le Pacte des Yokai" in the French translation - is an episodic shoujo series about a highschool boy, Natsume, who has the gift of seeing spirits and monsters; and which has always considered this as a curse - being seen as weird by his classmates, and being passed on from adoptive families to adoptive families. His grandmother had the same power and used it to bully spirits into forming many a "pact of friendships" which she collected in a book which is now in Natsume's possession. This brings Natsume a lot of unwanted attentions from yokais which want to steal the book for their own advantage, or to be released from their pacts of friendship. Natsume forms an agreement with one such powerful feeling - Nyanko Sensei - which takes the form of a Maneki Neko to be his bodyguard against the other spirits, and in exchange will inherit the book of pacts once Natsume dies. Meanwhile Natsume will try to release as many yokai from the pacts as he can.
I've started hearing about the anime adaption of this series - mostly in good - a lot lately. There's three volumes of the manga translated in French so far, and it is very good. The art is very thin, delicate and expressive in a way that suits perfectly the sensitive and melancholy nature of the stories. There's also a lot of natural landscapes adding to the lovely poetic atmosphere. The characters and their relationship (Nyanko Sensei is a rather snarky trickster mentor) is well depicted. Despite their very episodic nature, the stories are well developped and usually quite touching, articulated around themes of loneliness, friendship and the difficult of connections between the human world and the spirit world.
Hyakki Yakou Shou - "le cortège des cents démons" in the French translation - is a series with a very similar summary : Ijima Ritsu is the grandson of horror stories writer and medium and has had the same power to see spirits and monsters since he was a little kid. Before his death his grandfather set spirit Aoarashi to protect Ritsu from other monsters - and to possess the just recently dead body of Ritsu's father. Follow episodic stories of Ritsu dealing with some kind of supernatural happenstances, being (snarkily) protected by Aorarashi and bemoaning about his power.
Despite the similarity of formula, Hyakki Yakou Shou has a very different mood from Natsume Yujin Chou, being more truely horror, with a touch of dark humour, and less focussed on feelings, and targetted to a slightly older audience. It's slightly less epsiodic in nature too, having a larger cast of regular characters, including two of Ritsu's (female) cousins who also have some medium powers if less powerful ones. It's just as high quality, though, very intriguing and compelling stories.
Sadly the translation was discontinued after the 6th volume due to lack of money (the series is still ongoing in Japan); and the scanlations available don't reach this point yet.
To keep going on with traditionnal Japanese supernatural stories, Onmyouji is an adaption from famous Baku Yumemakura novel which also had two movies adapted from it; about legendary onmyouji Abe no Seimei solving supernatural cases during the Heian era along with his friend court noble Hiromasa who plays The Watson to Seimei's Sherlock.
This is a gorgeous manga, with exquisite and detailed art (although I occasionnaly have trouble telling characters apart but I blame the Heian fashion - all those hats) and great storytelling. The stories are subtle, complex, sometimes creepy, sometimes touching. Seimei's character is awesome, mischevious and charismatic, and play up to Hirosama's earnest, clumsy and kind personnality with a lot of humour and chemistry. The French adaptation is also extremely well done, with several coloured pages, and annexes going into depth about historical, geographical and esoteric details. There's three volumes translated so far out of a total of 12.
Now for something completely different, Kami no Shizuku - "Les Gouttes de Dieu" in French - is a seinen manga about wine. More specifically, when a famous oenologist dies, his testament determines that the one to inherit his impressive wine collection will be, between his son, Shizuku Kanzaki, who's never tasted wine in his life so disgusted was he with his father's extantricities, and his adoptive son another oenologist; a contest in identifying 12 great wines from descriptions. In order to be his father's inheritor, Shizuku will have to learn all about wine very quickly, with the help of apprentice sommelière Shinohara Miyaba.
One of the thing I love about manga is the capacity to pick any random subject a tell a great story out of it. This is the case here : the art is beautiful, the characters are endearing, and the story is actually very compelling... Sure, it's far-fetched that Shizuku keeps on falling onto situations which his growing knowledge of wine helps solve and lets him develop his knowledge at the same time; and, sure, the way wine is described through full panel landscapes is a ridiculously case of what do you mean it is not awesome... but it works. It makes the idea of wine tasting as something cool, plot carrying and full of imagery accessible, and, also, it's hysterical. Characters both main and secondary and very well developed and plays in and out of the story showing a great mastery of storytelling. I've read up to volume 4 so far, and the plot develops, slowly but surely, with a lot of suspense, humour and entertainment. If this manga doesn't make you into an alcoholic, you have no heart.
That's it, I'm done making you drool about the stuff that gets translated into French for today.
Natsume Yuujin Chou - titled the "le Pacte des Yokai" in the French translation - is an episodic shoujo series about a highschool boy, Natsume, who has the gift of seeing spirits and monsters; and which has always considered this as a curse - being seen as weird by his classmates, and being passed on from adoptive families to adoptive families. His grandmother had the same power and used it to bully spirits into forming many a "pact of friendships" which she collected in a book which is now in Natsume's possession. This brings Natsume a lot of unwanted attentions from yokais which want to steal the book for their own advantage, or to be released from their pacts of friendship. Natsume forms an agreement with one such powerful feeling - Nyanko Sensei - which takes the form of a Maneki Neko to be his bodyguard against the other spirits, and in exchange will inherit the book of pacts once Natsume dies. Meanwhile Natsume will try to release as many yokai from the pacts as he can.
I've started hearing about the anime adaption of this series - mostly in good - a lot lately. There's three volumes of the manga translated in French so far, and it is very good. The art is very thin, delicate and expressive in a way that suits perfectly the sensitive and melancholy nature of the stories. There's also a lot of natural landscapes adding to the lovely poetic atmosphere. The characters and their relationship (Nyanko Sensei is a rather snarky trickster mentor) is well depicted. Despite their very episodic nature, the stories are well developped and usually quite touching, articulated around themes of loneliness, friendship and the difficult of connections between the human world and the spirit world.
Hyakki Yakou Shou - "le cortège des cents démons" in the French translation - is a series with a very similar summary : Ijima Ritsu is the grandson of horror stories writer and medium and has had the same power to see spirits and monsters since he was a little kid. Before his death his grandfather set spirit Aoarashi to protect Ritsu from other monsters - and to possess the just recently dead body of Ritsu's father. Follow episodic stories of Ritsu dealing with some kind of supernatural happenstances, being (snarkily) protected by Aorarashi and bemoaning about his power.
Despite the similarity of formula, Hyakki Yakou Shou has a very different mood from Natsume Yujin Chou, being more truely horror, with a touch of dark humour, and less focussed on feelings, and targetted to a slightly older audience. It's slightly less epsiodic in nature too, having a larger cast of regular characters, including two of Ritsu's (female) cousins who also have some medium powers if less powerful ones. It's just as high quality, though, very intriguing and compelling stories.
Sadly the translation was discontinued after the 6th volume due to lack of money (the series is still ongoing in Japan); and the scanlations available don't reach this point yet.
To keep going on with traditionnal Japanese supernatural stories, Onmyouji is an adaption from famous Baku Yumemakura novel which also had two movies adapted from it; about legendary onmyouji Abe no Seimei solving supernatural cases during the Heian era along with his friend court noble Hiromasa who plays The Watson to Seimei's Sherlock.
This is a gorgeous manga, with exquisite and detailed art (although I occasionnaly have trouble telling characters apart but I blame the Heian fashion - all those hats) and great storytelling. The stories are subtle, complex, sometimes creepy, sometimes touching. Seimei's character is awesome, mischevious and charismatic, and play up to Hirosama's earnest, clumsy and kind personnality with a lot of humour and chemistry. The French adaptation is also extremely well done, with several coloured pages, and annexes going into depth about historical, geographical and esoteric details. There's three volumes translated so far out of a total of 12.
Now for something completely different, Kami no Shizuku - "Les Gouttes de Dieu" in French - is a seinen manga about wine. More specifically, when a famous oenologist dies, his testament determines that the one to inherit his impressive wine collection will be, between his son, Shizuku Kanzaki, who's never tasted wine in his life so disgusted was he with his father's extantricities, and his adoptive son another oenologist; a contest in identifying 12 great wines from descriptions. In order to be his father's inheritor, Shizuku will have to learn all about wine very quickly, with the help of apprentice sommelière Shinohara Miyaba.
One of the thing I love about manga is the capacity to pick any random subject a tell a great story out of it. This is the case here : the art is beautiful, the characters are endearing, and the story is actually very compelling... Sure, it's far-fetched that Shizuku keeps on falling onto situations which his growing knowledge of wine helps solve and lets him develop his knowledge at the same time; and, sure, the way wine is described through full panel landscapes is a ridiculously case of what do you mean it is not awesome... but it works. It makes the idea of wine tasting as something cool, plot carrying and full of imagery accessible, and, also, it's hysterical. Characters both main and secondary and very well developed and plays in and out of the story showing a great mastery of storytelling. I've read up to volume 4 so far, and the plot develops, slowly but surely, with a lot of suspense, humour and entertainment. If this manga doesn't make you into an alcoholic, you have no heart.
That's it, I'm done making you drool about the stuff that gets translated into French for today.
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I love this webside (mangaupdates) it's very helpful to find info and scanlations ^^
et je sais pas pourquoi j'ai dit ça en anglais >_>;
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I'm surprised there's no scanlation for this kind of manga. I mean, everyone loves Seimei, right? And even translated-from-French scanlations would probably be well received.
I'm waiting a bit before watching the anime of Natsume about everything I hear about it makes me excited as well ^^
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It's very odd--I used to think there might not be any scanlations from the Japanese version because it might be full of Heian-era terms and vocab that are hard to translate, but with a French version available...well, maybe one day someone will attempt it.
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there's no miracle about learning language, it's all about practice ^^
yeah I hope someone gets around to translating it because I really want to read those Hikago/Onmyouji crossovers! XD
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Tell you what, let me look into this and then get back to you. XD
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Actually since I now have I scanner I could do that myself, except for the part where I'm not hot about debinding them *considers*
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(Ummm, if this turns into an actual scanlation project, and not just a translation one, I'd be happy to help with editing/cleaning--I'm not brilliant at image editing but I can certainly clean up text bubbles/boxes and try to squish text in.)
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Do you know how to? I've got zero experience into that kind of things, so I was thinking about learning as I tried, but if you know more about the different steps of it we can think of a better work repartition deal.
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I'm certainly willing to try, even if it might not end up being the prettiest scanlation ever. *determined face*
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So what do you prefer? For me to give you text file with the text in english? Any typical way to tell what goes where in such thing? Or should we both do the remove-and-add text part to gain times?
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For a text translation, though, it's probably best to have something like a section for each page with the page number, and line-breaks between lines of text to show when it moves to a new box/bubble/section. (You could do it in script format with the character names, but that might be too much trouble.)
How did they handle the sound effects in the French version? Did they redraw them entirely, or leave them as they were and just give them translated captions...?
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this is what I did so far :
page 1
Prologue: May an eternal spring bath the happiness land of Pyou'an.
Twelve times a hundred years have passed since Emperor Kammu funded his capital at Heian, in the land of Yamashiro.
... even today, if I only let my thoughts wander... always, they take me back to these times. Great Times...
I dedicate this book to Abe no Seimei.
Page 2
index
Page 3
Onmyouji
Page 4
Where Abe-no-Seimei learns his art in the footsteps of his master Tadayuki.
Page 5
-picture-
page 6
During the Heian period...
within the core of this pediod of peace and prosperity that was latter called "Blessed Engi era", under the reign of Emperor Daigo...
a world of thick darkness and dark forces remained in every places...
Indeed, flip this peaceful and prosperous era like a kimono : on the back side, it is at the same period that Sugawara no Michizane's angry soul, having been vilely exiled by Fujiwara no Tokihira, roamed around the imperial palace, seeking revenge...
page 7
Yes, in this age of darkness yet thick, next to the blossoms of the exquisite refinement that would bloom almost one century later in the culture of the court...
demons, fairies and diabolical vengeful ghosts were still swarming.
page 8
Yet a child is staring at this darkness without fear...
His name is Abe no Seimei.
page 9
Seimei: Lord Tadayuki!
mustache guy: Lord Kamo-no-Tadayuki, are you already going home?
mustache guy: Ah, I understand... the Onmyoudo Bureau must be overworked, I imagine.
page 10
mustache guy: Last year already, between the typhoons and the flood, I think the Shimogyo rice fields were entirely under water...
mustache guy: And now these drought... Is all of this still the angry soul of Lord Sugaware no Michizane?
mustache guy: I am not doubting one moment that your Bureau of yin and yang are very busy with finding a way to sooth him...
mustache guy: Are you not, my Lord?
mustache guy: Tell me, is it true what they say? That against his curse, prayers to Fudo-Myoo aren't working at all?
Tadayuki: Why don't you ask this question to a bonze?
mustache guy: Ahem.
mustache guy: By the way, I heard you took a new student?
Tadayuki: You mean Seimei?
mustache guy: I heard he was Abe no Masuki, the former kitchen chambellant's son.
mustache guy: They even say his mother wasn't human...
mustache guy: *small* Who knows what went through Lord Masuki's head...
mustache guy: But was a Kitsune named Arrowroot Flower.
Tadayuki: Really?
is that clear enough for you?
They redrew the sound effects in French. You could annotate them if you want. I know hiragana and katakana if that may help with that - although sound effects are typically obscure.
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I think captioning/annotating the sound effects (the ones not in text boxes/bubbles, anyway) would be easier, since I'm nowhere near good enough with text or graphics to do a decent redrawing. Any hiragana/katakana help would be nice; I've picked a few (like any manga reader) but sometimes the SFX are drawn so dramatically it makes them a little hard to recognize. *g*
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but sometimes the SFX are drawn so dramatically it makes them a little hard to recognize.
Yeah, I noticed that ^^
woot this is exciting. Perhaps we should continue with e mails?
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E-mail would be great! I'm keelieinblack at gmail dot com.
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My email is anne dot elisa at free dot fr.
Working on doing more of the translation right now. I'll send you the first chapter this evening, I think.
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Not to mention the fact that the indexes and footnotes and whatnot are there in the Japanese version too. Okano sure loves her historical info overload.
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(And, I have to say, of the translations I've been collecting of FAKE? The French editions by Tonkam are the best in terms of physical production values -- much better quality paper than the English or German ones and subsequently sharper reproduction. (The German translator was much more diligent about translating sound effects, though, so I'm glad I splurged on those as well.))
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France has a tradition of high quality comic books so they pay attention to that kind of things, at least with the most narrowly targetted series where the audience is likely to be demanding. Personally I don't mind trading things like paper quality for cheapness, but I admit there's a certain pleasure in holding a prettypretty book with in-depth notes in the annex. :D
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Nothing more on the anime front, although I have Ghost in the Shell 2 standing by and my friend put on the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack as the backdrop for our Deadlands game.
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Cowboy bebop for deadlands? Hmmm, interesting choice. Not that you can ever go back with Yoko Kanno.
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Funny, but the only reason me and gf split up is that she was moving back to Paris, and I didn't want to move to Paris as I couldn't speak the language (lame, I know). So in a parallel universe, I've probably been living in Paris for the last ten years (muses on quantum theory).
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Sounds like a lame excuse, are you sure that's the only reason you didn't go with her?
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Although having said that, maybe it wouldn't have worked out, and I wouldn't have had her as a really good friend for the last decade instead.
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I have some illustrations, and, yessss it is.
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Onmyôji is great!
for the discovery of Onmyôji ! <80)
This manga is just too great and it's nice
to see that more and more will be aware of
this through that project of scanlation...
(it's just strange that such a title isn't
published in the US, I guess French public
is lucky to have some great publishers)
I've found that there are several movies
adapted from the manga, I don't know what
it's worth, but I will try to get them one
way or another <80)
Re: Onmyôji is great!
the US doesn't translate as many titles as France does, actually. (although of course there are many titles translated in English which have yet to be translated in French too!)
As far as I know there are two movies, which were both adapted from the novel (the manga is adapted from the novel, too), I watched the first of them and it was pretty good as well!!