Random Anniversary 10: My Brain

2026/08/212026/08/20 brainLeave a comment

How can it be time for an anniversary already?? This is clearly some science-fiction plot against me! There is no way I could have filled the pages of yet another journal with my many ramblings and musings, not in so short a time! And yet however impossible it feels, I cannot deny the reality of the limited edition Sumida fireworks Rollbahn with its every page covered in my tiny black-inked script. Friends, the time truly does run away over the hills like wild horses.

I did do a lot in that time, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this last year has gone by in a blur. I took a vacation! A whole two weeks in which I did not work, but rather took advantage of the JR Rail pass (an excellent deal if you want to zip from city to city in impressive style on the shinkansen) to show my sister all that my second homeland has to offer. We enjoyed ekiben! We stayed in a hotel with vegan and gluten-free offerings at their café/restaurant, truly a miracle in a country that is not so accommodating of alternative diets! (Although to give credit where credit is due, they’re getting a whole lot better at feeding us weirdos.) We saw an actual (performance) of a fox wedding in the rain! We were accosted by a deer that very rudely drank our beer! We encountered monkeys vigorously copulating in the middle of a trail up the mountain, blocking our upward progress!

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Ore no Imoto ni Kateru Ki ga Shinee: Tamekou

2026/08/142026/08/14 brain5 Comments

I translate a lot of different kinds of books—manga, light novels, the regular sort of novels, the occasional work of non-fiction—but the majority of my work is manga, if only because there is more of it that needs to be translated. (Especially after the Covid-induced explosion in sales in 2020. Thanks for keeping me gainfully employed, murderous pandemic!) And while I do translate a variety of genres, the bulk of my work tends to be books about people living their lives, often queerly and having relationships which are more or less difficult. Think less action sound effects and more thought balloons.

I’m terrible at coming up with sound effects, despite my best efforts and the enormous glossary I have built over the last couple decades, so it’s probably a good thing I’m not on any Shonen Jump titles. (Although fun fact! I translate Shonen Jump light novels. All the action is described in words instead of SFX, and words are a thing I am good at, so it works pretty well.) But occasionally, I get frustrated with the introspective relationship angst. Japanese is a highly context dependent language, which means that sometimes, if you are not certain of the context, parsing a sentence can be next to impossible. And a lot of the thought balloon type titles I work on leave so much so open-ended that I’m forced to spend way too much time wondering exactly what the “that” in this particularly sentence is actually referring to.

And the angst! My manga characters go through some hard times. They deal with betrayal, mental illness, disapproving family, hornily exorcising ghosts (okay, that was just the one manga), and all that can wear a translator down over the course of a work day.

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801 · Boys' Love · Japanese · manga · mememe

Taro Don’t Escape!: mememe

2026/08/012026/07/31 brainLeave a comment

Books bring me a lot of joy in so many ways, not the least of which is paying my rent through my translations of them. It is very nice to have a place to live! But I also love sinking into the world of another person’s mind, finding unnoticed pieces of myself in the story, discovering new ways to view the world around me, or simply getting out of my own head for a while. (It’s so noisy in here!) A somewhat unheralded joy, though, is maybe the communities we create through reading. There are the more structured ones, like book clubs or even BookTok (?? I do not know. I am an Old, and therefore constitutionally unable to pivot to video), and then there are the fandoms and the chance connections we make. I’ve made more than one friend by posting about books I love here or on social media. (Come say hi to me on Bluesky! It’s where I live now.)

One such friend is the brilliant BL scholar Khursten Santos, who just happened to be doing some work in Tokyo while I was there this winter, so naturally we met up to talk all things BL (and some things not BL). She was on a quest to find a book by an artist I’d never heard of, and I was intimately acquainted with a large bookstore that held that book on its shelves. So off we went to score some new books to stuff into our already overstuffed luggage. And today, on this most fujoshi of days, I am here to pass on the BL and spread the good word about mememe. Don’t say I never did anything for you, blog friends.

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Akane Torikai · Japanese · Nonfiction

Konseiki Saidai no Rifujin: Torikai Akane

2026/07/312026/07/31 brainLeave a comment

It’s a weird thing to read a memoir by a friend. Like, is it really okay for me to know this much about you? Obviously, they are telling the whole world by putting it in book form, but the whole world are strangers, and as anyone who has ever tended bar can attest, it’s far easier to unburden yourself to strangers. The strangers will read your memoir and take what they want from it, and none of that will ever come back around to you, the author of said memoir. Except maybe in the form of reviews, but you don’t have to read those. (And you are probably going to have a better mental health day if you do not read them.) But your friends, they’re going to read your memoir and then sit down across from you at lunch. They are going to have personalized feelings about your feelings and experiences.

In this particular case, the friend is Torikai Akane and the memoir is actually her second one. Her first memoir is a diary-style record of her developing relationship with fellow manga artist Inio Asano. Which dovetails neatly with Konseiki, which is at least in part about the dissolution of that relationship. But in the broader context of the absurdity of Japanese law and societal norms when it comes to the institution of marriage itself. The title literally translates to “the greatest absurdity of the century”, with the subtitle “But I still wanted to get married anyway.”

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Japanese · josei · LGBTQ+ · manga · Seinen · Toi Yoh

Tamon-san no Okashina Tomodachi: Toi Yoh

2026/07/172026/07/16 brain2 Comments

Back when I was a Youth, we had no internet. Well, we kind of did, but it still lived inside the phone, so you had to put the receiver in a special cradle so the computer could talk to other computers on the phone, and if you picked up an extension while your nerd dad was talking to his nerd friends via this computer phone call, all you heard was a terrible screeching noise and your dad yelling at you from the basement to hang up the damned phone. So naturally, social media as we know it was not a thing, and if you were a person with strong opinions that you needed to get out of your head and into other people’s heads, you typed up those opinions, cut and pasted the text around pictures you took or cut out of magazines, borrowed the photocopier at your best friend’s mom’s office and cranked out a couple hundred copies of your zine.

Then you would send copies to places that review zines (like Broken Pencil and Maximum RocknRoll [which called one of my zines a “cleverly disguised tool of Satan”, and yes, I will be riding that high until I die]), and they would print your address so other people could send you a couple bucks in the mail to buy your zine or maybe send you their zine in trade. The whole process took an enormous amount of time and effort, but we didn’t have doomscrolling then, and TV was pretty bad, too, so we had lots of free time for cutting and pasting.

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Horror · Japanese · Kawakatsu Tokushige · manga · Seinen

Yufuin Kiko: Kawakatsu Tokushige (Original story: Moegara)

2026/07/032026/07/03 brainLeave a comment

As you may remember (or not if you have the same goldfish memory I do), I hung up my TCAF hat a few years back after Brain friend and favourite Torikai Akane graced the festival with her presence, and handed the torch to my eminently qualified successor who brought over Mayuzuki Jun (whose After the Rain I translated) and Shirahama Kamome (whose Witch Hat Atelier keeps getting better with every single volume). While it was weird at first to simply go to TCAF and not have to do anything, it was a treat to be able to wander the floor and see/buy all the cool comics available, say hi to friends, and hang out with the manga artists with absolutely zero responsibility for anything that happened to them while they were in Toronto. It was a lot like being the cool aunt. (I am actually the cool aunt to some niblings, so I can say this with some confidence.)

But then last year, I learned that the MINT project folks were planning to bring Brain All-Star battan to TCAF 2026, and I quickly volunteered to come out of TCAF retirement. I mean, we’re talking about battan here! You know I cannot resist her upturned noses and lovingly drawn ladies. What I did not realize, however, was that the MINT contingent would include four other artists, plus five editors. Plus administrators and project organizers. And since my personal method of interpretation involves what amounts to (polite, non-invasive) stalking, I suddenly had to read a whole lot about ten different people. (The administration side of things were able to fend for themselves.) Ten people with very different careers and art styles.

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Aoi Ikebe · Japanese · josei · manga · Princess Akiko of Mikasa · Royalty

Aka to Ao no Gown: Princess Akiko of Mikasa & Ikebe Aoi

2026/06/192026/06/18 brain1 Comment

As a Canadian, I am no stranger to royalty. Growing up, Queen Elizabeth’s face was on all my money, her portrait was hanging in every school I ever went to (and I went to a lot) right alongside Prince Philip’s (whose title led me to briefly believe as a child that men couldn’t be kings in real life), and at more than one school, I had to sing “God Save the Queen” before class every morning. (I went to military school, which maybe explains a few things.) But the queen was all the way in England doing queen stuff, removed from everyday life. Her face was on the change in my pocket. Sometimes, you got an old queen; others, you got a young one, but either way, she was a face on a quarter. Or very rarely, a lady in a car on the news, waving weirdly. Someone to be parodied by Kids in the Hall.

It was only when I moved to Sweden for university that I was forced to confront the fact that royals are also actual people who exist in the world. While I was at Uppsala University, the talk of the campus was Crown Princess Victoria, who I was told had had to actually leave the country to study because the Swedish press were hounding her so badly she developed an eating disorder. (Now that the internet exists, I can fact check this ancient gossip, and it looks like the eating disorder came first. Nevertheless!) But she was supposed to study at Uppsala, like her father had, during the very time I myself was enrolled at the university! This honestly boggled me. A princess going to the same university I was attending?! Princesses are real???

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Chisato Abe · Fantasy · Fiction · Japanese · SFF · Women

Kogo no Midori: Abe Chisato

2026/05/292026/05/29 brain9 Comments

Not long after returning to Tokyo, I was scanning the fantasy shelves at my favourite bookstore in the hopes of finding a new Yatagarasu book, as is my custom even when I know there couldn’t possibly be a new one yet since the last one only came out the week before. But hope springs eternal as they say, so I was looking at the A section, desperately scanning the Yatagarasu volumes that line my own shelves when suddenly I stopped with a gasp. A new book! A title I had not seen before!

From the spine design, I could tell it was not a new installment in my favourite fantasy series, but any new book from Abe is cause for excitement. She’s so good at what she does! Her writing is delightfully sensual; she lingers over the smallest details and introduces us to the sounds, smells, visuals, and more of the worlds she creates. She takes her time with the narrative to let the story unfold at its own pace without being heavy-handed or hitting us over the head with whatever it is she’s trying to say. Her first book was already incredibly polished and mature, and she’s only gotten better in the dozen-ish she’s published since then.

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Japanese · Kana Chaiko · manga · Yokai

Mokke no Banbanzai!: Kana Chaiko

2026/05/152026/05/14 brain2 Comments

In each episode of Shuppunk, a great Japanese YouTube channel on publishing and books, they take an author to the bookstore (one of my favourite bookstores, in fact, so you know I am wandering those familiar aisles vicariously and wishing they would go over to the manga room for just one episode at least so I can see the new releases when I am trapped in my Toronto abode and unable to visit those shelves myself) and give them 10,000 yen to spend. They then follow the author around the bookstore and talk about their career, influences, and general book nerdery. If you’re a Japanese-speaking book nerd, this channel scratches that itch very nicely.

A recent episode features Minato Kanae, an author I’ve had the pleasure of working with in one of the weirder jobs of my interpreting career (a book festival in the UAE. We rode a camel in the desert together). While she races around the bookstore like a kid in a candy store, she talks about how she started writing half out of spite (that is not how she would phrase it, but she totally did) and how Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was her repeat read at university.

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Japanese · manga · Saba Nanako · Seinen · zombie

Kutsu no Oto: Saba Nanako

2026/04/242026/04/24 brainLeave a comment

I think I am some kind of weather jinx? When I returned to Toronto last week, the temperature suddenly plummeted to Tokyo winter, forcing me to get out my big, blanket of a coat hot on the heels of the surprisingly summery weather I left on the other side of the ocean. Last year, when I made this voyage back to my home and native land in late March, I was welcomed by a two-day blizzard. More than once I have arrived in Tokyo just in time for a typhoon. My rational brain realizes that this is probably a synchronicity type of situation, but my irrational heart suspects I may actually be cursed by a weather wizard.

Whatever the truth, my brain, me, and all our books are back in Canada, and ready to start battling again. And there are so many books to battle! I had to pay for a whole extra, very overweight suitcase just to haul them all back to my Toronto abode, which is increasingly, dangerously full of books. Should you not hear from me for a while, it’s probably safe to assume I was crushed when one of the mountains of books collapsed on me in my sleep.

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