Teaser Tuesday – Kanata Kara

Teaser Tuesday is a fun bookish meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Everyone can play along, all you have to do is simply take the book you are currently reading. And then share 2 ‘teaser’ sentences from any page in the book. I often share more than 2 sentences

Please avoid SPOILER!!

I have just finished rereading this Manga for 2  challenges, Manga Challenge and Once Upon of Time Challenge.

This Manga is my number one Shoujo Manga (Manga for female). I am a shounen manga (manga for male) fans but I still read shoujo manga when the story is not merely about love and romance.

I stopped reading Night Shift by Stephen King for a while (I can do this because Night Shift  is a collection of Short Stories).

I am breaking the rules here,I have finished this book yesterday and here is my review: Kanata Kara: My number one Shoujo Manga. I did this because I have just started Night  Shift again and haven’t found the right teaser yet.

Here is the teaser:

彼方から (Kanata Kara) – My Number One Shoujo Manga

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“Can you see it. This is the world of light. Everything has become one in light. I entered the world of light and I found you.
Do you understand? We are the world of light. This is what we have been searching for. I feel a gentle energy that embraces everything. And this energy can be felt anywhere anytime as long as you open yourself to it”

Kanata Kara by Kyoko Hikawa has been my most favorite Shoujo Manga since early 90s till today and I know it will stay as my most favorite for years to come.

Kanata Kara is the only shoujo manga that can come close to shounen manga. Hikawa can beautifully mix love story with interesting adventure and great fighting scenes, she also put some good moral in it.

You can read this manga in Manga Reader.net, all the pictures in this review is taken from that site … but I didn’t read it from that site, I borrowed it from my best friend (The one who drew my sweet KameChan). I wish the publisher republish this manga so that I can collect them myself. The translation for names in the Indonesian version and the English version is a bit different and I am going to use the Indonesian Translation.

Onna No Mangaka (女 の 漫画家)

Click on this button to join the challenge

As I have already said in my post for Hello Japan! Mini Challenge last year, I have been a Manga reader for the past 19 years (or 20 years) now. But I am more into Shounen Manga (少年漫画) or Manga for boys rather than Shoujo Manga (少女漫画) or manga for girls. The reason is quite simple, because Shounen Manga offers more interesting adventure story than those romance story in Shoujo Manga.

However, I am not totally pushing away ALL shoujo manga, I still read some of them, mostly manga from the mangaka (漫画家) or manga author I am going to talk about. These mangaka mixed romance with some adventure and complicated story. They didn’t write something merely about how a woman met the man of his dream like most shoujo manga.

1.      Kyoko Hikawa (冰川京子)

I copied this from goodreads.com

Does mostly light-hearted comedy stories, but very entertaining. She does surprisingly great action scenes (haven’t seen many shoujo artists try at a Western before!!).

Her stories ranges from cute to action, but all done unparalled attention – the drawings are refined and the storylines bring the readers into what the characters feel. Her page layouts and camera angles varies a lot, and thus keeps the interest of the reader.

Chizumi and Fujiomi : The Wind of Fall

After reading such a chunkster (Under The Dome with its 1074 pages) in the last 3 weeks, I decided to read something short and non-thriller book. I picked up a manga I haven’t read in the last couple of years.

Part of the reason of why I chose to read that Manga is because of my Booking Through Thursday post 2 weeks ago. The question was about book we are too ashamed to tell people that we read it…unfortunately (or is it fortunately) I don’t have that kind of book, I finally chose Manga from a genre I rarely read. I NEVER and AVOID reading romance books because I find it such a waste of time to read thousands of word regarding someone’s journey to find love…however, there are some romance Manga that I like so much. I’m not ashamed of reading those manga, I even recommend it to people around me.

I’m writing this manga review in English because I’m going to include this in my Manga Challenge 2010. I’m not sure if this manga had already been translated to English or not.

After 2 months of reading nothing but thriller for my R.I.P. Challenge, I took out 2 Manga about a couple Named Chizumi and Fujiomi. There 3 manga about them, but I only have 2 books. The ones I own are Haru o Matsukoro (Indonesian translation: Angin Musim Gugur, in English: The Wind of Fall) and Patel Kibun (Pastel Mood). The one that I don’t have is Golden Book.

I will only review The Wind of Fall for now and will soon write my review on Pastel Mood somewhere next week. The Wind of Fall is filled with 6 short stories. There are 5 stories about Chizumi and Fujiomi’s relationship and 1 extra story.

As I already said, I don’t read romance…this manga is an exception because it’s really fun. It’s short but meaningful. Kyoko Hikawa can really make her readers feel relate to her story. I know how careless I am (not as worse as Chizumi but still too careless for normal people), I somehow know how it feels to be in Chizumi’s shoes…but I’m not as weak as her in defending myself from trouble.  Fujiomi is my type of man, quiet but full of care. I find man who likes to talk is good as friend but not as companionship. I guess that’s why I really enjoy this manga