Reading Material

I was in Japan for two years, my fiancee for three. In all that time, we amassed a rather impressive amount of Japanese literature. After all, Shonen Jump comes out once a week.

Reading manga was one of the ways I would reinforce my Japanese study. Comics like Shonen Jump were especially useful, as they are made with kids in mind and all the kanji within have furigana (the hiragana appears above it). With around 52 issues a year, we had about 150 by the time we left, and that's before you start adding in all the monthly comics like Shonen GanGan, Zero Sum, and Ward. There were also about a year's worth of Nintendo Dream and Hyper Hobby magazines, the occasional Newtype, Koro Koro Comics, the semi-annual Jump specials (for Golden Week and New Years), a sengoku themed comic that I only found once, and various other odds and ends. We bought bags for most of them and stacked them up in the closet, where they slowly grew to mountainous proportions.

When it came time for us to leave, we had to find something to do with all these books. Normal people, as far as I can tell, keep them for a while then dispose of them, either by putting them out for recycling or selling them to a recycle shop. Fortunately, all we needed to do was call up Emily, who is always enthusiastic about receiving new reading material. She reads comics for much the same reasons as we do and agreed to take all the manga, but not the magazines, which we threw away in chunks at various convenience stores and hotels. Emily's car, as you might recall from the Halloween entry, is tiny. Here's what it looks like when you shove three years of comics into it. First, the backseat:

And the trunk:

I'm glad we were able to fit it all in one trip and that Emily now has more reading material than she will likely ever need. Not that I think it's going to stop her from getting more. It never stopped me.