After all, the Edo terms and grammar aren’t applicable to daily conversational Japanese, and I’d rather spend my effort reading and speaking modern-day Japanese.

But I’d prefer to do after I consider myself truly “fluent” in contemporary Japanese. I have heard there are typically visual cues to help catch these jumps, but I still need practice to learn to recognize them.īeing hugely interested in Japanese language and culture, I have no problem learning about the Edo period’s linguistic differences. This manga was made even harder to understand by frequent transitions in some sections, where all of a sudden there was a new scene without much notice. And knowing very little history about shoguns and other aspects of Edo-era culture made it even harder for me to follow. I don’t mind reading furigana (text that explains the pronounciation of difficult or rare kanji) every now and then, but the font is so small that I have to strain my eyes to even have a chance of picking up the kanji readings. Unless you have studied this type of Japanese before, odds are you won’t know words like 某（それがし), which is a first person pronoun used throughout the book.

As I mentioned, the language used is Japanese from the Edo period, which has many differences from modern Japanese, including grammar, pronouns, and other vocabulary. That brings me to the downside of this work, especially for non-native speakers reading the Japanese version, like myself.

That is, when I understood what was going on. This man-shortage back story, plus the events which occurred in this first book were quite entertaining. I won’t give away any of the store here, but just try to imagine how different society would be with such a different distribution of the sexes. There is one major difference which is central to the story: nearly 75% of men has been wiped out by a disease, leaving a massive shortage of them. Although I am no expert in classical Japanese history, both the clothes used and the language spoken seemed somewhat accurate to the time period. It turns out I was right, as this story is set in Edo Japan, which is roughly between 16. (I have a review of this Japanese bookstore here.)įrom the outfit shown on the cover, I had a feeling there was something “classical” about this work. During a recent business trip to New York, I finally decided on picking up the first issue at Book Off. I’ve been keeping an eye on this manga in Japanese book stores for a few years now, whose mysterious cover and title piqued my interest.

Ooku fumi yoshinaga