Rant & Request!
Monday, 10. August 2009, 20:43:45
So, for this post I have a little rant and request. As you may or may not know from my wordpress blog, and other sources, I'm a BIG romance novel/comic fan. Specifically, Japanese manga. I adore stories with one male and one female, either from childhood or complete strangers who go through a dramatic twisted or complicated cycle of life to admit to themselves they love each other. The only aspect of that I dislike greatly is when "tragedy," "smut," or similar comes into the scene. But other than that, I adore all kinds. Pretty much. A particular genre of romance novels I like is the "drama" genre, which leads me to a manga I came across about several months (perhaps a year now) ago. This goes by the name of "My Girl" by Sahara Mizu.
Some background on the author: Sahara Mizu is a pen name of a female author named Yumeka Sumomo (also a pseudonym) for her predominantly Seinen stories. She also goes by two other pen names for two other genres. Sahara Keita for her Shoujo stories and Chikyuya/Sasshi for her Doujinshi work. She also uses the Yumeka Sumomo pen for Shouen Ai stories. Aside from being an author, she is a lovely artist. She is known to have contributed as the artist for the Voices of a Distant Star manga working with the famous anime director Makoto Shinkai. All in all, she may not be known greatly but has the privilege to work with other great people.
That said, I should state that her stories, manly My Girl is one of the best manga I have personally come across. Aside from Naruto (where he meets his father), My Girl was able to make me cry. The story is THAT good, that it can make a grown 20+ year old man cry. Then again, I am a fool to cry over simple matters.
So what is My Girl about? It's about a 23 year old "toy-inventor-maker" Kazama Masamune that finds out he has a child. Here's more from MangaUpdates.
During the season of cherry blossoms, his beloved passes away. He happens to meet a little girl outside work and realizes she is his daughter who was raised in secrecy by his lover. The worst spring of his life is transformed into a painful yet vivid spring.
My rant comes into place is to the fact, due to a recent announcement the story has gained much more popularity in Japan. But unfortunately, the manga comes short if we were to talk about the manga scanlation. Out of the three volumes it currently has, only 1 has been done in English. It's true, only 1 volume gets released a year, but overall, the manga and story too is getting a lot of attention as of late in Japan.
So, coming to the end of my post, I have a little request. I'm urging if some people can get together and work on this lovely manga. I would love to read further, but I can't read a single word of Japanese (only understand via audio), so I'm at a ditch. Furthermore, I do know of some Japanese translators, but can't find a single raw chapter online, so I'm in a much bigger hole than a ditch. Not to mention, my Japanese friend isn't into this manga (he is in his teens).
In short, if you know Japanese, or know people that do as well as English, live in Japan or can get access to the Sahara Mizu My Girl raws, please, please, get a group of people together and scanlate it. If you love children, have a wife or planning to get married soon, I'm sure you'll love this dearly as I do. If a group of people or one man does come about, I may even contribute to the purchase of the manga if needed. 10 (300 yen, I believe) bucks per volume is cheap.
WIDGETIZE