.
Of the deadly sins going around this year, we've certainly seen our fill of Superbia (an anthropomorphic orange kitchen sponge who has THE BEST WORDS is going to make America win so much it'll get tired of winning!), Ira (the way anyone with a brain feels about the former situation), and Gura (the Grim Reaper had already taken too many musical souls for one year even before he got to Leonard Cohen). However, Luxuria has been markedly thin on the ground.
If you're feeling frustrated about this and searching for a solution, well, we're pleased to say that we've got just the thing you may be looking for.
Those of you who've been reading NGS/Blog-Tick for any length of time are probably aware that in addition to being the English-language internet's foremost Buck-Tick Blogger (What a stupendous claim to fame! We're almost tired of being famous already!), Cayce is a professional freelance translator based in Tokyo, which everyone knows is a magical land full of Pocky and Pikachu and Godzilla and lots and lots of anime. In fact, it's a known fact that anyone who visits Tokyo immediately transforms into an anime character upon arrival in Narita airport, and I know that every Blog-Ticker who's made the trip over here to see B-T will back us up on this one.
(This artist is wrong. The reality is actually much closer to the image on the left.)
And though we're a very private person, we're now pleased to share that not only have we been living as an anime character since our own arrival in Narita in aeons past, but we are now actively employed in the anime business, or more correctly, the manga business. That's right, folks: since spring of this year, the services of your very own Cayce have been engaged for the translation of manga. Specifically, your very favorite kind of manga: smutty manga.
Publishing takes a while, and most of the titles we've translated so far are still in production, but in celebration of this new development in our career, we're pleased to announce the release of our very first officially authorized manga translation: The Rose-Cutter and His Love Slave. The platform, Renta! Comics, allows readers all over the world to purchase or rent digital manga that you can read on your phone or tablet, and as you can see, it's Luxuria galore. Though we take zero responsibility for the inconsistent quality of the art and writing on these stories in general, if this kind of thing tickles your pickle, we encourage you to check out the whole site, as they have oodles of titles available. Most are written by female authors and aimed at female readers, and we believe the content can be best summed up by this lyric from Buck-Tick's "Black Cherry":
You’re the honey, honey spilling over
I’m kneeling, eating it like a dog
Weeping in ecstasy
Oh, yes, kids. Don't stop, kids! Let there be pr0n!
For those interested, we will happily keep you updated on the titles we've translated as they are released.
For the fujoshi among you: there is yaoi coming soon.
For those interested, we will happily keep you updated on the titles we've translated as they are released.
For the fujoshi among you: there is yaoi coming soon.
And last but not least, for all you teen weeaboos who dream of translating manga smut for a living: yes, this is a real job that pays real money. It was our dream once, and look at us now! Like we said, Tokyo is basically a real-time anime in city form.
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P.S. Fun fact: Cayce has actually slept with Godzilla in the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku (but it wasn't like that.)
Good luck in your new enterprise Cayce! Good for you!
ReplyDeleteYaaaay \(*♡*)/ congrats !
ReplyDeleteI bet youre doing a great job Q(*♢*)
I love your site *^* ♡
This is awesome news, well done and anything that helps to temporarily forget the shitness of 2016 is ver welcome!
ReplyDeleteAll the best wishes for you, Cayce, in your new enterprise! Have fun!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you're doing a great job =)
Best of luck with the new projects :)
ReplyDeleteHello Cayce
ReplyDeleteCongratulations! You're always doing such a great job on this site and manage your own life so nice as well! I hope you enjoy your new post and wish you all the best. I want to ask you a question though, a completely unrelated one to this post or this blog in general. We were assigned a project at uni with the subject of "Crimes of passion and the romantic love syndrome". Our main difficulty is the lack of info there are out there about the said syndrome as the internet
offers no results on what this syndrome might be. The closest I came to find that could be interpreted as a syndrome and is also related to love is the article on wikipedia on limerence. Besides that, we also have trouble
ReplyDeleteJust adding my two cents, but I found this:
Delete"In the traditional society, the partner selection process was dictated more by pragmatic elements where the interests of the community prevailed. A good life partner was the one who could protect the family from an economic point of view (Ilut 2005). The modern society offers the possibility of choosing a life partner at the individual level, placing romantic satisfaction first. The martial partner is chosen according to a personal set of values, aiming to satisfy the emotional-affective needs (Chipea 2001). It is what Goode (1959) called "the romantic love syndrome." (Chipea, Floare & Raluca Miclea-Buhaş "Changes in Mate Selection Strategies: Intergenerational Comparisons." Applied Social Sciences: Sociology. Ed. Patricia-Luciana Runcan, Georgeta Raţă, Mihai-Bogdan Iovu. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 247-54. Print.)
I think that would be the gist of it, but if you'd like to do more research, go to Google Books, enter "romantic love syndrome" en perhaps even add Goode and I'm sure you'll get more hits.
I'd like to add that if I were your teacher, I would be more charmed by Mishima's book, since it's a little bit more obscure than the great classics of western literature, but that is just my opinion. Lolita is not a bad choice, just a bit more expected.
Good luck!
Another suggestion: a few months ago this very short, but charming little gothic novella came out, Bodies of Water by V.H. Leslie. Only 130 pages, yet interesting, particularly if you are interested in the Victorian period and the horrible things women in particular had to endure during that time. It is also about the macabre and perverse fascination of mankind with dead (especially drowned) women.
DeleteOh, or take a leaf out of Sakurai's book: I think he said Misshitsu was inspired by the movie The Collector (William Wyler, 1965), which in turn is based on a book by John Fowles, with the same title. Well, I'm not sure how you'd connect the romantic love syndrome to that, but I thought to just throw it out there.
Deletespotting a crime. We have already decided to pick one from literature and not Shakespeare ( we keep that for serious summer studying). Knowing how very well-read Cayce is and what a genius with literature and art I ask for your help. Can you recommend any crime of passion from literature that's not from Shakespeare? ( also, suicides just won't do because last year's class used Anna Karenina and classified her suicide as a crime by jurisdiction of the law, so no suicides). I would really appreciate your help and I thank you in advance.
ReplyDeleteAn example from Japanese literature: Mizoguchi's arson of the Golden Temple in Kyoto at the climax of Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Over the course of the novel, Mizoguchi falls in love with the temple and also grows to hate it (as a consequence of his own self-hatred.) At last, he burns the temple. The novel was based on the actual history of the temple - it was in fact burned by an arsonist monk whom Mishima interviewed in prison to get the details of the story.
DeleteThe murder at the end of Nabokov's Lolita is another famous example, but despite how many people have lauded that particular book, it continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth, so if you're like me, perhaps you don't want to write about it.
Sounds to me like the phrase "romantic love syndrome" is just referring to the fact that falling in love can feel like a disease...am I wrong?
Other examples not exactly from literature - Bizet's "Carmen," Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets," Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris... there are loads more but I've been translating vampire manga all day and my brain won't deliver. Good luck!
Thank you so much! The temple seems an interesting choice but I think in the end I will go with Lolita. I had already thought of it but it is hard after all to baptise pedophilia as romantic love. As for the syndrome...I really cannot tell. The internet doesn't show any evidence of its existence and neither could the librarians help. But you are great help and I am really really thankfull!
ReplyDeleteFrom an outsider's perspective, Humbert's love for Lolita is certainly pedophilia. But from Humbert's perspective, it's romantic love (however fucked up that may be), and it inspired him to commit his crime, so it definitely counts as a crime of passion. The question of why Nabokov chose to write about such troubling subject matter with little acknowledgement of how troubling it is is a completely separate question deserving of its own separate paper...(though we like answer we got from a friend of ours many moons ago when we posed the same question to her: "because rape culture.")
DeleteIf love has never felt like a disease to you, you are lucky in one way and missing out in another. Perhaps someday, if you meet the right person, you'll discover why.
I'd also recommend some Dostoyevsky.
Delete