My Japanese is (very) slowly progressing. I'm ditching my current study book "Japanese for busy people" because I got bored of Mr. Smith's (that is, Su-mi-su-san) and Mr. Brown's (Bu-ra-u-n-san) business trips and meetings. The most exciting story was chapter 7 when they take a break and go to a Sumo match. I was excited to read about some real action, but then I peeked at the end of the book just to find a uninteresting story in which they walk together to the public library. Will Mr.Smith be able to get a membership card? This suspense is not solved in the last chapter, when Mr. Smith writes a boring letter to his sensei.
I then felt ready for some real material. I went to Akihabara (the electric city) and bought an electronic dictionary.
which, alas, was not that cheap but necessary nevertheless.
Then I headed to one of the omnipresent comics stores to get some manga. It turns out that there are various genres. Firstly, I can't read kanji yet, so I needed to get manga for children, say less than 13 years old, because there's the phonetic transcription (furigana). These are roughly divided in those for girls and those for boys. I skimmed through some of the girlie ones and found way too much sugar for me. Moreover I know that it's hard to understand children, it's hard to understand the Japanese people, it's hard to understand the language and everybody knows it's hard to understand girls, therefore it would prove an impossible task to understand Japanese-written psychological stories of 12 years old J-girls.
In the boys section I found lots of adventure manga; some of them you surely know (again, if you have a decent age) are: Dragon Ball, Yu-gi-ho, Hokuto no Ken etc. I had to discard those because there's not much dialog and I'm sure I won't find any occasion to yell "Ah! I did a delayed hit on your secret pressure point! Now you only have seven seconds to live!". In the end, I opted for Japanese-written psichological stories of 12 years old J-boys.
I think that "Boys Be" is engrish for "being boys". It seems that these have the same lives of italian boys, but they're far more repressed and baffled by their female pals with the never-praised-enough short skirts. I like the mix of drama and comedy, as in this canonical example. This guy and this girl are "special" friends; that is, the walk around holding their hands, always with red faces.
One day, he meets another girl - or to use the correct technical jargon, "the blonde bitch" - who also has actual breasts (as we can see, breasts that talk!).
He is seduced by her, but he is not up to the situation, so he panics and runs away.
I consider the next scene a gem. The girl sees some lipstick on the guy's mouth and she handles him a hand-kerchief. Then she asks (my translation) "was she more beautiful than me?". He is embarassed, he rubs harder (go-shi go-shi go-shi go-shi) and then astonishes her with the answer: "yes". Note: manga are drawn right-to-left.
I just asked the people here to confirm my translation. I got it very wrong. She says: "you should clean yourself better" and not "was she more beautiful than me?". (anyway I think that in my version there was more drama)