Unplanned Skip Week

Last week wasn't planned. Real life can be a bitch sometimes. Everyone's busy but who knows, we might end up increasing our output over the summer. Anyway, Saltiness will be back, hopefully next week. Sorry, but real life takes priority over scanlation.

We bundled the 8th and 9th chapters together because the 8th is... very smol.

Kiriko Nananan - Water ch. 8 and 9

Communism, huh? Well, I'm glad we don't have to deal with that shit anymore. Sorry China, Cuba and Vietnam. You must suffer so that we can be freeeeeeee. 

Two chapters to make up for the skip week.

Unlucky Young Men ch. 6

Unlucky Young Men ch. 7

Japanese Summer

Just Unlucky Young Men this week. Everyone else was busy. Sure would be nice to have an extra typesetter right about now... Oh well. Saltiness is a redrawing nightmare so you'll have to wait an extra week for ch. 35.

Last week's special guest appearance really took me by surprise. Anyway, Yukio Mishima is awesome. There's this movie called Mishima A Life in Four Chapters and it's fantastic, but you should read some of his stuff first. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea or Temple of The Golden Pavilion are good starting places but his masterpiece is his tetralogy. He was a really fascinating man.

Unlucky Young Men ch. 5

Too Much Spring

Back in business, cool intro by a character based on a super cool person. And speaking of cool, these chapter covers... so coool

Unlucky Young Men ch. 4

These are such "magazine oneshots", like, they're good but they're fairly simple and a bit ambiguous. Take for example the previous chapter, you're never told if you should pity her or think she's getting what she deserves. They mostly represent the troubles of youth - love fast, love hard... crash hard and fast...

As a collection, reading a lot in a row is probably not "the best way to experience them", they're like a bonus that comes with those serializations you follow. Not that you should devour a collection of short stories in one sitting anyway. But yeah, they work well as a bonus to our usual releases.

Kiriko Nananan - Water ch. 7

First day at work for the gruesome twosome. Yep, they're wagies now. You asking yourself "hmm, I wonder how long that's gonna last?" ? Well, let's read this volume and find out. Also, disclaimer, do not read this chapter while children are present, you have been warned, that last panel on the last page is pure nightmare fuel it's JESUS CHRIST HOW HORRYFYING

Saruchinesu ch. 34

Mixtape

Best Friends Forever. And we've reached the end of the third volume, one more to go(11 chapters). Yasui means cheap by the way. 

Looming darkness.

Saltiness ch. 33

And of course

Saltiness Vol. 3

And now the last Akane Torikai oneshot featured in this collection. I enjoyed all four and I really wish there were more, like, six would've been such a perfect length for a collection. I think I liked the first one best but all four were very good.

I liked how different they were, they talked about different subjects and they had different themes and everything. In a way, it was a pretty chaotic collection because of that so we tried showcasing this with the different fonts we used for the title pages. The first one is handwritten because it's a personal story and because handwritten style fonts are pretty and that's the whole point of the story that I hope I did justice with the translation because even the dialect is supposed to show this, things are pretty on the outside, but they're cloudy on the inside. It's also shaky, because it matches the story, it's about depression and how shaky you can be on the inside. And it's the same for the others, Runaway is about teens so it looks cool, Swan Park has an elegant and slender swan like appearance and the underline serves like a "cut" if you will, and the fourth one is "thorny" because the story is about time and the passage of time. I really like the design of the book but there's some blandness in the plain white pages and in the plain white pages with generic font, and yes I know that for official releases you have limitations in fonts because you have to pay for them and shit but.. iunno, I like how the different fonts for the title chapters looks in our release.

Hopefully we get some Akane Torikai in english, and hopefully it's not this or "Sensei" since these are already available in english through scanlation. She's got a lot of interesting stuff, there's another collection of short stories that I really wanna read, there's Ohayo Okaeri, There's Jigoku no Girlfriend, there's Household of Women, and there's also Saturn Return which looks super cool but scanlation on it seems to have stalled... I really would like to read it. Oh and there's that other two volume one I talked about that's being released in France right now, I'll get to it eventually for sure if nobody else does.

I know there's not much of a market for josei in the english manga scene but... ya never know. The stories weren't particularly "josei" except for maybe the third one, ya know? Ya know.

You've gotta love song ch. 4

There were two extra pages at the end with sketches from Runaway, I've included them in this here batch

You've Gotta Love Song (complete)

I guess I'll end it with a mixtape where I assign a song for each story, seems appropriate considering the title and the fact that Akane used a different song for inspiration on each of these, so here we go, I tried not to be too on the nose with them, the stories just made these songs pop into my head, it's just feeling

What if I try to live

Runaway

The Swan Park

You've gotta love song

And okay, okay, maybe the last one is a bit obvious but screw you, The Cure kicks ass! Well, maybe I was a bit rude there so I apologize and I'm gonna take that "screw you" back but Disintegration is the greatest album ever

Anyway, Ingenue is actually the first song that popped into my head when I read the story buuuuutttt, y'know... maybe it's a bit of a "cheap" choice in a way, still, I vastly prefer this version to the original. So... yeah, had to share. It's fun assigning songs to stories.