Putting to the side for the moment the talk about scanlation that was mentioned in the last post, here are some nice manga for you all, should you wish to peruse. They are scanned and translated by fans in most cases because they have not yet been licensed/not yet become widely available/gone out of print in the good old U.S. of A.. If you feel any compunction about reading them in this fan-translated and posted form, I suppose it is always possible to send the mangaka or publisher a check for the amount  consistent with the extent to which you have benefited from their work...

Anyhow, the following are some of the few (out of the thousands) which I love most, accompanied by short writings to recommend them. There will be a few others forthcoming. The majority of these you can find online pretty easily by searching using the title of the manga and the words 'manga scans' or something of that persuasion. I would recommend looking specifically on the website mangapark if you have trouble finding a manga, as for some reason they tend to offer a lot of pleasantly weird and less-known manga. For some other reason I seem to have misplaced the names of the authors that correspond to all of these series, so please allow me to post them later as well. Enjoy!

1. Shinya Shokudou

A manga focused on a small café which runs from midnight until seven in the morning. The owner of this café cooks for each guest what he or she is really craving at the moment, mostly japanese home cooking, whether traditional dishes or japanese-style modifications of western food. The stories, told from the perspective of the cook, touch lightly on the guests' lives  as they come in and out of the café. The characters are pulled from the japanese night. Depending on how much japanese pop-culture you've absorbed through media, you may be able to identify in this story some staple stereotype characters from modern japanese storytelling and especially from the manga world; the hostess, the yakuza, the boxer, the traditional singer, the 'mama' from the gay bar. This set of stories may leave you with a sweet feeling and strong cravings for strange foods you've never eaten. It is also a good choice if you only want to read a little bit at a time, because it isn't as much of a black hole as some other series. It's a bit more mature, somehow. Ah, and the drawing is very pleasing to look at. 

2. Nodame Cantabile

Drawn in a somewhat simpler, cleaner and more angular style than the many romance manga in the world featuring sparkly-eyed heroines, Nodame Cantabile is the lengthy and hilarious story of two extremely gifted pianists attending the same university, one a wealthy and uptight young man whose dreams of becoming a composer are hampered by his intense fear of airplanes, the other a disgustingly messy girl from a family of seaweed-processors with a stunning memory for music and aspirations of becoming an elementary school teacher. Many other, more minor characters will wander across the story and into your affections while Nodame and Chiaki battle it out with themselves and one another. This is also the rare romancemanga that doesn't bother much with the details of the characters' physical relationships, there being no more than a few kisses throughout the one hundred and thirty-six chapters. It doesn't suffer at all for this.

3. The Embalmer

Drawn with a tendency toward gothic-lolita style, this manga focuses on a relative rarity in the japanese funereal world- an embalmer. The embalmer in question is a youngish japanese-american man with a pseudo-disorder compelling him to get into immediate contact with warm skin after finishing each job. Each story is built around a different episode in the embalmer's work life, and each explores a different possible reason for embalming rather than cremating a corpse. The story returns often to the idea of the human need to see in order to grieve, and to grieve in order to continue with life. 

4. Chihayafuru

This is another long series, not yet completed, which focuses on Chihaya, a high-school girl obsessed with the competitive version of the strategic japanese card game known as karuta. It is similar to a sports manga in the sense that most of the action occurs during or in the periphery of competition and preparation for competition, and the characters as team members learn from one another how to be complete human beings. It differs from a sports manga in the sense that the subject it takes as its point of departure is deeply rooted in japanese poetry and other aspects of traditional japanese culture. What this means is that the series is, among many other things, a very enjoyable exploration of the way in which we become attached to inanimate- or even intangible- objects as symbols of those things in life we have found important.

5. NANA

This series takes as its starting place the chance relationship of two girls named Nana who move to Tokyo at the same time to pursue very distinct dreams. The artist, Ai Yazawa, has a very skinny and punky style of drawing (another of her popular series, Paradise Kiss, is about a rebellious group of fashion students), and somehow unsurprisingly this series focuses eventually on a group of artists and musicians who are entangled in an increasingly complex web of desire, repulsion and greed. The idea of the organically created family of originally unrelated individuals who become necessary to one another through coincidence and time is central to this series. This is a manga with dramatic emotional high and low points. One piece of the perspective it creates that I particularly enjoy is the idea that hate and love, fate and absurdity are two sides of the same coin, and the coin doesn't necessarily come to rest. This manga is somewhat sexually explicit and it may make you cry.

6. Gokusen

This is definitely a manga at which you should be prepared to laugh until your stomach hurts, but it also has some quite tender moments of the sort that can make you smile while you're walking down the street months after reading it. The main character is the daughter of a yakuza (japanese mafia) boss AND a new teacher at the local school for delinquent boys. From the lascivious little-old-man principal of the school and his scheming brother to the good-looking son of a high-ranking police official who takes an interest in the contradiction-packing new homeroom teacher, the story is full of nobility, stupidity, good and downright bad intentions, rivalry and family, of one sort or another. This is my favorite yakuza manga. The drawings themselves are unusual and humorous, and the steamrollering one-character girl-power message certainly doesn't hurt, either.

7. Ashita no Ousama

A manga about a country bumpkin college girl who is pulled into the world of theatre and eventually becomes a playwright. This is one of the older manga in the list in terms of year of publication. I read this one quite a long time ago, so I don't remember too many of its details, but I can recommend it enthusiastically based merely on the echoes of my happiness at reading it at that time.

8. Natsuyuki Rendezvous

The main character of this series is a young man with bad eyesight and an unrequited love for his boss, the widowed owner of a flower shop. Even just the covers of the volumes are beautiful, but the author has provided a twist to the story in the form of the ghost of the flower-shop owner's husband, who lurks around making things difficult for Hazuki (our main character). This series, too, is not without its sadnesses, but there is something very special about some of the words which accompany its images; it's quite poetic. In fact, many manga are, in part due to the layout of the pages, which cause phrases to be fractured and to float in between images and characters, as well as to sum up in few and precise words some very grand or particular sentiments and situations.

9. Oishii Kankei/ A Delicious Relationship

Oishii Kankei is a story about restaurants and chefs, narrated by the ambitious, energetic and lighthearted daughter of a defunct gourmand who has decided to make a life for herself in the world of cuisine. The story explores many of the practical aspects of cooking and running a restaurant, as well as some of the more whimsical, making the point that both are deeply necessary to a chef. With some very nice characters, including the cantankerous aging grande dame of the japanese cooking world and her two brightest protégées (rivals) as well as the main character's pampered family and friends, restaurant regulars, restaurants sponsors, restaurant designers, a host of psychologically damaged chefs, and a few random but crucial others, this series is also one you may want to read all at once. 

10. Fukuyadou Honpo

This is not really a manga to revere for its drawings. Rather, it should be appreciated for the way it makes you want to eat japanese confectionery and, of course and probably more importantly, its revelation of the culture of the traditional business world of Kyoto. Even the insults exchanged by the characters are art, and all the lacquered relationships in the story have to be scraped at layer by layer before the characters can get their most serious feelings across to one another. The main characters are the female owner of the oldest existing vendor of traditional japanese sweets and her three very different daughters. This is one of the stories during which all of the characters grow up, although their growing-up takes longer and comes in a different order than you may expect.

11. Nononono

A sports manga focused on a ski jumper who disguises herself as her brother in order to fulfill her family's dreams of a medal in the olympics. This one is for you if, however much you may not want to admit it, you enjoy stories in which the characters are revealed to be overpoweringly brilliant at something and an indispensable part of the story is devoted to the awe that is felt toward them. This is the sort of story classified in the manga world as "gender-bender", which often involves brushes with danger as the character who is, for whatever reason, in disguise as a member of the opposite gender attempts to carry out his or her mission without being discovered by those around him or her, even those with whom he or she becomes close throughout the story. This of course produces a certain psychological atmosphere, which is heightened by the background stories of the various characters vying for a position on the world stage of ski jumping in this particular series. This story does include a certain amount of nudity and some other mature content.

12. Kimi wa Petto/ Kimi wa Pet

Another sincerely funny story, taking as its main characters a homeless dancer and an overachieving career woman who come together as pet and owner. This series, like so many manga, introduces a special perspective in the exploration of the difficulty of being intimate with others, and the related but not identical problem of being true to oneself, or being one's true self.

13. Bara no Tameni

A beautifully drawn relic of the eighties, or at least eighties style, revolving around a hard-working girl of twenty or so with overefficient fat storage who is left alone after the death of her grandmother and must go to live with her heretofore unknown family, a set of beautiful and cold half-siblings with flower-themed names, the children of a famous actress. As this main character cleans the mansion inhabited by her lazy siblings and attempts to piece together her previously unexplored origins, the story caresses the borders between different kinds of love. This series is something like a comedy-mystery-love-story-tragedy with some pretty noble themes and outrageous characters that you may well find yourself becoming sincerely attached to just as the main character does.