"ドールをお迎えした2" by Koruse

 Here is a small, cute one that came along with my latest Mandarake shipment...

I've always been a big fan of dolls, especially antiques and the modern, more elaborate bjd variants (*not* those weird-ass western dolls with huge heads). It's always been a bucket list item of mine to own a proper dollfie, but due to a sort of nomadic lifestyle and former lack of funds, I could never quite do it. Maybe soon?

Anyway, we're talking dolls because the aptly titled ドールをお迎えした2 (literally Welcoming the doll) by Koruse is a short, b&w A5 manga from 2022 exactly on this topic: how to better welcome a doll into our homes? the protagonist has found her a nice maid dress for her new purchase, but something doesn't seem right... maybe a special setpiece is in order? 

Koruse is not just a dōjin artist, under the circle name "Studio Iwashi", but also a professional mangaka, currently serializing 伽藍の姫 in the well known yuri magazine Comic Yuri Hime - and yes, in case you hand't guessed it, yuri seems to be Koruse's jam. ドールをお迎えした2 is the first work I read of them, and it's a short but sweet piece: very well drawn, especially when it comes to the doll, perhaps at the expense of the human protagonist and the backgrounds, which are for the most part barely sketched. No big deal, as the doll's features and attire are rendered with plenty of luscious detail, a real piece of eye candy. You can see plenty more, of both dolls and maids (yes please!) in their Booth or their Bluesky.

"Kamisama no Shinzou" by Fumino Aya

 Aaand here we are again. As you might have noticed from my previous post, it took me only twenty or so years to cement my otaku credentials and get myself a banner - specifically, some old Comiket paraphernalia which -- I have to say -- looks real good on my wall.

Still, we're all here for the dōjin, and we're starting the new year with yet another 'early work' from a mangaka who, later on, made the switch to commercial work. I was, in fact, sort of familiar already with the name Fumino Aya because a bunch of her manga were translated in Italian, though I don't remember reading anything. I will clearly have to dig up some, because the item in hand for this review is quite intriguing. 

As often happens with mangaka who 'make it', there isn't a whole lot available on Fumino Aya's dōjin activities; their PIXIV is a wasteland, and the Twitter doesn't seem that active either. They do have fairly meaty Wikipedia entry, from which we learn they had an interest in fine arts, something that probably had a bearing on their 2020 debut work Myuuzy no Shinzui. From that same year comes the dōjinshi Kamisama no Shinzou (A5, B&W, 48 pages), a short manga that definitely encapsulate their interest in, as the bio itself put it, "encapsulating daily life".

There is definitely something of early (the good) Asano in this short, charming yet slightly disquieting story about a disillusioned young couple struggling to understand each other on an emotional, and sexual level. It's that sort of melancholic, perhaps a bit darker 'slice of life' that was on display in masterpieces like What a Wonderful World or Solanin: that feeling of having to come to grips with the reality of adult relationships, while still carrying all the emotional baggage of our teenage years. A bit edgy, perhaps, but then again, a flair for the dramatic (as, in the case of this short story, swearing to die together) feels more like a rite of passage than anything else, when we realize it's something we all went through at some point or another. Much like the female protagonist of Kamisama..., who among us never wondered even once if we came across as 'weird' to our partner? 

Short, interesting story for those who appreciate their slice of life with a touch of realism. One last factoid: according to their bio, Fumino is one of Japan's top Puyo Puyo players, and used to spend up to ten hours a day playing it. To each one their own (I'm not looking at my 600+ days on WoW...)

It took me only twenty years

 

New year's first post or whatevs

 So yeah, 2026 has come around - not to an amazing start, but much better than the utter shitshow the latter half of 2025 was. Gonna be hard to go as low as that...

I do have a couple leftover dōjinshi from the previous batch I'll be reviewing soon; besides that, as I'm waiting for the next, beefier than usual shipment (see: me trying to work around that new silly custom tax), I figured I'd do a bit of a different post. 

I've been watching a lot of 'otaku room' videos on YouTube - you know, weeaboos displaying their hoards of asian plastic and wall scrolls for anime that everyone stopped watchin a decade ago. They are a fascinating time capsule of a different era of otakuness, and one I squarely belong to: in fact, with the exception of dōjinshi and visual novels, I sort of fell off the weeaboo train once it became laughably easy to track down Japanese products that, before some arbitrary date probably located around the mid 2010s, required connections and knowledge to get one's hands on. Pickets are sort of difficult to place, but I feel that a big change for the worse started once Crunchyroll became popular: moving from obscure YouTube playlists and sketchy download links to a streamlined, dedicated service killed a lot (not all, fortuntately) of the subculture. That's when I began to see big scanlation groups die out, lots of 'the usual places' go belly up from one day to the next, and so on. This is all off the top of my head: I'm sure people like Patrick Galbraith would have a lot to say on the subject.

I feel that, by large, the Western otakusphere has gone the way most of the Internet has - oversaturated with cheap, rehashed content that simply doesn't excite me anymore. Which explains a lot of my dōjin preferences, I might add. You may have different opinions about places like Sankaku Complex, ZeroChan etc., but for better or worse they were a part of my otaku intake back in the day: nowadays, thanks to a passable knowledge of Japanese, I mostly get my stuff off PIXIV or straight from JP blogs. Never been into figures, so those don't factor in.  

This rant just to say that... a very specific type of dōjinshi aside, I don't really collect. So my hypothetical 'otaku room' video would be, like, ten seconds long. Figured I'd be easier to just show a couple of pics. 

My dōjinshi collection. While it might seem small, keep in mind that I collect only non-h, original IP doujinshi, which constitutes probably 1% of all yearly dōjin output. I have a few fairly rare and older thingies - some you can find by perusing previous blog entries, others will be forthcoming. I also have a couple intruders that cross-link with other interests of mine, like a few issues of Super Mystery Magazine MU.  What's that? read and find out. 

My new battle station (and no, I'm not a redditor). For most of my adult life, as I frequently moved from one country to another, I couldn't feasibly get a proper desktop PC. Finally gifting myself a nice one, led lights and all, has been on my bucket list for a while, and this year I made it happen. Nothing special (still i7), but it's a huge upgrade on my laptop, and I mostly play retro anyway.

 

A poster from IKEA's 2017 Art Event, which I got mostly as I really liked Yasuto Sasada's art after seeing it at a Tokyo gallery way back in 2013. 

And, for something really offbeat - a limited edition poster by Little Thunder for the 1st anniversary of Hong Kong's Coffee & Laundry. Besides being a really nice poster, I'm a huge Little Thunder fan - Kylooe is probably in my all time top 3 of non-JP comics. Really worth a read. 

Short and painless, wasn't it? next shipment I'll be getting my hands on my first tapestry, which I guess sort of invalidates all of the screed above. Whatevs.