Atogaki

The single-volume of The Garden of Words manga arrived today. I knew it was out for delivery and had seen the mail carrier coming so I went out to the mailbox to wait for it. But following this morning's snow, the sun had come out and the snow was melting and falling off the trees. I tried to stand far enough to one side to miss most of it, but of course, just before I got back to the house, a big pile fell right on my head. Well, I was just happy the package had finally arrived!

A really nice color cover. The majority of the book is as it appeared in Afternoon, with the color pages up front and then the rest in B&W. The manga in the magazine had a little something past the movie, and the book has a few extra pages. I'm only up to 30 kanji so far, so it will take some time to translate them.

I've been getting better at telling the difference between shi and tsu and so and n in katakana, but here I'm working on reading someone's handwriting. The small size of some of this isn't helping and again making me miss my Optivisor. I'm trying to make out what it says under Yukino and Takao's names but I'm just going to have to work through likely suspects until I get something translate-able. Arigato gozaimasu!

Also in this shipment, I got the "Promise" CD by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra, performing Tenmon's songs from Shinkai's movies.

Did I not take a picture of the front? Well, here's one of the back.

Inside, there is the CD on one side...

And a booklet on the other...

The booklet has pages on Tenmon, Shinkai, and the Orchestra, as well as pages about each of the movies and the selected songs.

Amazon and itunes have the album which may be the easier way to get the music if you don't need the booklet to satisfy your collector's urges.