Manga

I was never really into manga until I got to the point where I could read it in Japanese and realised how many different kinds of manga there are. Most of the stuff that gets translated tends to be about ninjas or something, but there are mangas covering every subject under the sun, from the lifes of lawyers, to porn stars, to the more fantastical.

Here's the one I like - it's about a section manager who works at a large Japanese conglomerate during the 80s boom years. It deals with the breakdown of his relationships and office politics. It's kind of like a Japanese Man Men I guess.

What I really like about manga is how it allows to me to relive the feeling of music collecting before MP3s. Since there's so much manga, only the newest, most popular stuff tends to get stocked. If you're working your way through an old series, you need to trail around the huge second hand shops looking through the different publisher sections for the issue you need. I was lucky to find this in the third shop I tried today.

In the second-hand shops, they're sold for either 300 yen (£2.50) or 100 yen (69p). Finding a 100 yen copy is an extra boon.