Sunday, November 08, 2026

Started: The Pirate and the Princess: The Twilight Stone by Mio Chizuru

Starting: The Pirate and the Princess: The Twilight Stone by Mio Chizuru

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4 comments:

Futami-chan said...

A great video for unexpected reasons lmao.

We call those light novels, not light books. I wonder if the student who told you about this genre of books found the name so nonsensical they couldn't dare or muster to tell the literal name to you, and had to make up something else. This isn't a nice joke to say, but it's indeed essentially a genre for children and manchildren, the demographics I happen to belong to myself!

I think it was about a decade ago, on some Vi*tn*me*e internet forum, there was even some thread that unironically tried to debate the meaning of the word - whether "light" here means the weight of the books or the thing that makes your eyes go blind. I was juvenile then and my mind couldn't process all the arguments, but I found the whole thing ridiculous - if they couldn't settle down with some sources then what's the point of debating/arguing as if they were making serious arguments. (Not mentioning whether you consider what coming out of Asian to be constituted as a rational argument or not).

My prediction: you will not like it much and your daughter may like it to a certain degree at best. Speaking as a fan of the broader Japanese sub-culture: if you don't happen to be (or potentially be) a fan, then you most likely wouldn't be able to bear this genre of young adult novels at all. The number of books of this genre I have read (that can be said to be engrossing, and by my already very niche standards) can be counted on the fingers of my hand.

November 9, 2026 at 9:21 AM
Futami-chan said...

...now come to think of which foreign audience surely weren't much receptive to Japanese culture back 2 decades ago. I know of another book series of the same genre that was officially published only 2 out of 7 volumes in English. My country surely wouldn't have considered such a genre of books to be anything better than how the West viewed it - something quirky that likely wouldn't have sold. Now with the inception of the creepy and gross weebs, suddenly there are a lot of demands. I just visited the biggest bookstore in D1 HCMC and nothing amused me more than the sign saying "This book section is for 18+ years old readers only" hovering above the anime-looking books. Do contrast that to the era when to the eyes of the world, the innocent image of Pokemon was the dominant.

Marx would have been horrified by the most perverse form of capitalism initiated by the Japanese: commoditized cringes! Imagine living in the modern world, the era of the capitalists who make profits just by manifacturing cringes and packaging them into the tiny cute fancy boxes, shipping them to the overseas lands where the rulers of those lands will happily mooch off some more money through tariffs, so the poor workers have to pay a lot of layered fees just for some fiction that aims to make them the alienated laughingstock of public society!

November 9, 2026 at 9:44 AM
Futami-chan said...

While I'm blabbering about the sub-culture, it's also tempting to make some joke about how I had a fantasized scenario of me being the smug atheist that asked "if God existed, how come every single Japanese artbook in D1 HCMC costs around 1M when my monthly wage is 14M?" - to which there would be a smug religious person who retorts "that's actually the case in point in favor of god's existence, not the other way around" to mock me. I had to visit the place 2 nights all because I kept agonizing and decided for and against getting what I wanted.
[a little off-topic: when I passed by the English books aisles, I found they had some sort of annotated version (although didn't seem to be by an actual notable publisher) of Ulysses! - funny as if I only need to wait and the exotic distant unreachable things I have always dreamt of will eventually show up some day; unsure if it's apt to bring up what Randy Pausch said about being prepared for your dreams]

November 9, 2026 at 10:41 AM
Joel Swagman said...

Thank you for the correction about Light Novels/Light Books. I'm glad you enjoyed this one. So far, my daughter is enjoying it. It makes me regret that this was the only book published from the series, but, what can you do?

November 10, 2026 at 10:28 PM

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