Monday, June 10, 2013

What Happened To Bilingual Manga?

Don't worry, I'll keep this quick. So if Chihayafuru is getting a bilingual language edition in Japan and Kodansha Comics still seems to be publishing the odd volume of Japanese & English language manga, where are they in America? I can't exactly walk into Barnes & Noble and buy a copy of Chobits that is both in Japanese and English. You can possibly buy them through J-List, but that doesn't mean they're intentionally for a North American audience. The ones I've found on Amazon are out of print - and painfully expensive.

Honestly, I'd love to learn to read Japanese but my local community college isn't offering the course right now. Should I just grab a Japanese language edition of Naruto GN 1, the Viz Media edition of the same volume, and a basic guide to Japanese written letters and figure it out that way? I'm not even sure if that would work; translation is not an exact science. As for the method itself - well, I'm an autodidact but that's a bit nonsensical, even for me.

Please feel free to correct me on this, of course. But where is the bilingual manga in America? And why can't I find any of it?

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