成長を眺めるのが楽しい

It has recently come to my attention exactly how much the BLCD / BL novel community has grown in the past decade.

Back then that section of the forum didn’t even see much traffic, and it was hard to come by links or even interested people. Cult favorites like Aida Saki’s Deadlock Series, Decoy Series, Esu Series, Eda Yuuri’s Koushounin series and other titles generally remained under the radar.

Now we have whole websites dedicated to translating them with the most famous one being koekara: link here, if you are looking for the BLCD translations of the Decoy series and Koushounin wa Damaranai series, and more. There is this one here which did a partial novel translation for Deadlock and Utsukushii Koto. You cannot imagine how impressed I am right now.

We also have the Esu series, translated into english, and (legitimately!) for sale published by June novels! Fans can buy the paperbacks, along with other titles translated into english on Amazon.

And the above mentioned works are talked about pretty often now, in forums and blogs. (Katou Erena’s Synapse No Hitsugi series, Saudade series, and Slaver’s series seemed to have faded into obscurity though, I wonder why. Maybe her prose was a tad too morose for the regular fujoshi.)

Since when was there a mass market for stuff like these? Or did I simply miss the changes whizzing by me while I was standing still?

After years of formal Japanese language lessons, all JLPT exams, and more than a decade of dealing with this foreign language, I realize, with no small amount of guilt, that other than a crappy site here which was created in my youth (holy shit in 2007) with a couple liners on BLCDs I thought was good, and a few months of answering requests on the forums, I have never really contributed to the community in any significant way.

That said, I recently unwrapped the novel Koushounin 03: Koushounin wa Furikaeru, and began the excruciating process of reading it again.. except that strangely it didn’t feel as difficult to read as before. Encouraged, I also took up a pencil and attempted to convert the first chapter into english.. and set it back down again. The phrase 修行不足 came to mind. It was many times harder than I thought it would be. Understanding the heart of the Japanese language has always been my focus, and I have never attempted to convert those same sentences into something with the same meaning in English.

また、チャレンジしたいと思います。