Translation of BLCD: Border Line I is Complete!

It is old but gold. Here it is.

Yuri and his beloved

ポルノグラファー・インディゴの気分

Pornographer + Indigo Kibun
Furukawa Makoto x Shingaki Tarusuke, Matsuda Kenichirou

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This was based on the manga by Marukido Maki. You can read it here.

So I basically pick up everything with Shingaki Tarusuke in it now, and I went to spoil it for myself by reading the manga before listening to the BLCD. This story had an interesting start: Nice, kind university student Kuzumi (Furukawa Makoto) accidentally breaks the arm of a nice looking thirty something year old called Kijima (Shingaki Tarusuke) but has no money to pay his medical fees. (No, Kuzumi does not offer his body in exchange, contrary to the typical thing that most BL works do) Kijima offers to waive the fee if he works for him as a scribe, but Kijima turned out to be a rather prolific erotic novel author and a pathological liar.

Then the story took a weird turn. So we eventually find out that Kijima is slightly fucked in head, and though strange fucks can be likable, I don’t think his character was ever likable. The sexual tension that was brewing between them fizzles out pretty early and frankly Kijima’s strange revelation (oh! I want to write after all!) at the end left me a little puzzled, like「先生、あんたなにやってんの」みたいな。

Still! The BLCD was worth listening to just to hear Yashiro’s signature deadpan voice as he dictates his novels to One Punch Man, who has to write it all down.

囀る鳥は羽ばたかない 4

Guess what got released in February while I wasn’t paying attention!

囀る鳥は羽ばたかない 4
Hatano Wataru x Shingaki Tarusuke

More of Shingaki Tarusuke is always welcome

Well, what can I say? Just like Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Iron Man and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, I swear every time I read this title by Yoneda Kou I can almost hear Shingaki Tarusuke speaking as I read Yashiro’s speech bubble, and every time I hear Shingaki Tarusuke elsewhere in some other work I can only hear Yashiro. It’s been a long time since someone’s voice had slipped so effortlessly and comfortably into a role. I loved the way he went 「ウワウ、カーチェースみたい」 right after Doumeki turned the car around to chase Hirata’s grunts, and the way he snorts as he laughs when asking about what Doumeki did with his tiger T-shirt.  It’s amazing how Shingaki san manages to make an オカマっぽい voice sound menacing and yet drained of any emotion whatsoever. Hatano Wataru’s 無愛想な Doumeki was good too, and this was a really good listen in a rather long time.

I fell asleep listening to Ten Count, by the way.

Looking forward to this manga‘s releases.

And… Is it just me or are Misumi’s two grunts damn fucking adorable

囀る鳥は羽ばたかない

Went on a BLCD acquiring spree yesterday. Some notable titles include Yoneda Kou’s Saezuru Tori wa Habatakani Series and the full suite of DMMD audio dramas.

Anyway.

囀る鳥は羽ばたかない
Hatano Wataru x Shingaki Tarusuke

I vaguely remembered reading the manga the thinking about how typically Yoneda Kou this work was, but better than usual. Apparently it is a big deal in the community now and some are saying that is her best work yet, and I am inclined to agree. In an amazing stroke of luck, the voice acting for this title was also excellent. I got excited seeing Yasumoto Hiroki in the cast but the main took my breath away instead. Shingaki Tarusuke is a BL rookie? Holy moly. I hope he is somewhere in Japan earning big money and getting lots of gigs. I got almost giddy on the train listening to the quality of the voice acting. It was like Border Line all over again.

Yashiro (Shingaki Tarusuke) is this lewd, mostly masochistic hitogirai who has probably fooled around with most of his gumi and is also in line to be the gumi‘s second in command. Don’t ask me how that mixed well, but it mixed well. Doumeki (Hatano Wataru) is an expressionless former policeman and ex-convict following Yashiro around as his bodyguard. He believes Yashiro to be ‘strong, kind and beautiful’, much to everyone’s mirth, but as the series progresses you will realise he is right. Kageyama (Yasumoto Hiroki) is the only person Yashiro ever cared about and Kuga (Ono Yuuki) is a host that Yashiro set Kageyama up with. There is Miyake Kenta and Ookawa Touru somewhere in there too. This is one star studded cast.

You can read the manga here.

This was the scene through which I learnt the phrase 「公務執行妨害罪」. Plus it was cute

The DMMD audio dramas were ennui inducing. I don’t think many fans actually think that DMMD plot or voice acting were particularly memorable (really, Mink? You needed someone to tell you that you were alive?), but the smut.. I get up just listening to the BGM.

While revisiting my old fangirl material again about a decade older (and wiser? I guess not), it kind of hit me that sometimes, just sometimes, the depiction of the climax in BL is.. almost entirely female, and the headier and more potently female it is the chance that the title would be a hit increases tenfold. DMMD is a good example of this; look at the Noiz x Aoba good ending in DMMD reconnect and you will know what I mean. BL media is, 所詮, mostly created by women for women after all. It kind of sank in exactly how remote and fantastical these fantasies are.. it made me feel a little forlorn, really.

These were heavy in my diet throughout my impressionable youth. I used to lie awake for an hour or so every night listening to them. It was like a disaster waiting to happen

Everyone harbours demons, but the largest ones are the ones you feed.

I try not to think about this too much.

燃えてる萌てる

Zoomed through the glut of new BLCDs that has just been released from captivity from the BLCD forum (of which i still haven’t recovered my membership) into the aarinfantasy forum. these are the more interesting ones, amongst all the usual gag reflex inducing fluff.

その唇に夜の露
morikawa toshiyuki x yusa kouji

Have been looking forward to this since i read the manga. okay, i didn’t like the seme and his monomaniacal warped sense of logic much, but it was pretty good overall and the idea of coupling on the bus was kind of.. hot haha, especially when wada was terrified and jittery and constantly looking at the rear mirror when he found out only wakae was left on the bus and that the bus was going to a park where usually no one will alight and they will be all alone. yes, that was my sadistic gene at work. but at the end, i was still puzzled as to why wada didn’t explain what he did to the wakae back then. the ending was slightly abrupt and it’s like one big question mark, though i don’t think this drama will have a sequel. it ended with a sentence that got me thinking for awhile. food for thought.

キッズログ
kondou takashi x yoshino hiroyuki

This was full of cuteness that doesn’t make you feel like throwing up, two characteristics that are usually not mutually exclusive. man, i love children in BLdramas, when they’re not part of the pairing. the seme-uke-kiddo interaction was hilarious. basically the seme’s twin brother passed on and his that said twin’s son believes the seme is his papa. seme takes care of him till his brother’s ex wife comes to claim him, but end up becoming inseparable with his little nephew. the uke, who is a blonde preschool teacher, comes into the picture and messes things up. i loved it when the seme hears about how his brother had told his son that ‘it’s okay to jump of a roof because your brother’s going to catch you below’ when that really happened and the seme broke some bones while his twin brother escaped unscathed.

I also loved it when the nacchi-sensei takes the seme’s hand and declares he’s going to become his son in order to goad the seme’s little nephew into action. and it is also interesting to note that there was no yaoi scene and almost no BL in it. thank goodness, because i might have to skip an entire track if i ever had to hear yoshino hiroyuki’s aegikoe again. sequel? i hope so.

花が降ってくる
kazama yuuto x kondou takashi

The uke’s basically someone who devotes himself to entomology and who can’t live on his own, and the seme is someone who have been taking care of him since goodness knows when. usually i would dislike ukes without spines, but akihiro‘s qualities make him endearing, somehow, if only he’d stop crying so often. yet i believe this is the kind of bldrama that makes us fangirls unconsciously dream of having what the uke has someday. though akihiro may be a big dear, you can’t really imagine that kyouichi would drop an engagement to a perfectly wonderful beautiful woman, give up the idea of having children, endanger his job and status in his family and basically throw away everything for someone like akihiro. that’s not possible. that will make love both blind and deaf.

and i think i’ve changed? i find myself unconsciously living certain ideas and female identities which i would find preposterous back then, and it’s scaring me, because i absolutely don’t want to become what i’ve always hated seeing in dramas, and on tv. i need focus on turning milk into gall. milk into gall.

がっかり、いろんな意味で

the BLCD ごめんなさいと言ってみろ ‘Gomennasai to Ittemiro’ turned out to be a sort of failure. i can’t believe one of Eda Yuuri’s works can be so shallow. maybe the way the script was written failed her, i don’t know. i really wanted my BLCD fix, and my BLCD forum membership back, but so far i’ve gotten neither.

on the hand, have been throwing myself into this extremely quote-worthy american sitcom called ‘big bang theory’. it’s been a long time since i watched anything with english dialogue haha. many thanks to the person who gave me all three seasons! the sitcom makes me feel i should aspire to be a physicist instead of an engineer.

yepp, it’s just a biochemical process.

will be leaving for penang tomorrow, to enjoy good food and the general inactivity. oh dear. i think my fitnesse and ab condition is currently in its worst shape in one and half years, and i’m going to exacerbate the problem. and it’s the dreaded time of the month, and the corresponding acne has arrived very punctually. also realised after packing in a record 20 minutes that i suffer from a chronic lack of clothes, and therefore am determined to cure this with retail therapy in the holidays. as for where the sudden vanity came from, it’s hard to explain.

萌ようぜ、一緒に

was scrolling through the new BLCDs in my ipod in the MRT after i contracted ennui from my international relations readings (strange how something i used to find interesting can become so insipid just before the exam). realised that the new ones are utter crap, because they contain wimpy ukes or ukes who are not wimpy but act wimpy. gave up on abazure and ai nara uru hodo within 3 tracks of each. someone hand me an equivalent of ‘Deadlock’ or ‘Borderline’? i need it, there hasn’t been one in ages.

this one was passable, am halfway through it.
ごめんなさいと言ってみろ
yasumoto hiroki x yoshino hiroyuki

uncreative cover, but at least it is the uke pulling the seme’s tie, and not the other way round

put two men with attitude together on a collaboration, one a mangaka, one an author, and they simultaneously combust. just hope they don’t kill each other first. that’s just about as far as i got. i need to listen to the rest of the drama, once my paper is over, that is.

寒さの中で寝むり COLD シリーズ3

Realised i have been putting off listening to the second and third installment of Konohara Narise’s COLD series, for a good reason.

A reason which i obviously forgot, because just recently on a whim I put on the second last track of the third and last installment COLD FEVER. walao, made me damn sad after that. you can almost.. feel touru’s confusion as he tries to grapple with his returned memories and his situation with fujishima. and when he fails to do so, resort to the only thing he understands.. violence. and fujishima, taking it all. Think i dissolved into tears after reading the last paragraph of COLD FEVER the novel in mandarin, and i think i’ll be more miserable if i read the japanese version.

The third installment in Konohara Narise’s COLD series

but in a sense, the novel reached completion, albeit in a strange way. fujishima did love the impetuous, foul mouthed kid touru was, even as mindwiped, angelic touru fell in love with fujishima. in a sense, those 6 years fujishima had with a gentle and kind touru seemed to be some kind of repayment for the wrongs fujishima suffered, a kind of temporal period of escapism. in the end, he did get what he originally wanted. though i wish konohara narise didn’t need to describe in poignant detail how touru tormented fujishima in the third novel, because it breaks my heart haha.
i think i’m talking abit funny. shall blame it on flu and codeine.

FUJOSHI 復活

there’s this new BLCD in the forum that made me laugh even without having to listen to it. it’s called「YES IT’S ME」. in capital letters. can you imagine?

IS IT YOU?
YES IT’S ME!

retardness cracked me up. or am i the only one who think’s it’s funny?
in late august,「新説・源氏物語-藤壺の章」shinsetsu: genji monogatari (fujitsubo no shou) will be released. and we just had shinsetsu: kokoro last month. don’t quite know the reason for the sudden obsession with literary BL remakes.

truth is i couldn’t really sit through the first track of shinsetsu: kokoro. from the very beginning all you hear is hirakawa daisuke all over morikawa toshiyuki. like *passionately* sensei.. sensei.. kind. yee ._. i kind of lost patience with it for awhile. hirakawa seme sounded appropriate in koi no zettai series and morikawa uke sounded cute in shiawase ni dekiru series but elsewhere, it’s just erh. i think i need to find out how natsume souseki‘s original version was like.
and a few weeks later i’ll get to see if the producers were able to take something like genji monogatari and make it interesting.
listened to wakeari as well and am quite appalled at the number of slut roles poor toriumi kousuke had to voice. wonder if he might become one himself.

ah BLCD. used to be able to write essays on them. it’s all coming back with being at home 24/7. guess i’m actually a very faithful otaku when i’m not being physical during trainings.

had to reupload things on itunes following the com’s change in O/S to windows 7. didn’t really get to reupload everything so the BLCD collection in my ipod is currently very streamlined and take-no-shit. means there’s only old favourites and the newest BLCDs. no rubbish with coupling in the first track or bird brained half assed plots. still there’s about 25 GB worth of audio files.

looking at the almost inexhaustible list of tracks made me think about what a long way i’ve come since my first BLCD 7 years ago (kedamono series), and how pivotal and extremely vital a role they played in improving my japanese vocabulary and enunciation. of all things

高階佑 o^_^o

August’s BLCD releases are out!

Came back from camp to find a couple of very promising ones. These illustrations by Takashina Yuu reminds me so much of her Deadlock series  There’s even a retelling of Natsume Souseki’s famous literature novel Kokoro, BL version. Think I’ll probably finish them all before school reopens.

Houigakusha to Keiji no Aishou

Wakeari

交渉人は振り返るturn back!

have i talked about how much i love Eda Yuuri’s Koushounin series?
i think i have, countless of times, since i heard the first BLCD a couple of years ago and i’m like devouring the third book in the series koushounin wa furikaeru「交渉人は振り返る」(which i bought in japan!) like crazy and i’m halfway. will be pretty sad when i finish it because i’ll probably have to wait a few more years to go to japan again to get the next installment of the series.

but seriously, the situations mebuki and hyoudou gets into! and the things hyoudou say. oh my gosh my core muscles almost died controlling my laughter on the train.

poor mebuki got squashed under 3 sumou wrestlers while trying to catch a swindler and hurt his back. shimeno insists on helping him put the compression pad on his back and even offered a massage. hyoudou and hakuta.. just has to walk in unannounced at the moment shimeno’s hand was on mebuki’s ass. mebuki, mebuki, mebuki why does this always happen to you?

hyoudou: *says to hakuta while staring down at shimeno and mebuki* are you carrying a gun?
hakuta: i offer my sincere apologies for not carrying one today. there’s an apple in here if you want *gestures at the fuit basket he is golding*
hyoudou: i won’t be able to kill him if i hit him with that right?

and when mebuki came back to the room after seeing shimeno out, hyoudou was sitting on the sofa sulkily eating a banana. from the fruits basket he brought. the cuteness of the whole mental picture almost killed me.

and what’s with shimeno’s name. 七五三野登喜男. it has like 7 words when written in kanji and 6 words when written in hiragana.

and mebuki! the oyaji gyagu he spouts and the hopelessly oyaji trains of thought he has when it comes to ayaka makes me relieved that he’s still the cheerful anti-romanticist he was since the first book.

plus this book was released almost a year ago? like why is the bldrama not out. i seriously can’t wait.

P.S. sometimes i really do adore those american fujoshi with their wicked sense of humour. this one doesn’t update anymore but still, read here blog here.

青い羊の夢

the second half of march’s releases were out for quite some time before i noticed. shows how little time i actually have to myself nowadays.

have 6 new BLCDs to listen to yayness. except that i used to finish up the entire month’s worth of releases in a week by listening to them in bed before i sleep. nowadays i prefer to go straight to sleep once i get into bed.
some of them look promising. especially the ones based on novels, like 「朝から朝まで」, 「兄弟の事情」,「Restart」and「Keep Out」. some are much awaited sequels like 「Cold Light」and「Crimson Spell 02」.

currently on the first track of 「青い羊の夢」. it kinds of already revealed that it originated from a mindlessly angsty shounen ai manga. i think the mangaka intended it to be some sort of yakuza/triad thriller, but when you’ve read and listened to almost all of aida saki‘s works.. i think hardly anything is good enough anymore. like wow. there’s this guy who goes in search of the killer of his lover when he finds her ring on the finger of one of the leaders of some powerful triad called the saruto group which controls half of the city. takes a gunshot in the knee and fights ten men with that injured knee to become that saruto leader’s bodyguard. then sleeps with him to get information. and of course according to the manga both guys are hopelessly pretty. like their bodies stopped producing testosterone some time ago.

like who am i to complain. i’ll probably listen to the end anyway.
went shopping for some things for the trip to japan. in the end, bought 4 pairs of socks, a money pouch and kinokuniya membership (digression). was actually tempted to spend on more pretty things at muji but reined in somewhat. like why do you need to use a muji plastic box to keep your hairpins and ear studs when you can use an empty eclipse mints box.
makes me.. excited. i really can’t wait till i’m in ikebukuro.

won’t my next two paychecks and 25th may hurry come?

燃えるぜ！

i’m actually opening my books again, after dusting them off. (which have been kept carefully wrapped and out of sight after last year.) i need to play up my strengths, since i have so few of them. and i have alot of other things to work on.

for economics we studied how pure competition can go wrong sometimes. i’m beginning to see how competition can drive people to do things they usually wont, for no other reason than to just get ahead. it actually gets really stupid sometimes. but i can hardly take it, it’s eating me inside out. i need to bite my way out of this first.

that aside, i was sitting beside a japanese family on the bench outside the toilet as usual during my break, when my message alert tone sounded. mind you, my message alert tone is morikawa toshiyuki shouting 「こいつは俺の男だ！」 in the BLCD ‘bad boys’. they actually turned and stared at me for a full 10 seconds. i cant tell you how embarrassed i was. and i’m still wondering what would have happened if my message alert tone was koyasu takehito going「頑張ろうなぁ、ムスコ！」in ‘egoism’. i may have died wahaha.

excruciating wait for ワースト to be released next year!

難しいね

i believe that the smile would be a permanent fixture on my face by the time next year comes around. seriously, it’s not that easy to smile at customers that you really want to scowl at, especially those who eat half of the samples and leave without saying thank you or those who spray powder all over the glass case. the glass case which took me an entire week to figure out how to clean properly. i know, i’m obsessive complusive.
other than that, i still feel like i’m walking on tightrope. i’m still dreading the moment the higher ups realise that i don’t have anything between my ears. they’re not that far off. i’ve already forgotten to punch my card at least 5 times.

and yes, i’ve gone back to bunka’s advanced course, which will start next year in january. apparently mizusaki sensei said that 敬語 wont be of much use to me now. wonderful. ._. means i still will suffer heart seizures everytime i answer the phone, because i might unwittingly use an impolite sentence structure while speaking to some important business client.
picked up this dubious looking BLCD called 金環蝕, kinkanshoku, which apparently means ‘corona’, the bright ring around a full solar eclipse.

金環蝕: ishii kouji x shiozawa kaneto, okiayu ryoutarou

i know shiozawa kaneto fans are going to kill me for this, but i doubt i may pick up any shiozawa dramas for a long time. he doesn’t sound.. human. his voice is all wheezing, breath and wind and he accentuates his words at wierd places in his speech. and he sounds like he is speaking through his nose most of the time. i think i never recovered from his role as iason mink in ai no kusabi. 金環蝕 is full of angst, or should i say nothing but. an army colonel, betrayed by a traitor. had his entire fleet wiped out. was wrongly accused of war crimes and made into a war criminal. unable to return to his country, he was forced to become a male prostitute. was bought over by the very person that betrayed him. his physical strength deteriorates. it’s more or less the regular yaoi sob story, and it gets tiresome after awhile. and the names of the characters! i had hell trying to figure out the accompanying katakana in the booklet. so the protaganist’s name is ‘cut fragrance’, and okiayu’s character is ‘mellrose vicious’? dont get me started on how to convert the traitor’s name into english, i really have no idea. if i try, it’ll be something like ‘crisis rollshanty’. that’s some really strange names.

what really saved this was the orchestral pieces interspersed into the flow of the story. i wonder if they were specially composed for this bldrama. they’re really nice. XD

ごちそうさまでした

finished listening to the deadlock gaiden.

yoshua’s seiyuu was actually good enough to compell me to search the net for his name. toochika youichi.. i’ve never heard him around before, because he has only done roles in animes i’ve never heard of. maybe deadlock’s his first yaoi title wahaha. means that yusa kouji just sliced open a watermelon? ;P toochika youichi has this throaty voice, and when he tells rob ゛直接舐めてください゛ in that breathless voice of his, i got goosebumps.

i wouldnt have guessed who the killer was, if hiyama nobuyuki hadnt sounded so perverted. thedrama started with his evil laughter, so i guess all you needed to do was to wait for the character he voices to appear ._. it kind of spoiled it for me.

was rewatching this particular BLanime when i realised that the uke was hiyama nobuyuki, too. usoooo. hiyama nobuyuki? uke? i would be very frightened of the kind of ukes he does. he sounds like he would eat his seme after coupling.

i think you can tell i’m abit half assed. i came back from work to an empty home dead tired, so i ran a few kilometres to make myself more tired. then i opened a bottle of osmanthus wine (a gift) and drank half, because i was slightly depressed that i had to stay away from beer to avoid speeding up the increase in my weight.

tomorrow’s my off day, and i’m actually really looking forward to it. i might actually go crazy standing around all day. i’ve actually resorted to making small talk with any customerwho would actually talk to me, if not my brain will turn into cerebral fluid. if there’s any left, that is. i could talk to my japanese co-workers, but i’m still pretty frightened ofthem, because to me, up to now, japanese people had been nothing but some sort of legend. i’ve read about them and their habits and culture, watched them in dramas for years, and it’s overwhelming when i see them in flesh. do i make sense? if i dont, blame the alcohol.