db105

March 29, 2012 12:24 pm I got here a few days late, but I wanted to join the recommendation for Hikaru no Go. It's about a young teenage boy called Hikaru Shindo who finds an old Go board belonging to his grandfather. Go is a board game, with very simple rules but very complex to play (to give you an idea, while the best computer in the world can beat the human chess world champion, an strong amateur Go player can beat the best computer in the world). The board turns out to be haunted by the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai, a legendary ancient Go player. Sai wants to play Go again, not having been able to since the late Edo period. Because Hikaru is apparently the only person who can perceive him, Sai inhabits a part of Hikaru's mind as a separate personality, coexisting, although not always comfortably, with the child. Sai convinces Hikaru to let him play, so Hikaru goes into a Go club and, in his typical loud-mouthed fashion, asks who is the strongest player there. Hikaru/Sai ends up playing against a boy called Akira Toya, who is the son of the strongest Go player in Japan. Akira is Hikaru's age but his personality is completely different. Instead of fun-loving and scatterbrained like Hikaru, he is really intense and serious about Go and already plays at a professional level. Sai easily defeats Akira, leaving him devastated, but Hikaru is so impressed by the intensity of the other boy's passion for the game that he decides he wants to play like that too, without Sai's help. You don't need to know anything about Go to enjoy the story, and it's a really good shonen story (shonen=manga for boys, while shojo=manga for girls). It's beautifully drawn and it lets you learn things about Japanese culture.

October 30, 2011 9:23 pm The story of the year? Man, that's the story of the century!

September 26, 2011 6:24 pm Are we expected to pay for what is basically glorified advertisement?