Could I accept this much affection?

The first few stories in this series really made it seem like the Otherside both had far more people stumbling into it and dying all the time. They run into a lot of people early on and Toriko makes it sound like she found guns lying around all the time, but that has tapered off into more general weird events. Even Satsuki’s overarching presence has started to ease off to give the girls a break and the relationship develop a bit more and make the Otherside their own a bit.

It is also feels almost bizarre at this point to suddenly have characters openly and casually discussing the idea of women dating each other when the series has skirted around it for so long. But it is in service of continuing to push Sorawo to open herself up to these possibilities and allow herself to be loved. It is quite sweet, even if she can be frustrating.

Though I am sure that as soon as she does all of that danger and the weight of Toriko’s own personal history that have been pushed aside for the moment are going to come crashing down on the both of them.

It always took me a lot of courage to go to the next step in this train of thought.

I didn’t intend to keep ploughing through these, but I was travelling again and had several hours to kill on trains. The development of the relationship between Toriko and Sorawo is very slow, but there is always some degree of forward momentum to it, in spite of Sorawo’s cluelessness. She is like a protagonist in a zombie movie where the world is the same as it is now except that none of the characters have ever heard of the concept of a zombie, except instead of zombies it’s lesbians—though she is the only person like this as everyone around the protagonists clearly think that they are already a couple. This volume does make it clear that that ignorance was somewhat willful; she is too scared to open herself up, even in her own internal monologue, to the possibility of someone loving her. Still, we asymptotically approach lesbianism.

And I know that tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japan but her being scared of Migiwa’s Mayan tattoo sleeve he probably just got while drunk on holiday in Central America is very funny.

Just how many underage girls has she laid her hands on?

I am surprised that the story seems to actually be angling Toriko as a victim of grooming and I am curious where it goes with that.

Very funny that the only thing physically wrong with Sorawo after so many supernatural near-death experiences is that her liver is not in great shape from going out and getting hammered to celebrate every time they survive a trip to the Otherside. She also seems to have some sort of medical condition that causes her mind to fail to comprehend the existence of lesbianism or any information pertaining to it and is too socially awkward to every ask anyone to clarify what they mean by anything.

I had was wondering why the translator decided to use both Luna and Runa for transliterating that character’s name and it looks like in the original novel her name was also written two ways depending how it’s being used, with Luna in the translation standing in for ｢ルナ｣ in katakana and Runa for ｢るな｣ in hiragana. I like to try and get an understanding of little translation tidbits like that even when I can’t read the original text at all. Language is fun!

Alcohol is scary…

Whomst among us has not gotten so drunk that we blacked out and maxed out our credit card buying agricultural equipment?

The recaps in each story can feel a bit excessive sometimes for something that, as far as I know, wasn’t serialised on story-by-story basis. Could also do without the US marines field-modifying an armoured vehicle explicitly in line with IDF vehicles specifically designed to kill Palestinians in order to fight monsters which is a thing that actually happens in this book.

I enjoy Sorawo getting jealous without realising that that’s what’s happening and her hiding things from Toriko adds an interesting wrinkle to the relationship.

They say that being accomplices is the closest kind of relationship in the world.

Quite funny to take Roadside Picnic but reinterpret the title to just be about it being nice to have a picnic in the Zone, as is the how it wears its inspiration on its sleeve with Sorawo and Toriko meeting a guy who is basically a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stalker on their second outing.

The prose and dialogue are frequently awkward which I will put down mostly to translation problems, though I think that the descriptions are also very visually focused in a way that I think doesn’t use the advantages of prose as a medium.

But I was looking for a fun, light read while travelling and it provided that quite well. Toriko and Sorawo are endearing and watching their relationship evolve is compelling, from Toriko calling Sorawo Twitter-brained on their first meeting to them looking out for each other as they become accomplices. Using actual modern ghost stories and having a bibliography that cites 2chan threads in very specific detail is also quite charming.