Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I wanna see you fall…crazy in love with me.”

Afterglow by Wagimoko Wagase

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Higuchi is a young doctor whose aim is to become a cardiovascular surgeon, but he’s been transferred to a depopulating small port town to work in general internal medicine for a bit due to a traumatic experience he had while performing a surgery. He doesn’t like being out in the sticks and he feels like he’s being punished for messing up, although his supervisor is clearly trying to give him a mental health break and the time to recover from his flashbacks and shaking whenever […]

Biggest K-Pop Stan in the Japanese Underground

The Yakuza's Bias, Volume 1 by Teki Yatsuda

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When the yakuza boss’s daughter drags top lieutenant Ken to a K-Pop concert, he finds himself utterly captivated by the group, especially the main rapper Jun. I only dabble in reading manga, but one genre I have found myself enjoying is light-hearted gag mangas – with one major caveat. The joke’s got to have legs enough for a series, or it will run thin quickly. Luckily, this is not the case with The Yakuza’s Bias. Ken might be a serious, tough-talking yakuza member, but he finds […]

The Other Side of the Sun

The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld by Jake Adelstein

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The first time Martin Scorsese called Henry Hill after reading Hill’s gangster memoir Wiseguy, he told Hill: I’ve been waiting for this book for ten years. To which Hill replied: I’ve been waiting for this call for ten years. Scorsese had wanted to tell a tale of mobsters that didn’t revolve around Vito Corleone-esque bosses and power players. He wanted the audience to know about the gangster-next-door, the types he grew up with around Manhattan’s Little Italy. He found the story he was looking for in Hill’s […]

John Rain might be trying to get out of the game?

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cbr10bingo… Dream Vacation Ok so this book falls into the “Dream Vacation” category for cbr10bingo for 2 reasons: Tokyo and Osaka: John moved to Osaka to get away from the people who might want to kill him, but he travels back to Tokyo for most of the book.  I’ve never particularly wanted to go to Tokyo, but he makes it sound so interesting.  He goes to the little places that aren’t touristy, are off the beaten path, and that have great food.  The food he […]

Fun story. But fire the editor, please.

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Eiji Miyaki is a young man in search of his father.  In a modern, Japanese, coming-of-age tale, he doesn’t meet his father but if his goal in meeting him was to learn something about himself, well that happens in spades.  Eiji’s father is fiercely protective of his paternity and keeps a watchdog lawyer and assorted Yakuza goons to keep Eiji from meeting him.  The story meanders through derailments on Eiji’s journey.  When Eiji hits a roadblock, or is planning a next step, he frequently diverts into […]



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