I love food (hey, who doesn't?), so I figure Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine would be great introducing to Japanese Food for the average gaijin whose idea of Japanese Cuisine is sushi rolls, teriyaki bowls (not Japanese by the way) miso soup, rice and green tea. But it's more than that. Japanese Cuisi...
Half the fun of this manga is its mere existence. One always hears about the sheer variety of subject matter supposedly available in manga form in Japan, so it's gratifying to see something non-fantasy or SF get an English translation. Oishinbo is odd. What's being translated are selected chap...
One of things I like about this manga is how open the premise is. Yes, we're going to get stories dealing with food and cooking, but there can also be stories within that framework of rescuing orphans, reconciling heartbreak, rekindling romance and passion, teaching humility, and much more. Yes...
In this collection of stories from the long running manga series, the central theme is alcoholic beverages - in Japanese, as they explain in one of the notes in the book, "sake" means not just the rice based beverage that we know by that term, but any alcoholic beverage. So wine and champagne for...