Big Fight with my mother-in-law

Agony aunt story translated from Japanese:
Original story: http://komachi.yomiuri.co.jp/t/2013/0315/580044.htm?g=06

Big fight with my mother-in-law. My husband won’t take my side. Should I divorce him?

I live with my child, my husband and my mother-in-law. The house is in my mother-in-law’s name and we pay her 50,000 yen ($526) a month for living expenses. I’ve never gotten along with her so I try not to talk to her unless absolutely necessary.

Whenever she says something nasty to me, my husband says it’s my bad attitude that provokes her to find fault with me. He never takes my side. It seems he can’t stand up to his mother because she paid off a debt of 2 million yen ($21,000) from his bachelor days.   An incident happened three days ago and she suddenly hit my face when she was drunk. I was so enraged I hit back without thinking. Things got out of hand and the police were called.

When I explained what happened to the police, they agreed my mother-in-law was at fault. However since it was a domestic dispute they asked us to solve it ourselves. My husband came home in a hurry and I explained everything to him as well. He responded, “It was your fault for taking a drunk person seriously. Apologize to my mother. If you won’t, get out!”

I took my child and went back to my parents’ house. My mother tells me to put up with whatever it takes to avoid a divorce, but I can’t do this any more.

My husband gives me all the money he makes, and our child loves him. I’m unemployed so I’m worried about life after divorce. What should I do?

[do not reply]

Translator’s note: The writer doesn’t state the child’s genre, so it’s a bit annoying to have to translate the term “my child” when I would normally write “my son” or “my daughter.”

Random manga I tried to read

Break Shot – Bleh. Couldn’t get into it. What’s so fun about billiards anyway?

Do suru!? Paradise – The first chapter was pretty cute. Choosing what happens next is a nice gimmick, if a bit confusing. Not my kind of series, though.

Ike Ike Sakura – It reminds me of ‘Darling wa Namamono ni Tsuki’ with far more sex. Might get boring really quickly if the author doesn’t diversify.

I’ll – I tried volume 1. The translation was a bit hard to make it but from what I gathered it’s about two kids with bad attitudes and family problems playing basketball. I don’t get the attraction.

Master Keaton – I’m such a hater. That darn Keaton is too bloody perfect. I’m still going to read the rest, but not any time soon.

Live – I’m normally an Umezawa fan (I especially liked Bremen), but I can see why this title was cancelled. The idea was cool in theory, but the execution was shoddy and all over the place. It’s like Ushio and Tora except Ushio is a stupid wimp and Tora is going through puberty. Umezawa couldn’t figure out where he wanted to go with the series, so it went nowhere. What a pity.

Ookiku Furikabutte animation error

From Season 2 (Natsu no taikai-hen) episode 1. When Tajima, Mihashi, Hamada and Izumi are having lunch in the classroom, we first see Tajima holding his chopsticks in his left hand.

This is, of course, because he injured his right fingers in the last inning of the Tosei game. A few seconds later he gets up to talk to Shinooka, then gets back to eating. But this time his chopsticks have shifted to his right hand:
Either someone on the animation team wasn’t paying attention to the story continuity or the mistake come from the manga. …It wouldn’t take long to check… Nope, it’s not from the manga. Just an animator that didn’t pay attention to story continuity, happens all the time.

Ookiku Furikabutte Volume 19 cover + anime review

I knew I’d seen that pose somewhere before! Not that it’s a secret that sports mangaka use real life athlete photos as source material, but I just wanted to post this somewhere ‘cos I’m feeling rather clever. Ookiku Furikabutte Vol.19 comes out in Japan on June 22nd, but I’m not buying it because it’s just more Musashino Daiichi and Haruna, and that’s not who I read Ookiku Furikabutte for.

As for the series itself, it’s one of my favorite manga. Currently my favorite sports series now that Hajime no Ippo has been stagnating for goodness knows how long. I haven’t mentioned it here before because first I wouldn’t know where to start and secondly I only got into it recently. I watched Big Windup twice on Funimation’s youtube channel and liked it so much that I bought the S.A.V.E. DVD set as well.

What I like about it is, of course, the characters. Every sports manga lives and dies by its characters, which is only obvious because if it’s the sports the fans want to see, that’s what ESPN is there for. Ookiku Furikabutte has Mihashi Ren, a wimpy, crybaby pitcher consumed with guilt (as well he should be) for making his middle school team lose for 3 years in a row because he wouldn’t let anyone else pitch.

In high school he meets up with “genius” catcher Abe who latches on to Mihashi’s potential and easy controllability and together with 8 others member of the Nishiura High School baseball team and their big-boobed coach, they aim to make it to Koshien.

Normally I dislike whiny types like Mihashi and bossy types like Abe, but something about these guys makes them not just easy to bear but actually easy to like. It helps that the author Higuchi doesn’t try too hard to make them sympathetic. Yes, Mihashi had a hard time at Mihoshi, but it was 90% his own fault. Yes, Abe went through a lot with Haruna, but he shouldn’t take it out on other pitchers. They’re not perfect – and they’re not even that great as a battery – but that makes it all the easier to root for them.

So far there are 2 anime seasons and 90 chapters of the manga out. I’m suffering from the usual “Caught up to the manga and now waiting is a pain” disease. I dropped Hayate no Gotoku because waiting for releases got too tedious and the manga wasn’t going anywhere (gimme back my A-tan!), and it might only be a matter of time before I drop Oofuri too. For now, though, I’m just having fun.

Okami-san and her Seven Companions anime review

An anime with 12 episodes but that can be summed up thus: “No matter how tough a girl is, she is useless without a guy to protect her.” And so we are introduced to Ryoko Okami, a girl with years of boxing experience who nevertheless frequently finds herself captured or beaten up and in need of a rescue from her weak inexperienced love interest Ryoshi. His battle cry – “I’ll protect Ryoko!” – carries the implicit declaration: “Because she can’t protect herself!”

I’m sure fans will try to argue that the real moral of Okami-san and Her Seven Companions is that it’s not good to try to do things on your own and that you should depend on the people around you, but that doesn’t explain why the other girls on Ryoko’s team who stay in their place (the kitchen or the office) rarely run into trouble or why it is always her love interest who comes to Ryoko’s aid and not say, any other character, or why the guys who take to the frontlines are invariably successful where Ryoko has failed.

There’s a story in there about the “Otogi Bank” club that Ryoko belongs to that helps people out with requests and the rest of the members of the team (the seven companions) and how they get involved in all kinds of funny scrapes and adventures. There’s also some would-be rapist guy from another school who turns up from time to time to kidnap Ryoko so she can be saved.

It’s a fun show, when you ignore the highly misogynistic message. Lots of silly situations and memorable characters and a ton of references to various fairy tales. I quite enjoyed myself. But having the “Women can’t protect themselves, they need a man!” message shoved relentlessly down my throat every episode has left me a little nauseous. I can’t believe they still make shows like that in this day and age.

Ah well, it’s entertainment. I’m not going to think too deeply about it. I got some laughs out of it, and at least it was better than most other tsundere-and-wimp series. If they make a season 2 I probably won’t watch it but still, good show.