so far, the light novels i've been reading have been pretty old, from 5-10 years ago. i wondered, what's popular right now in japan that's almost unknown over here? of course, whatever i chose to read still had to be relatively easy, so clicking around the easy end and looking at publication dates, i eventually found this author "teren mikami" who seemed pretty promising. on the day i was looking, one of the newer entries in a series by mikami was even in the top 20 bestsellers in light novels on amazon, and all of their recent work had hundreds of reviews as well. unfortunately, it can be a bit difficult to "borrow" the latest, untranslated works, so i had to take what i could get and go a little bit older, thus settling on this one, watanare. at the very least it seems pretty popular, still getting new volumes recently and even a manga adaptation.

the first thing i will say is that writing style was very enjoyable, probably the most personality i've seen in light novel prose so far. the only issue is that that goes hand-in-hand with tons of slang, and so it unexpectedly ended up being the hardest light novel i've read so far. once again a reminder not to put too much stock in the determinations of the almighty Algorithm, which claimed that this one was easier than the last one i read. i think it might get tripped up by things like artificially low kanji counts due to choosing to write many words commonly written with kanji using hiragana instead, which i noticed happened a lot in this case.i suspect this is because hiragana are cuter than kanji. it did come in handy distinguishing some dialogue as you could always tell which lines were the narrator's, because the pronouns in them were always written using hiragana versus kanji when other characters were speaking.

now, as for the contents, a quick glance at the cover is enough to determine the genre: yuri romcom, mikami's specialty if the covers of their other books on their amazon author page is anything to go by.when it comes to light novels, you can and should disregard the old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage. taboos, even ones on their way out like girls liking girls can be a great potential source of comedy, but as most are probably aware, an even better source of eroticism. in the comedic scenes, nobody was really particularly concerned about girls liking girls as "it's the reiwa era now and that's normal"paraphrased from 「気にすることはない。もう令和(れいわ)だ。女性同士の恋愛も、スタンダードな時代になった」, so in the end it was mostly used for the latter. yup, at times i felt like i had been tricked into reading a japanese porn which i swear i originally picked because i wanted that other four letter word that starts with pplot. the strange thing about watanare is that many parts of it manage to seem like erotica while clearly not being erotica.i won't claim to be any sort of expert on erotica, this whole judgment is based on the sole piece of erotica i've read. it was a 30 page section of the sprawling, self-published tome "sadly, porn" by the legendary ancient blogger the last psychiatrist, who finally released it out of nowhere after disappearing for a decade. it's actively hostile to the reader in formatting and style, and essentially contains the author's idiosyncratic analyses of dozens of works ranging from the bible to oedipus to the giving tree to fast times at ridgemont high. some of them even seem to have been made up by the author. it's either a work of staggering genius or complete nonsense, like french philosophy. either way, the writing style is strangely hypnotic and i managed to get through a good third or so. i guess you could think of it as being "soft-softcore". i don't think i truly understood the old meme about "erotic handholding" until i read this light novel, although they do also go quite a bit further than that. in fact, things manage to move so fast in just one volume that it seems like there's no way things can possibly escalate any further without it getting straight pornographic. this is also true within many scenes themselves, where the light novel always seems to be just a line or two away from getting dangerously explicit before having its questionable innocence preserved at the last possible moment by having someone barge in and interrupt. oldest trick in the book.

one thing that annoyed me though is that it felt like the main character/narrator was a pretty blatant self-insert for your typical otaku male reader of this sort of thing. shy and lonely gamer decides to reinvent themself upon starting high school so they can get lots of friends or even a loverthis is the only metric for high school success in light novels. fair enough, i say, grades are bullshit. and ends up almost by chance falling in with an aggressive girl is essentially the basic premise of watanare. however, it's also more than 90% of the way towards being the basic premise of the last light novel i read, otaria. that's not even counting the fact that the female leads in both also happan to be, wow, beautiful and rich. then in watanare, something like half the "dates" end up being, oh boy, playing video games together. naturally, it also turns out that the main character is quite unfamiliar with makeup when they go to the cosmetics department. now obviously there can be girls who only like to game and who don't know makeup but i mean, come on. the reason i take issue with all this is because you could swap out the main character with generic light novel shy otaku gamer protaganist and lose almost none of the substance. it doesn't feel like the main character HAS to be a girl, betraying the "yuri" part of the premise, making it seem like it was just a normal romcom where the author arbitrarily made the narrator a girl to add a bit of extra spice to the sexual scenes. this is probably the sort of thing that only bothers me because i've mostly read relatively chaste yuri stuff like yuru yuri.

there is a lot more i could say, especially regarding the dynamics between the two main characters/love interestsone of the moral questions it will have you pondering is "where is the line between mere sexual aggression and straight-up sexual assault?", but i can't get too hung up on every throwaway light novel otherwise i'll never get anywhere. anyway, i would say that despite the shortcomings i discussed, it was still a pretty fun read thanks to both the engaging writing style and some of the deliberately (at least i think) over-the-top scenes. the more laid-back ones may still get you going dokidoki thanks to the sexual tension. that right there is another reason why this sort of light novel might be a good choice for a learner, as i almost never see anyone talk about this publicly, possibly because it's obviousmore likely because it's embarrassing, but you can harness horniness to motivate superhuman feats of japanese learning. consider the fact that it's one of the hardest languages to learn, and yet some of the world's most dopamine-addicted, completely useless adhd neets have managed to make their way through innumerable hours of mind-numbing quotidian japanese dialogue in visual novels to get to one sex scene at the end.the usage of this basic structure in many visual novels is why i believe they may be the most realistic form of pornography. perhaps they also reveal that relationships are in fact the ultimate form of edging. i will not elaborate. at least written porn with the occasional saucy image is probably one of the classier ways to go about things, behind going to the art museum and looking at boobies in old paintings and sculptures. why yes, i "study" art history and japanese "literature".