I've always been curious about our customers here at beNippon. For all the manga that we sell, they're not possibly all being read, are they? If they were, there'd be an incredible number of literate Japanese learners out there.
But, I regress. There's a phrase in Japanese that reflects the buying habits of adults, otona-gai (大人買い) is the phrase. It is particularly used when adults purchase manga, translating into buying all of the tankobon in a manga series. I see a lot of otonagai-ing going on at beNippon, people buying blocks of Ginga Densetsu Weed, Shaman King, and the like. It's great to be able to buy large blocks of manga, that way you don't get stuck when you finish the last one.
Which leads me to my question. For those of you that do read your manga (in Japanese or whatever language), do you read all of your purchases before you buy more? I've only got one more issue of Bamboo Blade, before I have to go out and buy the rest. On one hand I really want to finish the series, but on the other, I feel like jumping onto something else...
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I do read all of what I buy, sometimes I can't find the volume of the specific title I'm looking for so I'm buying the next one instead (and thus not read it until I buy its prior volumes). I do have some I haven't read yet, but they will all will be read eventually (actually, for some I save the reading for later until I purchase more volumes of the same series- so I'll have a fresh coherent memory of the events in the manga (and also detect missing parts of the plot)).
I have a habit of buying books and not reading them... not so much with manga, but I buy a lot of Japanese books with the hopes of learning something:-) Now, I'm trying to read what I've bought, before buying more. Thanks for your comment, hila!
Kind of the opposite for me - I buy a lot of books and read most of them, while I have a whole bunch of manga sitting around that I have barely looked at. In particular, there's this one serious called Range Man that looked really interesting, so I bought the first 5 for cheap at a recycle shop of sorts. That was over a year ago and I've only read the first one.
(That's weird - first time I tried to comment I somehow made a blog post instead).
BlueShoe, that's the nice thing about living in Japan. The used book stores make it a lot easier to purchase on a whim, then just let the manga sit around. I need to start reading real books now, to grow my Japanese vocab.
@blueshoe That blog post you created might have something to do with your twitter aggregation, maybe?
I do read them all and many times over after while. It is a lot of cheaper to buy five or six books than single one if you live in Europe and your order travels from other side of the Earth.
I'd definetly buy whole favourite manga series at once if I had a lot of money.
@apoc9, thanks for your comment. Shipping costs are quite expensive for just one book, so yes the otona-gae is best when ordering from abroad. Although, I couldn't imagine buying the whole series of something like One Piece... that would be a lot of euro ;-)
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