I loved this!! As I mentioned in the Harta 75 entry, I’d been meaning to get to this for ages, especially after enjoying the author’s work in the new series 犬火の兄弟, and the impetus ended up being the Harta back issue discounts and sudden Harta club creation, and coming across the first chapter in Harta 75 and being really into it.

I love the blend of science fiction and fairy tale-ish magic (in the best kind of fantastical but still pretty sinister sort of way), and the use of Laika here is fun and inventive in a way that’s obviously completely up the author’s wheelhouse (considering 犬火の兄弟 also involves lots of dogs, and two characters separated from a hometown and torn between revenge and making do). I zipped through it very quickly (probably wanting too much to post about it…) but was nevertheless very touched. In particular the line at the end of chapter 1, “故郷に帰るってどんな気分なのかしら” since I don’t really have a 故郷. I wonder if the author may be wrapped up in some of a similar kind of baggage around home and place that I was when I was in creative writing classes in college…

I was wondering how the collected edition had so many pages (around 250) when Laika’s Star is only four chapters, but of course – there’s more collected works! I liked them too! Though Laika is definitely the main event. I especially like the one involving yokai (including a tsuchinoko! Anything that shows me a tsuchinoko is a-ok in my book. Love me a tsuchinoko). Mayuri Yoshida is definitely very good at showing you endearing cute characters with strong enough motivations to rope you in and want things to work out for them, before dialing up the emotions in pretty intense ways. And they for sure like dogs. Ahhh I’m looking back and remembering more about the last story too, involving a dog dreaming of going to space and transferring that to traveling beneath the ocean. A strange magical and lovely story. It’s a great collection!

I was surprised to see attached to stories I liked a whole lot that they were published previously in Ao Kishi volumes… until I remembered that before it was a separate magazine, the Ao Kishi name was used for supplements with some issues of Harta, or something like that! So I’m pretty sure they’re from those, rather than being stuff I read in the Ao Kishi magazine and forgot (and I doublechecked that one of them isn’t in the magazine issue of the number listed – 95% sure I’m right about the supplements).