Twilight + Yokai = Black Bird

In the year 2005 a new pop cultural phenomena was launched and spread throughout the world. It released a giant of a question onto the world at large: Are you team Edward? or team Jacob?

I am, of course, referring to the giant franchise that spans 4 books, 5 movies, was on the NYT Best Sellers list and propelled Kristen Stewart into almost every home. That phenomena would be Twilight.

Now, I am not really going to go on about my opinion of the books one way or the other. I have actually read 2 of the 4 books while I was in college. My suite mates and I were passing around romance novels my senior year of college and I remember reading Twilight, the first installment of the series, in a matter of hours. For a YA novel, it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it had heart, the situation was entertaining, and the writing was so easily read that my brain didn't have to engage at all. It was like reading a really good fanfiction that was bound in paperback.

In 2008 Twilight, the first book in the series, was translated and sold thousands of copies in Japan. My Japanese teacher, an older and very smart women, actually read them because her friends were talking about it. The series and the books were a huge success in Japan, which is not very surprising because when you read Twilight and you've read some old shojo manga, you recognize that the plots and characters are made very similar.

Which is why it shouldn't surprise you that I am going to be looking at how Twilight and Black Bird, are very similar in a lot of ways.

Kekkaishi

I just finished an epic manga marathon that lasted about a week and a half and spanned 345 chapters.

I love Kekkaishi. It has this wonderful drama, intrigue, character development, and traditional Japanese culture that makes it absolutely foreign and familiar at the same time. To tell the truth, I actually started reading Kekkaishi years ago after the anime came out. I let me nerd out with a vengeance and marathoned the show, downloaded all I could from the internet, and discovered that the story wasn't over! There were hundreds of chapters of manga just waiting for me to devour. Alas, the manga wasn't finished in Japan and I was forced to wait years to get the complete story.

Now the manga is officially complete, it even has a complete guide for those who want all the statistics and characters in an organized form, I have been able to gloriously marathon the manga and completely forsake my other work.