On her LiveJournal, Hollow Fields creator Madeleine Rosca — a runner-up in Japan’s International Manga Award competition — begins writing about her trip to Tokyo, where she learned good food, hot weather, and important meetings don’t necessarily mix:
At lunchtime, we went with some members of the Japan Foundation, including the vice-president, to a restaurant to eat some shabu-shabu. Anyone familiar with this knows it is delicious slices of raw beef that you cook yourself by immersing in a soup. Anyone familiar with tasty food in general also knows that when something tastes good, you sometimes tend not to stop eating when you should. And so anyone familiar with indigestion will know what was happening to me by the time we left the restaurant to visit our first publisher, Kodansha.
This, for me, sparked what is possibly the worst memory of the trip. We were visiting Kodansha - who have published Akira, Air Gear, Negima and a whole lot more of my favourites - and a combination of the food and the extreme heat and humidity was just hitting me so badly…within ten short minutes of meeting the editors, I realised I would have to leave, or risk the embarrassment of being sick on Kodansha’s nicely polished floor. I don’t think I can describe the agony here of being given a once in a lifetime opportunity to talk to the bosses of one of your favourite publishing houses - and having to excuse yourself after you’ve barely gotten past introductions. The foundation thought it was for the best that I return to the hotel because they didn’t want me being ill at the ceremony that night. So I left, feeling pretty unbelievably disappointed with myself, and hoping Kodansha didn’t think I was an almighty idiot (after all…I’d like someone in Japan to license Hollow Fields one day…).
She promises more soon. Meanwhile, you can read a preview of Hollow Fields at the Seven Seas Entertainment website.
(Via AnimeOnline)
