Beginnings

Today we’re starting a lovely josei fantasy series full of adventure and magic. Ima Ichiko’s Kishibe no Uta series is essentially a multi-volume collection of oneshots taking place in the same world. There are recurring characters, but the focus is always on new characters and their plight. We are going to be releasing this slowly, so I encourage people to enjoy the standalone stories rather than wait for us to finish it.

As an aside, I’ve been wanting to work on this series for like a decade, before I even realized it was a series — I just thought that Ima Ichiko loved releasing 1-vol works with an Eastern fantasy theme. The stories are incredibly texty, which scared me off, but at the same time you really do get a nice, rich story from each oneshot. And despite all the text, her art just has a beautiful way of flowing straight to a lyrical, almost fairy-tale ending. I decided to finally give it a go after promising myself to take it slow. Huggles to achyif for nabbing us the volumes and Cpt. Mischief for her edits. Oh! And if there’s another Japanese translator who’d like to work on this series as well, toss me an email at [email protected]. We could release it faster 🙂

Kishibe no Uta c01 [DL] (note that each volume has a different title)

And this is our final call for the raw fundraiser. You’ll need a credit card or Paypal account to contribute — more info here. Thanks to everyone who’s pitched in!