Interest

Ikebukuro Shop to Sell New Durarara Book at Midnight (Updated)

The Ikebukuro branch of the Animate character goods store chain announced on Thursday that it will open at midnight on August 10 to sell Ryohgo Narita's next Durarara!! light novel volume, the 10th one, as soon as possible. The store will sell this volume with an exclusive bonus coaster (pictured below); the other Animate stores will offer one kind of coaster, while only the Ikebukuro store will have the second variant.

Not coincidentally, the story of Durarara!! revolves around the idiosyncratic denizens in this western Tokyo neighborhood of Ikebukuro.

Japanese shops, particularly those in Tokyo's Akihabara otaku shopping district, have opened early for the launch of the latest operating system update, the newest console, or a much anticipated game. However, it is still relatively rare for a Japanese light novel to launch at midnight, especially outside Akihabara. The much anticipated new volume in Nagaru Tanigawa's Haruhi Suzumiya light novel series, Suzumiya Haruhi no Kyōgaku (The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya), was also sold at midnight in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya this past May.

Narita has been writing Durarara!! since 2004, and Akiyo Satorigi began drawing a manga series in Square Enix's G Fantasy magazine in 2009. Aniplex shipped the entire 26-episode anime on DVD in North America. The website Crunchyroll streamed the subtitled anime outside Japan as it aired, and the Adult Swim programming block has been running the dubbed version on television in the United States since late last month.

Image © Ryohgo Narita/ASCII Media Works/Ikebukuro Dollars, MBS

Update: Date corrected. Thanks, Megiddo.