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Chihayafuru Manga Gets 1st Text Short Story Collection
posted on by Egan Loo
Chihayafuru, Yuki Suetsugu's award-winning manga about a schoolgirl competing in the Japanese card game of karuta, will get its first text short story collection on September 13. The omnibus collection will tell brand-new stories from the middle-school days of the heroine Chihaya; the story setup for the original manga begins in elementary school, but most of the story in the manga — and its anime adaptation — is actually set during Chihaya's high school years.
The text stories will be told from various points of views, including those of Chihaya herself, her childhood friend Taichi, and Arata (the transfer student who eventually has an huge impact on Chihaya's life). Novelist Yui Tokiumi is writing the upcoming Shōsetsu Chihayafuru: Chūgakusei-hen 1 book. Tokiumi previously adapted Waki Yamato's manga interpretation of The Tale of Genji, KOEI's Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time 4 game, and Gō Ikeyamada's Suki Desu Suzuki-kun!! manga.
Chihayafuru won the second Manga Taisho (Cartoon Grand Prize) in 2009. The manga also won the shōjo manga category in last year's Kodansha Manga Awards, and topped the female category of Takarajimasha's Kono Manga ga Sugoi! book listings the year before.
The manga inspired a 25-episode television anime season from October 2011 to March 2012, and the publisher Kodansha revealed last month that there will be a new anime season. Crunchyroll streamed the first season into several countries as it aired in Japan.
Source: Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web
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