🍷 [Manga Sommelier Hitsujigaoka] "Yotsuba&!", "Space Brothers", "Ping Pong". An appraisal for a traveler remastering their "first-choice life" on a sea-breeze island

When the curtain of night falls, everyone is looking for a story to read next in their heart.
I am in this appraisal room to help unravel that hesitation for you, my guest.

Now, tonight's guest is Ippobito-sama, who has begun walking as a "sea-breeze freelancer" on a Setouchi island.

Your battery once ran out within the massive system that is Tokyo. However, after that period of emptiness, you made the decision to steer toward an island so quiet that Google Maps freezes.

That was not an "escape," but rather a "tuning" to ensure the tone of your own instrument resonates correctly.

Bathing in a rooster's wake-up call, conversing with crabs, and having your CapsLock turned on by a cat. While exposing such lovable "shame and failures," you gently nudge someone else's back.
The words you weave, Ippobito-sama, always harbor an honest "body temperature."

Please take a look at the "habits of living" revealed by the "three titles" you love, and the path to the "next book" chosen for you.

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🍷 Tonight's guest's "preferences"

Hitsujigaoka: Good evening, Ippobito-sama.
I always read the words arriving from the Setouchi seaside—a bit spiritual, yet terribly realistic—while feeling the sea breeze.
Could you tell me your three precious books today?

Ippobito-sama: Good evening.
I made it here from the beach on Hakata Island.
These three books are what quietly, yet powerfully, rescued me back when I was asking my self-portrait in Tokyo, "Who is this?"

"Yotsuba&!", "Space Brothers", "Ping Pong"

Lining them up, it feels a bit embarrassing as if my own clumsiness is showing through...

I want to be able to hit the walls of reality, yet still move forward without saying "it's too late," and in the end, be able to laugh and say, "Maybe it's fine if today is just interesting."

These are my bibles, packed with those "habits of living" of mine.

Hitsujigaoka: ...That resonated in my heart.
These three books are truly the "soul's navigation chart" of Ippobito-sama himself.

In "Ping Pong," you are confronted with your own mediocrity and the resolve of "will you still do it anyway?", in "Space Brothers," you accept being a "person who is behind" while taking a heavy step forward, and in "Yotsuba&!," you make a soft landing in the state of loving "just today," which has no track record or title.

From that day you broke trying to be perfect, to today where you cherish your clumsy self.

I have carefully aged and selected three cups that will serve as the backdrop for Ippobito-sama's "next story."

🍷 First cup: "Barakamon" (Author: Satsuki Yoshino)

Catchphrase: "Sensei, you don't have to be number one; you should just write your own characters."

Hitsujigaoka's perspective: This is a story about a young calligrapher, Seishu Handa, who loses his way after failing as an elite in the urban calligraphy world and finds his "own line" through life on the Goto Islands in Nagasaki.

The title "Barakamon" is a Goto dialect word meaning "energetic person," or someone "full of life force."

What you, Ippobito-sama, are experiencing on Hakata Island—being woken by the sound of chickens, being swayed by the innocence of the islanders, and finding salvation in the time you would have dismissed as "waste" in the city.

That process is crystallized within this work.

The moment the protagonist, who was trying to write "beautiful characters (a life)" like a model, finally writes a stroke that is clumsy but filled with soul.

That should resonate deeply and gently with the change in you, Ippobito-sama, as you have begun to shed the "mass-produced words that anyone could write" and started writing your note in "my own voice," exposing your shame and failures.

🍷 Second Glass: "Chi: On the Movement of the Earth" (Author: Uoto)

Tagline: Even if you bet your life, you can move "one step" forward. That intensity continues to circulate across eras.

Hitsujigaoka's perspective: This work redefines the spirit of "whether to do it now" depicted in "Space Brothers" within a state of extreme tension. An era where believing in the heliocentric theory meant "death."

Even so, nameless people take a life-risking step to pass the baton of the "truth" they discovered to the next generation.

They, too, may have been isolated at first and appeared "mad" to those around them.
The theme you advocate, Ippobito-sama, of "taking a step in three months," may seem small at first glance.
However, that one step dramatically changes someone's scenery and eventually connects to a grand story.

By reading this work, you will be able to reaffirm the weight and preciousness of the "light of knowledge" that lies ahead on the path you are walking, Ippobito-sama.

🍷 Third Glass: "Sunny" (Author: Taiyo Matsumoto)

Tagline: We can't go anywhere, yet we can go anywhere. A junk car named "Heart."

Hitsujigaoka's perspective: A story about children living in a foster home, drawn by Taiyo Matsumoto of "Ping Pong" fame, projecting his own childhood memories.

Inside the broken car "Sunny" left in the garden, the children close their eyes and leap from the claustrophobia of reality into a sea of imagination.

Here flows the "fragile self" you once held in Tokyo, Ippobito-sama, the sense of loneliness with nowhere to go, and an earnest prayer that seems to wrap around it.

Reality is never kind, but with just one way of holding your heart, we can always go to our first-choice place.

The delicate lines and poetic dialogue drawn by Mr. Matsumoto are sure to become the perfect glass to gently snuggle up to you in the quiet night on Hakata Island, in the moments when you face your own inner self.

🧭 The path to your "book of destiny"

Hitsujigaoka: Now, Ippobito-sama.

Is it "Barakamon," which cherishes one's own origins while being blown by the island's sea breeze?
Is it "Chi: On the Movements of the Earth," which questions the value of the "one step" you believed in even in the depths of despair?
Or is it "Sunny," which lets you ride the Sunny of your heart and gently go to meet even your past self?

"Life can always be your first choice."
For you, who are living today with all your might to make those words a reality, which is the "narrative nutrition" you need most right now?

Ippobito-sama: "Without a doubt, it's 'Barakamon'! 🤣
It's truly a 'The Ippobito Case' kind of story (laughs).

Even if you're clumsy and a bit off-beat, you change little by little through your interactions with others....

I haven't read it yet, but I intuitively felt it's what I need right now. I'll read it immediately!"

Hitsujigaoka: "...A supreme and inevitable choice.

Ippobito-sama.
Back under the Tokyo sky, when you were trying to trace the 'correct' life that someone else had decided for you, you must have been desperate to draw lines like a perfect and beautiful 'model'.

However, as you crossed to the island, were blown by the sea breeze, and piled up days that didn't go as planned, the brush tip within you has begun to move more freely and with more warmth.

Handa Seishuu, the protagonist of 'Barakamon,' also finally found his own 'line' by being led by the hands of children on the island, getting covered in mud, and having his heart stirred by ordinary daily life.

That is not something that can be measured only by efficiency or results.
Sighing at the crowing of a rooster, struggling with the mischief of crabs and cats...

Such 'beloved noise' that is not a pre-arranged harmony is, I believe, the one-and-only ink that will color the story that only you, Ippobito-sama, can write.

You no longer need a 'pretty self-portrait' to be evaluated by someone else.

In the manga, the overwhelming sunset that Handa-sensei saw while being led by the hand by Naru, a child on the island.

When he was wrapped in that light, he realized.

That the 'answer' he had been searching for was not in a lonely study, but had been in the noisy and warm daily life all along.

Ippobito-sama.
The 'first-choice life' you have always wished for is not waiting somewhere in the distant future.

Right now, in that moment when you, along with your partner MacBook, weave words step by step and suddenly look up at the sky.

At your feet, the 'first-choice life' you have been searching for all this time is already spreading out vividly.

The step you take will surely become a light that changes someone's scenery.

From here, I am cheering for your story with all my might.

🌙 At the end of a quiet night

Well then, I shall bring tonight's appraisal to a close.

Ippobito-sama, thank you for today. That secret ingredient you cherish, called 'as you are'.

It is the essence that pierces most deeply and warmly into the hearts of people who are tired of something and seeking healing. I hope the sea breeze of Hakata Island carries your gentle story as far as possible, to someone who needs it.

The next person to sit at this counter might be you...
Or perhaps a future adventurer, staring at their own reflection in a train window, dreaming of the sea breeze of some distant island.

📚 3 books from the customer

This time's customer

Next time's customer

Thank you for reading until the end.
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