From: kenmlin@aol.com   
      
   I can't believe someone made a manga about calligraphy.  The main character   
   grew up in Canada but had to move back to Japan right before he starts high   
   school.  (School year beings in April in Japan.)  He is coerced into joining   
   the school's calligraphy club and immediately breaks his arm!  He then must   
   recruit the girl who injured him into joining the club in order to meet the   
   school quota.   
      
   I acquired the first seven volumes at a book sale and went through them very   
   quickly.  Last week I was at SFPL and lo and behold, they had the entire   
   fourteen volumes even though I have never seen any of them in my previous   
   visits.  I checked out the final seven volumes and went through them in   
   couple of days.   
      
   This is highly educational but the characters are also very well developed   
   and it's never boring even though most of the time they are just writing.   
   There's some romance between the boy and the girl that injured him but it's   
   very subdued and they usually focus on history of calligraphy and different   
   techniques that the students must muster.   
      
   And the author had to ask actual calligraphers (many are students) to come   
   up with the calligraphies that peppered the manga.  I wonder how he could   
   ask someone to write substandard ones so the characters' progresses can be   
   shown.   
      
   It took the author good nine years (published biweekly or less frequently   
   with sixteen pages per episode) tell two years' of these characters' lives.   
   But style is very clean and characters are almost always easy to identify.   
      
   And someone took the time to translate this into English...   
      
   http://www.mangareader.net/tomehane   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)