Book Journal: Arpeggio of Blue Steel

This week I'm trying to continue with some graphic novels I was reading a while back. I mostly stopped reading them because it was a lot harder to find the most recent manga in the series once I left Japan, but finally had the chance to pick up some of the once I'd missed when I took a trip over there.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is a science fiction manga in which humanity finds itself beset by strange enemies, the Fleet of Fog - so named because they basically sailed out of the mist one day with ships outwardly similar to those humanity had lost in previous wars but armed with weapons well beyond anything humans possessed. As far as I know, most of the series is about humans trying to find a way to finally defeat the Fog... well, that's how it starts, but it quickly develops quite a few interesting plot lines about everyone trying to figure out what's going on, since clearly not even the Fog itself and its sentient ships know very much about what's happening.

If nothing else, it does remind me that I should probably be spending more effort practicing my Japanese. I was never as good at reading it as I really wanted to be (the difference between how long it takes me to read English books and Japanese books is rather excessive), but even with that in mind, it felt harder to manage than I remember it being.

A related problem is that I've never been able to tell whether the stories with particularly convoluted plots should be as incomprehensible as they are when I'm also trying to figure out the language. For all I know, there's a detail that slipped past me because I skimmed over the wrong word which would make the whole thing easier to understand. It makes me very cautious about passing judgment on the series, since my lack of understanding could easily be my own fault.

All of that said, I really do enjoy the series. There's a limit to how bad it can be when you have World War II cruisers and battleships blasting away at each other with plasma weapons and gravity weapons, and I don't actually mind seeing the submarines do things that are flatly impossible by any known laws of physics. And when I do feel like digging though the Japanese dialogue in detail, there's a lot of interesting plot points about the mysteries of the Fog's appearance and what even they don't know about themselves.