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Disusedtopia Pages: 40 Release Date: October 16th, 2016 (Autumn Reitaisai 3) By: Kotoinari Disusedtopia is a full color illustration book that describes the memories of Kogasa Tatara while she lived in the care of family. Her memories recount the time she played with their daughter during rainy days by catching frogs. Those are the usual activities children do after all. Though, those were only a recounting of memories from over ten years ago ever since Kogasa was abandoned to the waste dumps. The rest of story is about Kogasa’s time at the Waset House which takes care of all sorts of abandoned objects. There, Kogasa plays with her new family – now composed of objects. This part was quite cute to read admittedly. Of course, nothing last forever, and so objects started to leave the Waset House as their caretaker took the objects to their “mother”. And this continued until Kogasa was the only one left. Alone again, Kogasa went to see the caretaker in secret. But she found the caretaker did not take objects to “mothers”, but rather sent them to the fiery blazes of of an incinerator. Upon being spotted, Kogasa ran out while the caretaker chased her, before tripping on her feet and setting the mansion in blazes. There was nothing left of the mansion aside from Kogasa. With no where to go, Kogasa was left on the streets again where Kogasa faded away with no left to take care of her. Admittedly, when I was ordering from Suruya-Ya, I would of preferred grabbing an older doujinshi of Kotoinari since his art style between the later half of 2016 and the end of 2017 was what I considered a transition period. His art style stopped using unique body shapes in flavor of a standard body shape, and colors begin to be much more saturated compared to the drab colors of before. But this was one of the only doujinshi available online, so I went with Disusedtopia. As for how I think of this doujinshi, I liked how the simple illustrations accompanied the story's text on the other pages. Made the each story beat impactful seeing how Kogasa has rise and fall in her situation. But most of the pages are filled with white space outside of Kotoinari’s art, making the doujinshi as a illustration book lose some flavor. However, if there is one area Kotoinari kept consistent in this transition period, it is how he tackles topics. In my mind, this story tells the experience of an orphan through Kogasa, and the Waset House is simply an orphanage for objects. Think of objects as children in the sense that they cannot act on their own without “parental care”, thus abandoned objects can be viewed as orphans when their “parents” stop using the objects. In Kotoinari’s story, an orphan has little options to go to aside from going to an orphanage or to sleep on the streets. And both options as shown by Kotoinari, are undesirable for the potential abuses, or the lack of help respectably. It is bit of a twist on the caretaker role Kogasa in the original canon and shows the true horror of Kotoinari; his ability to twist Touhou around non-Japanese topics in a bit of a satirical sense. Before I finish this entry, searching up the name Waset pulls up result the Egyptian city of Thebes, which was also known as Waset. Though, I can only say there is a relation in the sense that Kotoinari picked a name with Western roots. And I doubt the name is related to the predatory academic publisher WASET which has held fake conferences in the name of artificially boosting one’s credit in the scientific world. Then again, a Touhou doujinshi featuring Okazaki Yumemi finding herself in a fake conference in an attempt to prove her research is real sounds like the sort of topics Kotoinari would target for.

Over this past year I have been building up a collection of Touhou literature, ranging from manga, fanfictions, zines, and research papers. But I noticed that of discussion of Touhou literature is limited online. In an effort to rectify that issue, this thread's purpose is to act as a reading log on Touhou literature by sharing the work's details like story, characters, themes, art style, etc. Of course, any discussion about the work or sharing a Touhou work within the domain of literature is always welcome. If you have any comments to say on one of these reading log entries, be sure to comment in the Touhou Reading Log Lounge, a companion thread to this thread as to keep this thread clean for reading entries. =========================== Pinky Cat's Entries

I'm just curious, ive always thought of the touhou community as a bit older. Ive only met like two touhou fans born in 2005 so far.

2005 dude here

i make flash animations now

AND TODAY'S THE DAY!! MY BDAY IS TODAY!!