I enjoyed this book overall! I think it’s a fun read if you’ve already seen the show and are interested in the deeper lore behind the episodes. I’m not sure how well it would hold up on its own if you’re coming into it cold, though.
It certainly gives you a lot to think about, and it gave me a reason to revisit the episodes and try watching with Japanese subtitles, which was fun! The book was actually a great way to sort of pre-learn a lot of vocab before watching the episodes, which made it a
I was glad to see this one listed on TMDB, which meant I could add it to Natively (I think this is the first pro wrestling show to be listed on this site?).
It's hard to rank the difficulty because some of the important dialogue and scenes are only in Japanese, but if you have a general familiarity with Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, you can sort of get by to some extent. Some of the humor and drama builds on past TJPW history, so the show might not hit quite the same for people who are new to pro
The math problems and the crossword chapter were really fun
It's difficult to evaluate this book because it was definitely above my reading level, which made the prose really hard to get through at times.
Chapters 1-3 were my favorites of the prose chapters, though none of them really blew me away.
Chapter 4, 練習問題, was my favorite chapter overall! I did the math problems with a friend and we genuinely attempted to work through them, and it ended up being a whole lot of fun and really helped build suspense in the story. It took us about 80 minutes to fi