Hey folks, so here’s something new. Sort of. Ya see I actually scanlated this series a long time ago back in 2010-2012. I’ve wanted to sort of do a spruced-up version for a long time now but I didn’t feel like I had time. Especially when I’ve had all these other projects going. But I have some free time now, and that Gintama volume didn’t take too long and I can use the same techniques I used for that, so I thought I’d take a shot at this. I did the original scanlation of this with other groups since I did it before I started HWMN. The first 15 chapters were done by a group called Bakana-Haven, then it was done by a group called OMFGG until volume 13, and then volumes 14 to 17 (which is the end) were by Easy Going Scans. I translated every single chapter and I also scanned every volume and joined the double-page spreads (Except Easy Going Scans which scanned and did the joins themselves). So I’m essentially “redoing” my own project here, trying to improve it. I was really early on as a translator when I did them, I’d only been translating for a couple years, so I was hoping to someday redo some of this if not all of it. So that’s what I’m gonna do now. I dunno if I’ll be able to do ALL of it but we’ll see. This has higher resolution like all our newer releases and I also fixed up my translation and improved all the typesetting/lettering, which is done from scratch along with redrawing (I actually bought new copies of the series and started re-scanning at higher dpi).

This is one of my favorite series of all time. It’s about social anxiety and dealing with the conflict of wanting to be with people VS the freedom of being alone. The title “Kokou no Hito” Means “isolated or aloof person”. It also has a sort of official English title that’s just “The Climber” which I think is kind of a dull title so I prefer to call it Kokou no Hito. And also all about mountain climbing. It’s near and dear to my heart. I first fell in love with this series the first time I went to Japan in 2010 and found volume 1 in a bookstore and I knew I had to work on it. I’ve really never seen anything like it before or since. It’s written and drawn by Sakamoto Shinichi, the author of Innocent and #DRCL midnight children. This is the series he did before those two. (It’s based on a novel by Nitta Jirō about the real-life person, Katō Buntarō, and the story was written by Nabeta Yoshio in volumes 1 and 2 and then Nabeta left and the story was taken over by Takano Hiroshi until volume 4, after which he left and Sakamoto wrote the rest himself from volumes 5 on.)

Uh… so then on Friday, Viz announced they’re licensing this series, which I really didn’t expect because it ended over a decade ago. I guess sales of Sakamoto-sensei’s other series were good enough that they decided to also do this. But I think unlike doing DRCL from scratch when that’s already licensed, this is a bit different because I already scanlated it once. What I’m doing here is really simply “sprucing up” my old translations. I wouldn’t really think of it as directly competing with them since the scanlation already out there is one I did and it’s basically fine, just has some occasional minor mistakes (mainly in the beginning) because my grasp of Japanese wasn’t as good and my ability to translate into readable English wasn’t as good. I’d like to hear feedback on what ya’ll think makes sense. These don’t take THAT long to do because the translation is already done, I just have to scan, run cleaning automations, and then redraw/join, and typeset. And I edit the text as I typeset. This one took around a week and that included picking the fonts and such. It was super weird timing that that announcement came out when I was like 80% done with this. But anyhow at least I got volume 1 done here. I could probably do a quick version of all the other 16 volumes before the licensed version starts coming out in a year. There’s way less text as it goes on, so each volume will probably take less time than the last. But if anybody wants to help typeset it could go way faster, you can always email me at kewl0210@gmail.com. Otherwise I’m doing most of the jobs by myself besides checking at the moment (Ironic, I know. Or maybe apropos.) I still encourage everyone to buy the official version if you can. I know it’s also out in some other non-English languages.

Kokou no Hito Volume 1 (Ch. 1-9)
Mega
Online Reader (Mangadex)