A Day Off

10Sep12

These days it’s not often that I have a day off. And on the rare occasion that I could leave the shop, as was the case today, I decided I’d get out and hit the shops.

Kinokuniya and Book-Off were close by in Costa Mesa so I figured I’d drop by. I wasn’t on the hunt for anything particular, but I did come away with some gems.

First off, I stopped by Book-Off. Being something of a cheapskate, I usually did most of my buying there. Nothing really appealed to me in terms of manga, so I took a dip over to the CD section and came away with the following:

Warcraft III Reign of Chaos OST
Maaya Sakamoto, Hotchpotch
Chemistry, Second to None

I’m a minor collector of game OSTs, so $1 for Reign of Chaos was one heckuva bargain to me. As for the Maaya Sakamoto disc, I think this is the third version that I own. I first received a Taiwanese release (actually legit) from a friend well over a decade ago and somewhere down the line I also got the official Japanese release. The pictured disc here is the Geneon US release, back when they thought they could sell CDs to Western fans I guess. A tragic state of affairs really.

With that done, I made my way across the street to Kinokuniya…only to discover that it was gone. Replaced by…a Panera? Seriously? I guess it was hard to maintain reasonable revenues when prices have to be raised to ridiculous levels thanks to the extremely strong yen. Understandable.

On the drive back home, I decided to stop by Mitsuwa and that’s when I noticed that Kinokuniya moved back to their old spot there. Long time residents in the area may remember that Kinokuniya has been in the Mitsuwa market center since…before it was called Mitsuwa. Yaohan for those keeping score. I guess it’s good that they still have a store in the area, but it was a surprise to see them here again.

Now, as mentioned earlier, I’m cheap and the exchange rate hasn’t given me the urge to spend big on new stuff at stores like Kinokuniya, but something did catch my eye in the back of the store. That, would be the Jinki artbook in the above picture. I took a fancying to the series years ago in college and after snapping up the re-release of the original Jinki and most of Jinki:Extend, I had wanted to find any and all artbooks for the series. Not only did I find an artbook from the series, it was marked at 50% off. Even at Kinokuniya’s marked up prices, I couldn’t complain at that discount. Every so often, Kinokuniya will have a random sale of sorts where great treasure can be picked up. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does I definitely recommend having a look.

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