House of Parlance Blog

Not to be confused with the Vinnie Vincent Invasion of the mid-eighties, the Aranzi Aronzo invasion is beginning with a trickle of weird cuteness out of Japan. Anne Ishii, always out in front of the pack, or at least off to the side or maybe more accurately just wandering around following her trusty muse, mentions AA in her recent Vertical Blog.

I’d ordered in some Aranzi Aronzo books to Sophia Books a while back and loved their look and their vibrant, cute, unpredictable Japaneseishness. That mercurial quality that so much of the pop culture products and manga from Japanese artists possesses. But I hadn’t seen their website until today and it just blew my mind. I mean seriously. Take a look at that masterfulness of design and content.

I think that I’m going to cry now.
There’s a lot about this site that I like. For instance, AA describes it’s books with this sentence “ARANZI BOOKS series are cute, strange, cool, silly, a little bit horrible, stupid and comfortable.” Pretty outstanding. Even better, though, is the blurb for a book called Kappa Photo Story which reads, “Life with nothing new is boring but it could be happy indeed. People who read this book and cried with Kappa-kun might have been tired. This photo book will make you feel refreshed.” Might have been tired! Yes, thank you. There’s just no English equivalent to that.

Check their catalog here.

I am going to get my hands on all of their books, even the ones that haven’t been translated yet. This is what publishing should be all about.