State of the Collection: 2022 Edition

2022 was the year I really started expanding my "Japan Collection" (for the lack of a better name), as I essentially doubled the amount of manga and light novels I have, and went from two blu-ray releases to fourteen. This hasn't exactly been the cheapest possible hobby, but still living with my parents means I don't really have to worry about budgeting my life all that much yet, so I've been taking advantage of the situation with my many purchases during the year. As a consequence of them, I've assembled myself quite a collection, the current state of which I'll be going over in this post. 

Manga & Light Novels 

I've categorized my manga by trim size, meaning the largest volumes are first. That of course means starting with English volumes from Viz Media, mainly the deluxe box set of Nausicaä which I bought in 2021 and unboxed on this blog. At the start of 2022, I only had it and three other Viz releases, but since then, I've bought three more volumes of Kaiju No 8 over the course of the year, the first volume of Children of the Whales from Bookdepo in October, and my biggest single manga haul so far, Fly Me to the Moon vol. 1, Komi Can't Communicate vol. 1, and The Promised Neverland vols. 1-2, from a bookstore in Tallinn, Estonia in October. Also the same size with Viz's regular releases are the Finnish volumes of Yotsuba&!, which I started collecting due to the re-release round, but have fallen behind a bit as I only bought vols 4 and 5 this year even though 6 and 7 also came out. I'll have to see if Sangatsu has them at a good price next time I go to a con. 

The increase in the larger size volumes has made this section a bit smaller as I've had to move things over to the other side of the bookshelf, but there's still things to talk about here - mainly One Piece. I started collecting it in Finnish when vol. 99 came out, as I knew 99-10-101 had a connected cover illustration. Vol. 101 came out at a really convenient timing as I caught up to it just days after buying it. And then I went beyond the Finnish translation and caught up to the simulpub chapters. 

This section had probably the least changes, as the only new manga volumes here that joined during this year were Attack on Titan: Lost Girls which I bought from Sangatsu's booth at Hypecon in June. However, at the very end there's a couple really interesting additions. Sword Princess Amaltea is technically not manga (well, depends on your definition) as it's from a Swedish creator, but I bought it as a curiosity since it's from a new publisher here in Finland who might be making more waves in near future. Meanwhile, my light novel collection was doubled due to me finally getting my hands on the first volume of Eighty-Six, which had been out-of-stock everywhere ever since the anime aired. 

Anime DVDs & Blu-rays 

As I've been making the move from DVDs to Blu-rays, I haven't been buying much of the former, and may even be getting rid of some of them at some point to make more room for BDs. I do want to keep some of them as a collectible, such as that old Evangelion DVD. 

Now this is the section that has really grown during 2022! Before it started I only had two Blu-rays - Sound Horizon's live BD The Assorted Horizons and the 5 Centimeters per Second steelbook. Now there's fourteen items here, including the MangaUK/FuniUK releases of Attack on Titan season 1 parts 1-2, Akudama Drive and Astra: Lost in Space, the MVM Entertainment releases of Made in Abyss season 1 and the movie, and Anime Limited's collector's editions of Violet Evergarden season 1 and the side story movie, The Dragon Dentist and Re:Zero season 1 collection, as well as the standard editions of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Jujutsu Kaisen season 1 part 1. 

That's the current state of my collection as 2022 ends and 2023 begins. Right now I'm waiting for Violet Evergarden The Movie collector's edition to arrive once Royal Mail remembers which warehouse it is in, as well as Summer Ghost collector's edition once it's finally released after a delay to February. I've also got the Madoka movie trilogy on its way, and a CD import from Japan is already waiting for me to pick it up from the post office. (Speaking of Japan imports, there's a certain upcoming Sound Horizon release I've preordered...) I expect I'll be buying more manga and blu-rays during this year (there's already a few announcements I've got my eyes on), maybe not as much as in 2022 but we'll see. Right now the biggest issue - in addition to money - is that I'm starting to run out of shelf space. I'll have to do something about that in the near future.