The Physiophile Boyfriend

This story originally appeared in Amazoness! 2, published in Japan by Izumi Comics.  I've been a fan of Kinsyo for awhile, and it was a surprise to see his artwork in this professional publication.  I can't quite recall where I picked up this book, but it's well worth it.  More background about the story from Kinsyo is available in Japanese along with some sketches on his website.  He mentions on his website that it is his character Erika that appears on the last page of the story.  She appears in many of the pictures in Kinsyo's gallery.

Amazon ( JP ) link: http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4870765748
Kinsyo's website: http://members.at.infoseek.co.jp/kinsyo/
Kinsyo's story page: http://members.at.infoseek.co.jp/kinsyo/10gallery-page/knskrs.html

Refaal originally wanted to request a translation of this as his chainsketch request.  I decided to give him a GIF animation instead, but told him I'd translate this for him anyway.  I'm sure many others will enjoy reading this, too.  I had a hard time translating the title of the story.  The literal translation of 向肉性彼氏 ( Kou Niku Sei Kareshi ) would be "direction meat characteristic boyfriend", which doesn't quite make much sense.  The last two characters directly translate into boyfriend, so I focused on the first three characters.  I did some research to find similar kanji and came across 向地性 ( kou chi sei ), literally "direction ground characteristic", which translates into geotropism in English.  Geotropism is the tendency of plants to grow downward, and I was heading in the right direction.  The -tropism suffix apply more to non-human items whereas the -philia suffix applies to humans.  It also gives the right implication of attraction in this context.  I ended up narrowing the options to physiophilia or muscolophilia, both of which are not real words but sound good.  Physiophilia appealed a bit more to me because it sounded more natural, but either could have worked.

I've been thinking about making a scanlation of this story for those people that own the book.  Well, perhaps some day when I have more time.  If you own the book and want to do it, just make sure to credit me for the translation and link back to me.  This is the first time that I've attempted translating a manga. Though it's only 15 pages, it took me a lot longer than I expected.   I'm not great at the colloquial stuff and had to look up a lot of the Kanji.  Still, I think the end result is fairly accurate and reads pretty well.  I welcome any suggestions to improve the translation.  I tried to keep the dialogue clean, which is tough to do in a hentai manga. Please send me your comments, too, since encouragement helps me keep doing this.

I probably won't do too much translation in the future since it's so time consuming for me.  But if there's enough demand for something, I'd definitely consider it.  Hope you enjoyed this.

- elee0228

Thanks for the kind words.  Yup, I'm familiar with the usage of -chan, but since it doesn't translate all that well and most anime/manga fans are familiar with it, I choose to leave it as-is along with other honorifics.  I've seen some people translate it as -baby or -y or some other nickname, but I didn't think anything really fit. Hm... Ryou-baby?  Ryou-bear?  Reminds me of those robot bears in Thundercats.