about this site
In autumn 2006 I was in Kyoto for three weeks, mostly failing to be a tourist properly. A friend there took me to a second-hand bookshop somewhere south of Sanjo, pulled a volume off a shelf, put it in my hands and said, more or less, "lizard. you will like it." He would not tell me anything else. I could not read a word of it.
I bought four volumes on the strength of the drawing alone and carried them home in a bag that was too small for them. For the next year I worked out what was happening in those four volumes the slow way — by looking, by asking, and eventually by finding other people who were reading it. That is a genuinely stupid way to encounter a comic and I have never entirely got over it. I think I still read Hayashida more visually than I read anyone else, because for a year the pictures were all I had.
I made this in 2007 to stop repeating myself to people. It has never had a large readership and I have never especially wanted one. What it is actually for is that I read better when I have to write something down afterwards, and having it in public means I cannot quietly revise history when I turn out to be wrong. See the corrections page for how well that has gone.
about the layout
Current design is from March 2011, third version. The one before it used frames, which I chose in 2007 and defended for four years out of stubbornness rather than conviction. There are almost certainly pages here that still link to files which no longer exist; if you find one it has been broken since about 2013 and you are the first person to notice.
The colours are an attempt at Hole and I have rebuilt them four times. It is never quite right. The problem is that Hayashida's blacks are made of thousands of lines and a screen just gives you a flat rectangle, so the more accurate I make the palette the deader it looks. Current version leans on texture over hue, which is the closest I have got, which is not very.
The guestbook broke in 2011 under about forty spam entries a day. I removed it rather than fix it and never put anything in its place, which is why there is no comment form here and will not be. The hit counter went at the same time. I had stopped wanting to know.
images
There are none and there will not be. The books are properly available in English now and I would rather send people to them than host scans. See links for where to buy. This has been the policy since the site started, back when it was a considerably less convenient position to hold.
contact
There is not one. The guestbook is gone and the email address that used to be on this page belonged to an account I lost in about 2012, along with several messages I had meant to reply to. If you had one of those, I am sorry, and I think about the one from the person with the theory about Shin's mask more often than you would expect.