バルト三国、ラトビアが柘植に？

A committee member, Shibakawa, runs an independent bookshop called AprilBooks, a few minutes on foot from JR Tsuge Station. One day I stopped by for a meeting about the book fair, and someone who had drawn for GARO was there. I was born after the era of GARO, and even so the magazine had become familiar to me, at Kogera Bunko in the same town of Tsuge. He gave a comic book to Shibakawa and me as a present. I opened it and a rainbow world spread out, the kind that widens your pupils. I had almost no familiarity with manga or comics, but I liked it very much, and I learned it was from the comics series of kuš!, a publisher in Latvia. When I told him I wanted to contact the publisher, he gave me their details right away. I wrote that I really wanted to bring this book to the people of Iga, and they said they would send some copies here.

I remembered Riga, Latvia, where I got off in transit in 2017 on the way from Estonia to Germany. It was only a few hours, but the sky was clear and the scene is burned into me. I know nothing about Latvia, and still those few hours in transit leave me feeling close to it. Through knowing a publisher from Latvia at this book fair, I hope that someday, like me, someone hears the word Latvia and remembers a world that struck them.