Okina Kamino, the author of the Asobi ni Iku Yo! novels, has released the full text of his first novel online. It apparently has mechs and magic in an Okinawan setting, as well as an earlier version of the character Ichika who crossed over into AsoIku. I don’t know if it’s any good, but a non-DRMed ebook is a lot easier to work with for someone whose Japanese is not fluent, and this one is just clean HTML (er, make that “slightly crufty HTML”) with furigana.

[note that when I say “his”, I’m relying on Wikipedia’s gender identification. “Okina Kamino” is a pseudonym, and while Okina is usually a feminine name, in this case it’s written in katakana, and the author is apparently the only native Okinawan light novelist.]

While I’m linking, the illustrator for the AsoIku novels posted some character portraits on his blog, including a school-swimsuit shot of the captain and doctor in which they shatter the Rushuna barrier (amusing, but not as pleasing to the eye as the Chaika/Melwin picture).

[Update: I sanitized the HTML so I could preserve the supplied furigana when importing into my scripts, and was a bit surprised not to find anyone named “Ichika” anywhere in the book. Searching for cat ears located the character, but she must be called something else.]