What is the Shinchosha edition of The Twelve Kingdoms?

In July 2012 the Twelve Kingdoms changed publishers. Shinchosha, the house that had published The Demonic Child twenty-one years earlier, began reissuing the whole series in Shinchō Bunko, its flagship general-literature paperback line, and billed the run a kanzenban: a complete edition, with small revisions throughout the text. The reprints ran from July 2012 to April 2014, until the entire Kodansha sequence stood in the new uniform, shelved under the author code お-37.

The move mattered twice over. It took the series off the girls’ shelf and onto the national one, where it proceeded to win a national paperback prize. And it restored the art: where an intervening Kodansha Bunko edition had dropped Yamada’s illustrations, Shinchosha commissioned the full treatment again, new covers and new pictures inside every volume.