I am wondering if someone can shed light on this tweet from Japan?

Question

A friend of mine recently translated a Japanese article from Japan's October issue of An An magazine and sent her a tweet in English telling her that it was completed. The author replied with the following tweet: (^з^)-☆ ば

I have only been studying Japanese online for less than a year, and can't make any sense of her response. When I look it up in the Japanese to English dictionary, it refers to location, which doesn't make sense.

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Apparently ば is Yoshimoto Banana's signature on Twitter (ば is for ばなな). A couple of other examples of her tweets:

ψ(｀∇´)ψ ば

ですね^ ^ ば

Sometimes members of her staff will write tweets using her account and sign them スタッフ so you can tell that Yoshimoto Banana herself didn't write them.

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EDIT: I wrote this up quickly last night, but I have this nagging feeling that I need to give credit where it's due: my wife is a huge Yoshimoto Banana fan and as soon as she saw that tweet and "an an magazine" (which she insists should be all lowercase, by the way) she said "Oh, that's Yoshimoto Banana."

Answer 2

You won't find this in a standard dictionary. What you need is a "dictionary" of Japanese emoticons, for example:

http://www.japaneseemoticons.net/all-japanese-emoticons/

It seems (^з^)-☆ is an air kiss. As for ば (reads "ba"), this is probably the sound for "smooch".