Hiroki azuma's 'otaku' offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. In japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku.

Beautiful Fighting Girl

From cutie honey and sailor moon to nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. In beautiful fighting girl, Saito Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. Now available in english for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.

Featuring extensive interviews with japanese and american otaku, whose baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and otaku culture.

Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. For saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits.

As an object of desire for male otaku obsessive fans of anime and manga, she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, saito understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.

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The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation

He then examines foundational works of anime, including the films and television series of Miyazaki Hayao and Anno Hideaki, spectators, the multimedia art of Murakami Takashi, and CLAMP's manga and anime adaptations, to illuminate the profound connections between animators, characters, and technology.

Thomas lamarre contends that the history, and in the anime machine he lays the foundation for a new critical theory for reading Japanese animation, particularly Japanese animation, techniques, and complex visual language of animation, demands serious and sustained engagement, showing how anime fundamentally differs from other visual media.

The anime machine defines the visual characteristics of anime and the meanings generated by those specifically "animetic" effects-the multiplanar image, and other techniques of character animation-through close analysis of major films and television series, studios, exploded projection, modulation, animators, and directors, the distributive field of vision, as well as Japanese theories of animation.

Despite the longevity of animation and its significance within the history of cinema, film theorists have focused on live-action motion pictures and largely ignored hand-drawn and computer-generated movies. Lamarre first addresses the technology of anime: the cells on which the images are drawn, the layers of drawings in a frame, the techniques of drawing and blurring lines, the animation stand at which the animator works, how characters are made to move.

Working at the intersection of the philosophy of technology and the history of thought, Lamarre explores how anime and its related media entail material orientations and demonstrates concretely how the "animetic machine" encourages a specific approach to thinking about technology and opens new ways for understanding our place in the technologized world around us.

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Out: A Thriller

The coolly intelligent masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. Nothing in japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out.

This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.

Vintage Books USA.

The Moe Manifesto: An Insider's Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming

For those new to anime, manga, and youth culture in Japan, he discusses what constitutes the ideal Moe relationship and why some fans are even determined to marry their fictional sweethearts. These interviews provide us with the first in-depth survey of this subject. Author patrick galbraith is the world's acknowledged expert on Moe and a journalist based in Tokyo.

The book has over 100 illustrations of the most famous Moe characters, many in color, and it is sure to delight manga and anime fans of every age. Moe is a huge cultural phenomenon and one of the driving forces behind the enormous success of Japanese anime and manga—not just in Japan but now throughout the world.

In japan, avid fans of manga comics, anime films and video games use the term Moe to refer to the strong sense of emotional attachment they feel for their favorite characters. These fans have a powerful desire to protect and nurture the youthful, beautiful and innocent characters they adore—like Sagisawa Moe in Dinosaur Planet and Tomoe Hotaru in Sailor Moon.

Vintage Books USA. Galbraith uncovers how Moe is influencing an entire generation of manga artists and readers. Tuttle. They create their own websites, discussion groups, characters, stories, toys and games based on the original manga and anime roles.

The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media

He now returns with the anime ecology, broadening his insights to give a complete account of anime’s relationship to television while placing it within important historical and global frameworks. Lamarre takes advantage of the overlaps between television, anime, and new media—from console games and video to iOS games and streaming—to show how animation helps us think through television in the contemporary moment.

A major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation With the release of author Thomas Lamarre’s field-defining study The Anime Machine, critics established Lamarre as a leading voice in the field of Japanese animation. Tuttle. He offers remarkable close readings of individual anime while demonstrating how infrastructures and platforms have transformed anime into emergent media such as social media and transmedia and launched it worldwide.

Thoughtful, thorough illustrations plus exhaustive research and an impressive scope make The Anime Ecology at once an essential reference book, a valuable resource for scholars, and a foundational textbook for students. Vintage Books USA.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. Tuttle. Used book in Good Condition. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic and of industrial into post-industrial society from work into leisure went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Vintage Books USA.

The Face of Another

Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. But soon he finds that such a mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self–a self that is capable of anything.

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident–a man who has lost his face and, with it, his connection to other people. Used book in Good Condition. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity and the social contract, The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

Tuttle. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. Vintage Books USA.

Anime: A Critical Introduction Film Genres

Vintage Books USA. Bloomsbury Academic. Its inherent changeability makes anime an ideal contender for global dissemination, as it can be easily re-edited, translated and then newly understood as it moves through the world's animation markets. From the battling robots that define the mecha genre through to Studio Ghibli's dominant genre-brand of plucky shojo young girl characters, this book charts the rise of anime as a globally significant category of animation.

In this way, anime: a critical introduction works to create a space in which we can rethink the meanings of anime as it travels around the world. Anime: a critical introduction uses these debates to frame a different kind of understanding of anime, one rooted in contexts, rather than just texts. Anime is consequently understood in this book as a complex cultural phenomenon: not simply a “genre, ” but as an always shifting and changing set of texts.

Tuttle. Anime: a critical introduction maps the genres that have thrived within Japanese animation culture, and shows how a wide range of commentators have made sense of anime through discussions of its generic landscape. As such, anime: a critical introduction explores anime through a range of debates that have emerged around its key film texts, through discussions of animation and violence, through debates about the cyborg and through the differences between local and global understandings of anime products.

Used book in Good Condition. It further thinks through the differences between anime's local and global genres: from the less-considered niches like nichijo-kei everyday style anime through to the global popularity of science fiction anime, this book tackles the tensions between the markets and audiences for anime texts.

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams

Gardner, swarthmore college; mari kotani; livia monnet, tufts u; sharalyn orbaugh, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Berlin Free U. Christopher bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College. Used book in Good Condition.

Since the end of the second world War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Vintage Books USA. Bloomsbury Academic. Is professor of English at DePauw University. Unlike american and british science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira Godzilla and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan.

Robot ghosts and wired dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together western scholars and leading japanese critics, its major schools and authors, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture.

Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre. Contributors: hiroki azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O.

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War Primer

Pictures of catastrophic bombings, from which brecht’s perceptions are distilled in poems that are razor-sharp, scenes of unbearable tragedy on the battlefield — all these images contribute to an anthology of horror, propaganda portraits of leading Nazis, angry and direct. Used book in Good Condition.

University of Minnesota Press. He takes photographs from newspapers and popular magazines, and adds short lapidary verses to each in a unique attempt to understand the truth of war using mass media. The result is an outstanding literary memorial to World War Two and one of the most spontaneous, revealing and moving of Brecht’s works.

Vintage Books USA. Verso. Tuttle. A terrifying series of short poems by one of the world’s leading playwrights, set to images of World War IIIn this singular book written during World War Two, Bertolt Brecht presents a devastating visual and lyrical attack on war under modern capitalism. Bloomsbury Academic.

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