ANIME LOS ANGELES 2019 -- see you there . . .

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DEVILMAN CRYBABY & AGGRETSUKO: Chats w/Go Nagai, Masaaki Yuasa and Netflix's Taito Okiura

Netflix anime welcomes the dark side

Go Nagai is the original bad boy of manga. His series “Shameless School” (“Harenchi Gakuen”) cemented his status as the inventor of the hentai (erotic) genre. “Shameless School” debuted in the first issue of Shueisha Inc.’s Weekly Shonen Jump, Japan’s best-selling manga magazine, in August 1968. The adult shenanigans and sexualized students Nagai depicted rendered him the target of national media, Parent Teacher Associations and women’s groups — and an infamous artistic pioneer.

Over the past year, both Nagai and Shonen Jump have been celebrated for their 50th anniversary milestones. But one of Nagai’s later manga has gained immediate relevance. The animated adaptation of his 1972 “Devilman” series, “Devilman Crybaby,” directed by Masaaki Yuasa and released on Netflix back in January, has become one of 2018’s most talked-about anime and biggest international hits, despite its source being 46 years old.

Now 73, Nagai looks like a professor -- which, in fact, he is, albeit one with a flair for smart jackets. In 2005, he started teaching character design at the Osaka University of Arts. The soft-spoken former troublemaker admits that he may have been ahead of his time.

“‘Devilman’ came out over 40 years ago, and maybe the work itself was too early for the audience,” he tells me over coffee in Los Angeles. “Up until very recently, only one volume was translated into English. I think it’s Netflix that has driven my reputation here in the United States.”

Director Yuasa, 53, was the featured anime artist at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. He brings his signature visual contortions to “Devilman Crybaby,” while updating its specs: characters communicate in rapid-fire text messages and post bigoted rants on social media; a street gang’s disenchantment is sung in hip hop verses; and the story’s principal young women, Miki and Miko, are edgy, self-possessed and impatient, showing nary a trace of anime’s conventional kawaii cuteness, often preferring one another to men.

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Live in Dubai at the 25th Sharjah International Book Fair 2018

رولاند كيلتس يتحدث إلينا خلال مشاركته في معرض الشارقة الدولي للكتاب
Roland Kelts, well-known speaker and author chats with us. Here's what he said about #SIBF18 and about his participation.#الشارقة #الإمارات #معرض_الشارقة_الدولي_للكتاب #Shj #UAE #SBA pic.twitter.com/xpmg3QSUik

— Sharjah Book Authority (@SharjahBookAuth) November 9, 2018

Sharjah International Book Fair, 5 - 10 November, UAE

Honored to be in Dubai this week for appearances at The Sharjah International Book Fair.

Manga & anime in Japan's Heisei era (1989 - 2019)

Defining the Heisei Era: When anime and manga went global

The Heisei Era commenced after two gods fell in rapid succession. The first, Emperor Hirohito, was no longer officially a god, having repudiated his quasi-divine status under the terms of Japan’s surrender in World War II, but he remained god-like in stature. His January death in 1989 at age 87 signaled the end of a Showa past both turbulent and glorious. It drew global attention from the world’s leaders and media, but had been widely anticipated in Japan.

The other fell just one month later, in February, and his death shocked the nation. Osamu Tezuka, the beloved “god of manga,” died of stomach cancer at the age of 60. News of his declining health had been kept secret, as was then customary in Japan. Tezuka was a prolific workaholic and omnipresent television personality. He was also a licensed physician. Almost no one expected his sudden passing.

The two deaths would augur a new life for Japan’s twin pop culture media: manga and anime. Both would find global audiences in the Heisei years that were previously unimaginable, resulting mostly from the intensifying appeal of the kind of Japanese creativity and innovation that Tezuka had pioneered, but also from the increasingly cheap and easy access to Japan’s cultural products made possible by rapid advances in technology.

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Nieman Foundation 80th Anniversary in Cambridge

It was a privilege earlier this month to join my fellow Nieman fellows, dear friends and colleagues in Cambridge, Mass. for the 80th Anniversary of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Kampai!

Gala Dinner at Boston Public Library

Brunch at Lippmann House

Catwalking

Honored to be ensconced in the Tower at the Catwalk Institute.

Thank you Los Angeles & Dallas: Project Anime & AnimeFest 2018

(PROJECT ANIME 2018, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, CA. photo: Kumo Takeda)

(ANIMEFEST 2018, Sheraton Dallas, Dallas, TX.)

Feminism, motherhood and anime: Mari Okada's MAQUIA

Motherhood in modern anime

© PROJECT MAQUIA

Screenwriter, author and newly minted anime director Mari Okada shrugs and smiles as she and her entourage burst through a door behind me 15 minutes late for our meeting. We’re in a conference room on the ground floor of The Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites in downtown Los Angeles, a building famous for its cameos in hit films and TV series (“True Lies,” “CSI”) and for its bewildering interior layout.

“We didn’t know there was another entrance to this room,” explains one of her handlers. Okada, sporting a floral print dress, puts a hand to her lips and emits a giggle.

It’s not what I’d expected. In her autobiography, “From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to ‘Anohana’ and ‘The Anthem of the Heart,'” recently published in English by J-Novel Club, the 42-year-old Okada tells her coming-of-age story as a rural hikikomori (shut-in) in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture. She was awkward and unhygienic, endured sporadic bullying, got into fights with boys, dropped out of school, and was nearly knifed to death by her divorced and disapproving mother.

Self-loathing humor bleeds through the book (“Okada, you’re a failure of a human being,” she is once told and continues to remind herself), an unsparing portrait of the artist as an asocial and ill-equipped young woman.

Mari Okada

NHK is adapting Okada’s autobiography into a live-action TV special starring former AKB48 idol Atsuko Maeda and set to air in September. Okada is writing the screenplay, which will also feature footage from her anime films and series.

But that’s not why Okada is in LA. Her directorial debut, the anime feature “Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms,” had its U.S. premiere on July 6 at Anime Expo, North America’s largest anime convention, before it rolled out in limited release around the country last Friday. The consummate loser — who spent her youthful years hiding in her futon, wearing days-old underwear and T-shirts while ingesting a mix of manga, video games, and Camus and Tanizaki novels — has embarked on a promotional tour, stepping into the spotlight for the first time to sell her work. And when she is finally seated across from me at a small round table, she is disarmingly candid.

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With Mari Okada, anime screenwriter, author and director at Project Anime, Los Angeles

MAQUIA US trailer

With legendary mangaka Go Nagai at Project Anime, Los Angeles

(Go Nagai, creator of Mazinger Z, Devilman, Cutie Honey)

Japan's 'light novels' catch fire in America

Can Japanese ‘light novels’ remain publishing heavyweights?

Sam Pinansky (photo: Roland Kelts)

The palm-sized, lavishly illustrated paperbacks known in Japan as “light novels” can have some heavy titles. “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime” is one. Another, “Is it Wrong to Try to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?” is a bestseller, but so is “I Want to Eat Your Pancreas.” And that’s a love story. Of course.

They can also have some heavy political repercussions. Earlier this month, a light novel called “(New Life +) Young Again in Another World” had its big-budget anime adaptation and future publications in all languages abruptly canceled after its author, pen name Mine, was found to have posted racist tweets denigrating Chinese and Koreans. The offensive posts, first issued four years ago, were deleted, and Mine publicly apologized. But the tweets and the novel’s storyline, in which a Japanese swordsman who murdered 3,000 in China is reborn in a land of monsters, were not taken lightly.

Quite what qualifies as a light novel is a subject of debate and ongoing revision. According to translator and journalist Kim Morrissy’s 2016 Anime News Network article, Keita Kamikita, manager of an online fantasy and science fiction forum, coined the term in 1990 when he noticed that new types of fantasy prose narratives were drawing the attention of manga and anime fans. This burgeoning readership was not entirely young, so the “young adult” label didn’t apply. Nor were they reading works that adhered to pre-existing genres such as romance, mystery, horror and so on.

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Manga for intermediates -- guest post by Danica Davidson (with Rena Saiya)

With the global popularity of manga, there are also people in all corners of the globe who want to learn how to draw in the manga style. I have a background in manga – after starting out as a fan, I made it part of my career – covering it as a journalist, adapting it into English and working in the editing process. Two years after the release of my first book on manga, Manga Art for Beginners, I’m back with its sequel, Manga Art for Intermediates. 



For this book I worked with Rena Saiya, a professional Japanese mangaka who is making her American debut. This book mirrors the design of the first book, which aimed to show more steps for character-drawing than your average how-to-draw book, and to also make sure that the art is in the manga style. (I find most how-to-draw manga books in America look like a combination of manga and American comics.) But the book also discusses how professional Japanese mangaka work, including what pens they use, what happens if they make a mistake, and some of what Japanese publishers look for.

I also talked with Rena for what she wanted to share with JAPANAMERICA. 


“Thanks to the spreading popularity of manga worldwide, the development of IT technologies, and my English ability, I was able to make a decision to expand abroad while living in Japan,” she said. “This is after several years of a career in the Japanese manga industry. I thought it would be interesting if I could publish my manga books through foreign publishers directly, since usually manga sold in foreign countries are the ones first published in Japan and translated later.

“As for the content of the book, I heard that there are few manga drawing books which are based on genuine Japanese style in the States. So, I tried to put basic techniques or information which would be most common among Japanese mangaka. As for drawing tools' information, I chose ones which are available on the internet. With regards to the characters in the book, popular ones has been chosen and I tried to design a kind of typical type of each character. Therefore by learning the characters, you can create a kind of database in your head and it would be helpful when you design your original characters.”


Manga continues to grow around the world, but I’m not aware of any other books like this one, which combine the knowledge of a Japanese mangaka who knows the Japanese manga market with an American author who knows the American manga market. I think it’s a unique offering for fans of manga and can help them grow as artists. -- Danica Davidson

Manga Art for Intermediates
By Danica Davidson and Rena Saiya
Skyhorse Publishing paperback, also available as an ebook
On sale: June 2018
ISBN: 978-1510729520
Price: $19.99

Why Japan's lit and culture are so vibrant today

The Times Literary Supplement: Japanese questions of the soul

At public readings, either in Japanese or English, the novelist Hideo Furukawa performs like a banshee. He voices his characters’ personae, tenor shifting from stentorian to hushed, growling, trilling, book held aloft in his quivering left hand. His compact frame rocks to and fro, slowly enlarging before your eyes as he rises on his toes and raises his arm into a broad arc, snug hipster beanie barely holding his cranium in place.

I have watched Furukawa read several times, in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and each time I have been unable to look away. At first I worried that his histrionics might be overkill. But then I re-read his prose. He writes like a banshee, too, forcing words into action, squeezing them for meaning, studding his lines with coinages such as “scootscootscoot” and “creekeek” when the words just can’t take it anymore.

At fifty-one, Furukawa is among the generation of Japanese writers I’ll call “A. M.”, for “After Murakami”. Haruki Murakami is Japan’s most internationally renowned living author. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, his books sell in the millions, and there is annual speculation about his winning the Nobel Prize. Over four decades, he has become one of the most famous living Japanese people on the planet. It’s impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary Japanese literature and culture, but it is possible to characterize it.

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JAPANAMERICA for 600 bucks?

Talks, readings, signings in Dallas at AnimeFest, August 2018

Specs: AnimeFest 2018

Me and my Monkey: my story behind Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan

via GLLI

Editor’s note: Forget the old saw that English language readers won’t read literature in translation. For the last seven years, Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan has been publishing an annual journal of what it calls “the best of contemporary Japanese literature” in English. The paperback editions of the first three issues were completely sold out. This year, though, for reasons the editors call “both professional and personal,” it will not be releasing a new edition. Monkey Business will return with issue no. 8 in 2019 but the digital and most paperback editions of issues 1-7 are available for purchase at its online store. I asked Roland Kelts, who has been involved with the journal since its founding, to tell us about Monkey Business and his connection to Japanese literature in translation.  

Eight years ago I had the good fortune of being asked to do a favor. Professors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, esteemed literary translators, invited me to dinner in Tokyo and asked if I could help find a North American partner for their venture: an annual English-language journal of Japanese literature.

Back in New York City, my home in America, I called Brigid Hughes, founding editor of A Public Space. (Brigid had commissioned me and Shibata to assemble a portfolio on Japanese fiction for her first issue.) We had lunch in Soho, Brigid said yes, and off we went.

Our partnership has since produced seven issues of Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan (MBI). They contain stories, poems, photo essays and manga by talents internationally renowned (Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami), fast rising (Hideo Furukawa, Mieko Kawakami), and those we’ll be seeing more of (Tomoka Shibasaki, Aoko Matsuda). Each issue is unpredictable and spiked with gems – what author Junot Diaz calls “an astonishment.”

In my role as MBI advisor, contributing editor and occasional road manager, the experience has been equal parts astonishment and education.

When I first read literature in translation (Dostoevsky, Kafka), the alchemy was transparent to me. I’m embarrassed to admit that as a teenager, I didn’t even know the prose had been translated, or at least I didn’t care. I just knew that the writers’ names sounded strange and cool. It felt like they were writing directly to me.

At Oberlin, poet and translator David Young taught me to think about the sound and shape of language beyond its content, which in turn made me think of its origin – not only in thought, but also in culture, place, and time. I remember learning that Ezra Pound claimed he could understand Chinese ideograms without formal study and thinking … wha?

Context is everything, and also, like a Zen koan, nothing.

After I moved to Japan and met Haruki Murakami, I asked him several questions about translation. He likened the process to living inside an author’s mind. Of J.D. Salinger’s mind, he once said while translating The Catcher in The Rye: “It’s very dark in there. That novel (Catcher) is a battle between the open world and the closed. That’s the tension. And in the end, its author chose the closed world.”

Is manga dying in Japan?

Will digital piracy ruin the future of manga?

Chigusa Ogino (photo: Toru Takeda)

Author and manga translator Frederik L. Schodt once pointed out to me that many of Japan’s cultural products are embraced abroad just as they are declining at home. Ukiyo-e prints became the rage in Europe in the late 19th century, nearly 100 years after they’d peaked in Edo and Kyoto. Sake sales have been climbing steadily in overseas markets, with the value of exports doubling over the past five years and hitting a record in 2017, as they continue a decades-long slide in Japan. And now: manga?

According to a survey by the Research Institute for Publications, domestic manga sales were flat last year, but the big reveal in the numbers was that digital outsold physical for the first time, rising 17.2 percent while print slipped 14.4 percent. Weekly manga magazines saw the steepest drop in sales, to below a third of what they were in 1995. A lot of digital manga content is cheap or costs nothing at all, with some of the larger, more-established apps, like messaging service Line, offering free titles to entice readers to make in-app purchases.

The North American market for manga peaked in the mid-2000s, when it breached the $200 million threshold (one-fifth of the $1 billion global market), according to Chigusa Ogino, director at Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Japan’s largest and oldest literary agency. But in 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (known in Japan as “Lehman shock”) and the resulting financial crisis, followed a few years later by the bankruptcy of the American bookstore chain, Borders, dealt severe blows to the industry.

“A lot of publishers left the market,” Ogino says. “We saw the bottom.”

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Keynote gig, Los Angeles, July 2018

Writer, scholar, editor and cultural critic Roland Kelts is the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling book, JAPANAMERICA: HOW JAPANESE POP CULTURE HAS INVADED THE U.S. His writing is published in the US, Europe and Japan in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Japan Times and many others.

He contributes commentary on Japan to CNN, the BBC, NPR and Japan’s NHK, and gives talks at venues worldwide, including The World Economic Forum, TED Talks, Harvard University, the University of California, the University of Tokyo, the Singapore Writers Festival and several anime conventions across the United States. He has interviewed several notable Japanese artists, including Hayao Miyazaki and Haruki Murakami, and is considered an authority on Japanese culture and media.

Kelts has won a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Award in Writing at Columbia University and a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Waseda University and is finishing two books, a novel and a new version of JAPANAMERICA.

He divides his time between Tokyo and New York City.

Honored to be visiting Akita, my grandmother Ebata's furusato (hometown), to speak at Akita International University.