japanamerica

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...

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

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...

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 mist...

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 ...