Tag: books

November 22, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “Aren’t you making a mistake,” asks the lady selling cinema tickets. “Almost certainly,” sighs Alan Booth, a man who came to Japan to study classical theatre, and who finds himself glumly commissioned to sit through a ghastly Japanese teen movie so he can review it for a newspaper. No, says the ticket […]

November 16, 2023 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Scottish-born Iain Maloney writes of the way that he always needs a body of water somewhere nearby to feel grounded, to know which way is up. Living and working in Japan’s landlocked Gifu prefecture, he becomes aware that many of Japan’s early modern coastal defences, including a ring of vital lighthouses, were […]

October 20, 2023 · 0 comments

By Zoe Crombie. Since its initial release in 2013, Jonathan Clements’ Anime: A History has served as a unique resource for anyone looking to contextualise their love of anime. The just-published new edition elucidates this complex history further with newly added sections on timely conversations around the medium. Refreshingly, Clements’ book doesn’t adhere to the […]

July 4, 2023 · 0 comments

By Andrew Osmond. As long as new fans are stepping tentatively into anime, there’ll always be a need for an up-to-date guidebook, helping them tell their moe from their mecha. There’ve been a great many English-language guides in the last three decades. At one end, the mammoth Anime Encyclopedia encompasses the whole medium. At the […]

May 23, 2023 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “The history of manga,” notes the back-cover blurb for Matthieu Pinon and Laurent Lefebvre’s new book, “is inextricably tied to Japan’s social, economic, political, and cultural evolution.” But the authors neglect to mention the real selling point, which is that their History of Modern Manga actually bothers to point out where those […]