Anime Gift Recommendations
By Andrew Osmond.
If you’re buying anime as a present for someone this Christmas, here are our recommendations!
Books: Christmas Recommendations
By Shelley Pallis.
Over the last five years, amid our blog coverage of anime and manga, we at Anime Limited have also reviewed more than a hundred books related to animation, Asia and anything else we feel like, and as the gifting season approaches, we take this opportunity to make a few recommendations from our more recent coverage.
Books: My Heart Sutra
By Jonathan Clements.
Early in the evening on 12th November 2019, on his way home from an interpreting job in Silicon Valley, Frederik L. Schodt was hit by a moving car. It was a moment that could have easily deprived this world of the author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. “A car suddenly ploughed into my lane,” he writes, “sending my motorcycle and me on two completely different vectors.” He was rushed to the hospital with a broken clavicle and three broken ribs, “but when waves of pain and dizziness washed over me in the ambulance, I began to worry that my luck might have run out completely.”
And so he began to chant a Buddhist scripture that had been with him throughout his life: “Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.”
“I found that it helped to stabilise my mind,” he writes, “to concentrate, to stay conscious” and to remind himself of what the “emptiness” part meant – that there should be no fear. But this was just one of a thousand encounters that Schodt has had with the Heart Sutra in his life – the single most commonly recited scripture in Buddhism, said to have been carried from India to China, and thence to Japan. Continue Reading
Books: Erotic Comics in Japan
By Jonathan Clements.
This review is definitely Not Suitable For Work. Kaoru Nagayama’s Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga, in fact, comes loaded with so many explicit images, often of a frankly triggering nature, that I am unsurprised it is not only published at a weeb-scaringly high price, but by a university press in the famously tolerant Netherlands. Nagayama presents a history of the development of erotic manga, and a run-down of its many variant niches, sure to prove eye-poppingly illuminating to contemporary scholars. It will be of particular value to non-Japanese researchers in the field of comics studies unsure of how to visualise such a wide field in a country that is foreign to them.
The book is a translation not only of Nagayama’s original 2006 book, but of its 2014 re-issue, which added an extra chapter on, among other things, the controversially restrictive Bill 156. Opposition to this 2010 piece of legislation was entertainingly diverse, as were its targets. In one incident that ably demonstrated the dangerously broad remit of its crusade against “harmful” works, one Japanese politician tried to use it to ban Winnie the Pooh. Continue Reading
Burst City
By Tom Wilmot.
Shinya Tsukamoto, Takashi Miike and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are just a few of the names that come to mind when thinking of acclaimed Japanese cult filmmakers in the late twentieth century. However, without the work of another incredibly influential auteur, we may not have these directors as we know them: Sogo Ishii. Distribution of Ishii’s films has been all but non-existent in the West, despite them laying the groundwork for a new wave of 1980s independent filmmakers in Japan. Fortunately, Arrow Video have come up with the goods, delivering the definitive edition of what is arguably the quintessential Ishii film, Burst City (1982).