Features 591
Luck & Logic
By Andrew Osmond. Luck & Logic is the kind of series that could sound fearfully complicated if you kept in all the names and quasi-technical terms… but when you strip those names out, it’s a very simple affair. The setting is an alternative Japan, not so different from present-day reality, except for little things like […]
Dagashi Kashi
by Chris Perkins. Dagashi Kashi starts, as these things so often do, when a mysterious and beautiful stranger walks into our hero’s life. In this case, our hero is Kokonotsu, (affectionately known as Coconut by his friends and family) an aspiring manga creator in a country town. His gregarious father, meanwhile, wants Coconut to take […]
Japan Foundation Film Tour 2020
By Jasper Sharp. In customary fashion for the time of year, the Japan Foundation has just announced the programme for its annual touring film season to give us something to look forward to in these dark and joyless winter months. With 20 titles heading to 22 venues across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between […]
Divine Gate
By Andrew Osmond. Noriyuki Abe, the long – very long – serving director of Bleach, offers up the new series Divine Gate. Handsomely visualized by Bleach’s studio Pierrot, and based on a smartphone game, Divine Gate is the kind of anime that can look impenetrably complex when you look at some of its synopses online, […]
Books: Otaku & Imagination
By Jonathan Clements. Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan begins with an advert that depicts a man who is, in the words of Lawrence Eng, a “reluctant insider”, a slave of the rat-race who has an ace up his sleeve. Back in his bachelor pad, he has a virtual girlfriend […]