Tag: books

May 20, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. The temple is on fire. The warlord Nobunaga makes his last stand against the henchmen of a traitorous underling. Hearing someone kicking open a side-door, three attacking samurai rush in to execute an escapee, only to face a terrifying, ash-smeared demon. “In person they had never seen before a shadow so tall, […]

May 18, 2019 · 0 comments

By Motoko Tamamuro. For months after the release of Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Hirokatsu Kihara waits for news of the next production for Studio Ghibli. The studio suddenly gets lively when the announcement comes that the next film will be Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata. However, nobody says anything to […]

May 9, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. A fandom, writes Aaron Schwabach, “is the most powerful marketing tool a work of fiction can have.” Grow the right kind of grass-roots support, and authors can discover that works advertise themselves, that word-of-mouth becomes stronger than paid advertising. But fandoms can develop a sense of entitlement to the stories they read. […]

May 6, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Masami Toku’s collection International Perspectives on Shojo and Shojo Manga: The Impact of Girl Culture might contain a couple of doubtful inclusions and off-the-wall tangents, but still outperforms many similar books in terms of its sheer usefulness and educational value.

April 30, 2019 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. “When I was in third grade, I spent September and October researching square things.” It is a typical statement from Aoyama, the super-serious pre-teen narrator of Tomihiko Morimi’s Penguin Highway.  It is a comment of simple truth, but hints at statistical obsessions, an eidetic memory, and an inadvertent hint of recursive SF, […]