Manga 54
Books: Women’s Manga etc…
By Jonathan Clements. Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities seems at first glance like a grab-bag of buzzwords assembled to attract the attention of search engines rather than humans. The introduction by Fusami Ogi gives up on defining what manga actually means, and her colleague Kazumi Nagaike announces that “…the […]
Interview: Naoki Urasawa
By Andrew Osmond. “I have been told that the UK is one of the countries where manga hasn’t really been culturally assimilated,” declares the manga giant Naoki Urasawa. “I couldn’t quite grasp why the country which had the Beatles, who loved rock music, couldn’t understand manga.”
Manga: My Brother’s Husband
By Andrew Osmond. The manga My Brother’s Husband is a family drama, like some of the best-known Japanese films. Like Tokyo Story, it centres on an absence, a family member who’s died, and on characters bonding round the missing person. Like many Kore-eda films (and Hosoda’s The Wolf Children), it’s about an alternative family, not […]
Manga at the British Museum
By Andrew Osmond. The case against putting a Manga exhibition in the British Museum was made in three papers – The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times – on the morning I visited it. Actually, one argument was effectively made before the exhibition was announced. In 2017, the Independent newspaper ranted against the British Museum […]
Blue Spring
by Jeremy Clarke. Teenage high school movie Blue Spring (2001) centres on the leader of a violent boys’ gang in their final year at school. The nonchalant Kujo (Ryuhei Matsuda) has befriended Aoki (Hirofumi Arai in his debut role) since the latter first joined his class in their infancy: these days Aoki is Kujo’s number […]