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From "Cutie Honey" and "Sailor Moon" to "Nausicaa of the Valley of
the Wind," the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with
prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual,
always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both
hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the
objectification of young women in Japanese society.
In "Beautiful Fighting Girl," Saito Tamaki offers a far more
sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and
capable figure. For Saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex
sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional
spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku
(obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds
with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless
proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing,
Saito understands the otaku's ability to eroticize and even fall in
love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity
or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the
multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute
life in our hypermediated world--a logical outcome of the media
they consume.
Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a
comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an
analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose
baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku
culture, "Beautiful Fighting Girl" was hugely influential when
first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of
manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the
first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played
by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
This is the first English translation of a controversial Japanese
best seller that made the public aware of the social problem of
"hikikomori," or "withdrawal"--a phenomenon estimated by the author
to involve as many as one million Japanese adolescents and young
adults who have withdrawn from society, retreating to their rooms
for months or years and severing almost all ties to the outside
world. Saitō Tamaki's work of popular psychology provoked a
national debate about the causes and extent of the condition.
Since "Hikikomori" was published in Japan in 1998, the problem
of social withdrawal has increasingly been recognized as an
international one, and this translation promises to bring
much-needed attention to the issue in the English-speaking world.
According to the "New York Times," "As a hikikomori ages, the odds
that he'll re-enter the world decline. Indeed, some experts predict
that most hikikomori who are withdrawn for a year or more may never
fully recover. That means that even if they emerge from their
rooms, they either won't get a full-time job or won't be involved
in a long-term relationship. And some will never leave home. In
many cases, their parents are now approaching retirement, and once
they die, the fate of the shut-ins--whose social and work skills,
if they ever existed, will have atrophied--is an open
question."
Drawing on his own clinical experience with hikikomori patients,
Saitō creates a working definition of social withdrawal and
explains its development. He argues that hikikomori sufferers
manifest a specific, interconnected series of symptoms that do not
fit neatly with any single, easily identifiable mental condition,
such as depression.
Rejecting the tendency to moralize or pathologize, Saitō
sensitively describes how families and caregivers can support
individuals in withdrawal and help them take steps toward recovery.
At the same time, his perspective sparked contention over the
contributions of cultural characteristics--including family
structure, the education system, and gender relations--to the
problem of social withdrawal in Japan and abroad.
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