Content area
Full Text
ADULT MANGA: Culture & Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. By Sharon Kinsella. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2000. xii, 228 pp. (B&W photos.) US$39. 00, cloth. ISBN 0-8248-2318-4.
Among the corpus of English-language literature on Japanese comics (manga), haron Kinsella's book Adult Manga emerges as a unique and thought-provoking study that offers readers more than just a glimpse of this pop-cultural phenomenon's history. In pursuit of her aim, to illustrate how manga's status in Japanese society is dependent on the changing powerrelationships between manga artists and the editors of publishing companies, Kinsella provides us with a detailed analysis regarding the rise and fall of the Japanese comic industry since the 1960s. By addressing past issues of debate, including the repression of manga subculture, which arose in response to the social unrests and student riots of the 1970s, as well as new attitudes towards manga since the 1980s, including the revival of manga censorship and changes in the intellectual interactions between manga artists and editors, the book's greatest contribution lies in situating and evaluating manga within the course of Japan's social history and cultural production. In contrast to the common view of manga being a characteristic trait of modern contemporary Japanese culture, Kinsella, in her statement, "The closer we look at the making of manga, the more we see that it is not so much Japanese culture' as contemporary culture in...