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Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society. By SHARON KINSELLA. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. xii, 228 pp. $39.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Sharon Kinsella's Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society is the latest addition to the ConsumAsiaN Book series from the University of Hawaii Press, a series that includes, on the Japan side, studies of Japanese advertising agencies, women and the media, and consumer behavior, as well as the excellent anthology Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture. Kinsella's work is a welcome addition to this growing library of academic studies of contemporary Japanese culture, and is a wellresearched, insightful guide to one of the pop culture genres for which Japan is best known abroad.
Given the title Adult Manga, one might expect a titillating exploration of the sometimes grotesquely sexual and violent aspects of Japanese comic books; Kinsella's study takes a sharply different tack, avoiding both the type of reading that sees manga as the "gauche imprint of a collective Japanese unconscious caught unawares" and a more sophisticated "content analysis" of individual manga based on literary and psychological theory (p. 14). "Rather than taking apart the constituent elements of manga stories on an abstract level," she writes, "this book is based on research into how the different elements which make manga are put together in the first place. It is an ethnographic study of cultural production" (pp. 14-15; italics in original). In studying the "eccentric and rambunctious social network known as the manga industry...