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Lunning, Frenchy, ed. Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 304 pp. Softcover. ISBN 978-0-81665266-2. $19.95.
Mechodemia 2: Networks of Desire, the second volume in the annual Mechademia series that began in 2006 with Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga, is almost double the length of that first volume and improves on its mission to examine a wide range of contemporary anime and manga by expanding the coverage to include key issues at play in Japanese society and popular culture as it becomes increasingly globalized. This aspect reflects the "networks" part of the collection's subtitle. Divided into five sections, the first four, "Shöjo," "Powers of Time," "Animaliza tion," and "Horizons," represent the bulk of the primary essays, with the fifth, "Review and Commentary" (a standard section of each volume), devoted to reviews and commentary on everything from novels and films to art exhibitions to personal statements by creators working in the fields of anime or manga. The essays average fifteen to twenty pages in length and all have footnotes, although some of these are brief and others are much more detailed, so using them for continued research could create mixed results as it is sometimes difficult to ascertain from the cited sources that have limited supplemental comments in the footnotes the level of detail of the secondary materials themselves.
All of the essays in this volume deal with the "desire" part of the collection's subtitle, and while desire to some certainly includes a sexual component (although this collection, to borrow terminology from anime, is much more "lime" [implicit] than "lemon" [explicit] with regard to its sexual content), desire can also manifest as fantasy, consumption, nostalgia, hunger, romance, and friendship. One reason for the considerable amount of slippage concerning the definition of desire is related to the difficulty of expressing the cultural differences that influence the very conceptualizations of the term. Keith Vincent's essay, "A Japanese Eie etra and Her Queer Progeny," moves toward thinking about the complexities of translation in capturing nuances of thought and language, but his and a few others are in the minority in acknowledging how authences react differently to texts they encounter based on their cultural contexts.
The varying manifestations of desire in text and image are...