Cultural Studies. Clayton, Australia: Monash University Publishing, 2016. vii, 293 pp. (Illustrations, music.) AUD$49.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-925377-06-4.
Manga Vision: Cultural and Communicative Perspectives, edited by Sarah Pasfield-Neotifou and Cathy Sell, joins an increasing number of academic books examining the overlapping Japanese popular media forms manga and anime (comics and animation). As its title indicates, the volume is mainly concerned with manga, though some chapters inevitably move well beyond the page. Not unsurprisingly, all of its contributors have research interests in Japanese popular culture. However, the volume is unusual in its particular assemblage of scholars whose primary area of expertise is Japan alongside scholars working in other fields, and in its consequent examination of these media, both in and outside Japan. In fact, most of the chapters do not focus on Japanese popular culture or on its (re)production and consumption in other cultures; rather, the authors address various aspects of interplay between the two. As the distinction between Japanese popular culture within Japan and its manifestations abroad grows increasingly blurry, this is a welcome approach.
In addition to the many illustrations, including excerpts of manga, charts, graphs, and figures supplementing some chapters, the book’s cover, introduction, conclusion, and section heads are adorned with manga drawn specifically for the volume by original English-language (OEL) manga artist Queenie Chan, visually exemplifying the blurred cultural boundaries that the book as a whole illustrates. The volume also provides supplemental multimedia materials online for four of the chapters accessible via both URLs and QR codes, the latter of which might tempt readers, including students, with a smart phone at hand to quickly check out the collections of photos, music files, teaching materials, and an impressive bilingual glossary of onomatopoeia and mimetic terms.
Manga Vision is divided into two thematic sections. The first is “Appropriation and Expansion: Cultural Expressions,” which “explores manga as an expressive medium through which personal identities and group cultures are expressed and developed” (9). Three of the chapters in this section could find a home in a typical Japanese studies volume: Renato Rivera Rusca’s study of manga and anime magazines and their role in the broader industry; Thomas Baudinette’s examination of the representation of masculinity in manga appearing in Japanese gay magazines; and Corey Bell’s analysis of Ohba Tsugumi and Obata Takeshi’s highly popular narrative Death Note.
Conversely, another three chapters could all readily fit within a collection on foreign fandom of Japanese popular culture: Claire Langsford’s exploration of the role of manga in the Australian cosplay (costume play) scene, supplemented by an online photo gallery; Angela Moreno Acosta’s interrogation of how OEL manga relates to Japaneseness; and Simon Turner’s investigation of engagement with Japanese culture among an online English-speaking community of fans of the male homoerotic yaoi, or boys love (BL), genre.
The final chapter in this section features composer Paul Smith’s reflections on Falling Leaves, a solo piece for piano that he composed “in response to the dominant gestures, tropes and overall design of … yaoi” (126). The chapter is available for readers to listen to online. While Smith’s chapter offers an approach to manga, and to BL specifically, unlike any I have seen—or heard—before, it is the chapters in the second section that collectively I find to offer the most interesting and valuable contribution to the field of manga studies.
This section, “Communication and Engagement: Language Exchange,” addresses the potential of manga to serve as a resource for teaching and research, language use in manga, and difficulties entailed in translating manga. In their chapter, Tomoko Aoyama and Belinda Kennett look at how Ninomiya Tomoko’s manga narrative Nodame Cantabile represents language learning, German and French specifically, while in a practical chapter supplemented online by sample teaching materials, Lara Promnitz-Hayashi makes the case that manga can function as an effective tool in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom, drawing from her experiences teaching in Japan. James F. Lee and William S. Armour’s chapter exposes the difficulties non-native readers have understanding how manga panels are sequenced on the page. While they are responding to the use of manga to teach Japanese, their findings have implications for the EFL use suggested by Promnitz-Hayashi. In a related chapter, Wes Robertson calls attention to how the language use of non-native speakers of Japanese is represented visually in manga via non-standard orthography, in part via an analysis of Hebizō and Umino Nakiko’s depiction of a Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) classroom in Japan in their Nihonjin no shiranai Nihongo (Japanese that Japanese people don’t know). Also looking at language use, Lidia Tanaka’s chapter on the use of impolite language by manga characters demonstrates how manga, with the multifaceted ways it expresses interpersonal relationships and communicative interactions, can serve as a resource for scholars of Japanese communication.
While Robertson does not explore the difficulties that particular ways of representing foreign speech may represent for translators, Cathy Sell and Sarah Pasfield-Neotifou address challenges of a similar sort, namely how to translate onomatopoeia and what they call “mimesis,” the particular ways the Japanese language expresses states, motion, and feelings, including “The Sound of Silence,” their chapter’s title. These words present great challenges to translators given both the abundance of such words in Japanese which have no English equivalent (an extensive bilingual glossary of which can be found in an online supplement), and the way they are generally stylized graphically on the page (somewhat akin to the way “pow” and other words appear across the screen during fights in the Batman TV series). In his own chapter on translation, Adam Antoni Zulawnik asserts the importance of translating controversial texts, specifically nationalist texts attacking the rise in popularity of Korean popular culture in Japan and vice versa, and at the same time makes clear the value of such texts to examine issues such as the tensions between Korea and Japan, again illustrating the value of manga to scholars.
By way of a conclusion, Cathy Sell drives home the point that Sarah Pasfield-Neotifou suggests in her introduction and which is carried throughout the book, that “the multimodal nature of the image-text” (271) combination that is manga is important not just to educators and translators but to researchers, including both those with an interest in Japan and those who wish to better understand Japanese popular culture as a globally significant phenomenon.
James Welker
Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan
pp. 167-169