With the rise of Superman and Batman almost a hundred years ago, the US became the home of comic books. Then, before the turn of the 21st Century, eyes turned towards Japan and its manga industry. Today, it’s Korean manhwa (also known as webtoons) that have the eager attention of so many comics fans. We …
Much like how Netflix and HBO sparked a new golden age of TV a few years ago, shonen manga is seeing its own new golden age. In the 90s, there was Dragon Ball. Ten years later, we had the ‘big three’ of Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. Now, we have series’ like My Hero Academia, …
2020 was a really excellent year for literature in translation, with some stand-out new Korean books that included the spectacular Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo (tr. Jamie Chang). 2021, however, is looking to top last year’s offering of Korean books by offering us a refreshing selection of genre fiction and queer fiction. Until …
Tatsuki Fujimoto has gone from rising star to king of the shonen manga genre in a very short space of time. Like Attack on Titan’s creator Hajime Isayama, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s rise has been like that of a rocket, with all the speed, excitement, and splendour. It began with the Fire Punch manga and was solidified …
“The lives of the characters in this story are burning up within their bodies,” Saihate writes in the afterword to Astral Season, Beastly Season. “They certainly cannot expose those lives to others, and no one will understand them fully.” This is the debut novel in English by a celebrated young poet in Japan. It’s a …
Indonesia, Asia’s largest archipelago, is one of the world’s most ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse countries. It is a place called home by every kind of human being. As soon, Indonesian novels, stories, and poems offer readers that same kind of diversity and excitement. The Indonesian novels, stories, and poems found here do not encompass …
‘Wrapped up in our hectic lives, there’s something soothing about reading a narrative that has nowhere to be.’ Guest Post courtesy of Osusume Books The narratives found in Japanese literature have a unique power to heal the minds of its readers. A tough day of work ends. It’s time to flush the stress out of your …
Of all the most beloved, best-selling manga — the ones with the biggest legacies; the staunchest fanbases; the biggest numbers — most of them are shonen manga. But many of those shonen manga are now finished and aging. Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach. These names are being replaced, but by what? By these fantastic modern shonen …
Nobody does horror like Junji Ito, and there is no manga quite like a Junji Ito manga. While scary stories have been told for as long as we’ve had stories, and mythologies across the world are filled with creatures and tales of terror, it’s only within the last century that horror has become cemented as …
It’s an irrefutable fact that Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is the biggest anime in the world right now. Hype surrounding the Demon Slayer anime is intense, and the Mugen Train movie has become one of the biggest box office hits in the history of Japanese animation. Because of this, the Demon Slayer manga, written …
