All Is Relative, Nothing Is Reliable

The popularity of Japanese manga and anime has been steadily increasing in the Western world, and it is intriguing to speculate about the kind of understanding these Japanese genres receive. Mediated through different linguistic and cultural frames, these texts are inevitably remade. It can also be assumed that a less obvious, but more profound, process of refashioning constantly occurs as Japanese constructions of subjectivity, which underpin manga and anime products, are implicitly reinterpreted in terms of Western assumptions about subjectivity. Because many manga narratives involve a quest and characters who change and develop, they can be readily interpreted as if they conformed to multiple conventions of Western children’s literature, especially character development from self-regardingness to other-regardingness, from solipsism to intersubjectivity. An example from my focus text in this chapter, Takahashi Rumiko’s popular manga Inuyasha (1996-2008), is the demon Sesshōmaru (older half brother of the male protagonist, Inuyasha)

Epistemology · Nothing · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

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