Category: popular culture

Exit 8

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Exit 8 is a 2025 prose adaptation of a video game of the same name that was released in November 2023 and achieved viral success after being streamed by popular YouTubers like Markiplier and The Game Grumps.

The game version of Exit 8 (on Steam here) is a liminal space walking sim in which you loop through a (very) short passage in the Tokyo subway system endlessly. The only choice you can make is to keep moving forward or to go back the way you came, and you must do this according to a set of rules: (1) If something in the current loop is different, go back; and (2) if nothing is different, keep going forward. The “anomalies” occur randomly, so being observant is key.

If the player gets it right eight times, they can escape to the end credits, which play over Tokyo urban sounds that are like heaven after the underground corridor. If there’s any sort of mistake, though, the loop count resets to zero. (This) no-commentary video playthrough is about ten minutes long, and it’s worth watching for a minute or two if you’re curious.

Genki Kawamura’s novel adaptation maintains the same scenario and rules as the video game but creates a story centered around an original protagonist, an unnamed man in his mid-twenties who works as a freelancer in an unspecified field. Though he moved from his hometown to Tokyo with his girlfriend, the Lost Man has recently ended the relationship after he and his girlfriend grew distant.

As he exits a subway train several weeks after the breakup, the Lost Man’s ex-girlfriend calls to tell him that she’s pregnant. Before he can respond, the call drops. He rushes to get outside and call her back, and this is when he finds himself stuck in the endless loop.

Along with the Lost Man, Kawamura also gives a backstory to a figure referred to as the Salaryman, a featureless middle-aged office worker who travels through the loop in the opposite direction without ever changing his behavior or acknowledging his surroundings. In addition, the novel introduces an original character called the Boy, a shy child who cooperates with the Lost Man to escape the loop.

Exit 8 is one of the many horror-themed loop games to emerge in the wake of P.T., a “playable teaser” designed by Hideo Kojima and set in a single looping hallway. As the player walks through endless versions of this hallway, the game semi-randomly triggers instances of disturbing imagery that hints at a story of a man who murdered his pregnant wife.

In writing the backstory for the Exit 8 game, I get the feeling that Kawamura is likewise borrowing from its predecessor P.T., as well as the Silent Hill horror series that the demo was intended to showcase. While the Silent Hill games excel at exposing the psychology of an unreliable narrator protagonist, however, Kawamura’s adaptation of Exit 8 is remarkably shallow. Kawamura never provides the details of his protagonist’s backstory or attempts to explain his behavior. There is no complexity to this character’s motivations, nor is there any sort of nuance regarding his situation with his ex-girlfriend.

For some readers – including myself, if I’m being honest – this lack of psychological depth may detract from the story. If we don’t know anything about the protagonist or understand the conflict he’s facing, why should we root for him to escape the loop?

In fact, if we imagine the Lost Man giving up his easygoing lifestyle to join the corporate workforce in order to spend his adult life trapped in a relationship with a high-school girlfriend whom he no longer loves and a child he never wanted, is life outside the loop really going to be better for him? This isn’t the sort of question Exit 8 thinks to ask, nor does the novel attempt to interrogate the cultural symbolism of its setting and scenario.

At the same time, I think it’s worth pointing out that the novel version of Exit 8 reflects the stylizations of a genre of internet-based weird fiction called creepypasta (netto kaidan, or “internet ghost story,” in Japanese), which itself mirrors the “this could happen to anyone” anonymity of urban legends. Though creepypasta is presented as fiction instead of a recounting of a real event, one of the conventions of the genre is not to provide too many details about the characters, who are often framed as people posting anonymously to online message boards.

I also appreciate that, by refusing to give the reader any sort of emotional anchor in the Lost Man’s character or backstory, Kawamura emphasizes the sense of being disoriented while allowing the liminality of the setting to shine. Though none of the POV characters are inclined to wax poetic about the Tokyo Metro’s underground corridors, the book is filled with screen stills from Kawamura’s own movie adaptation of the book (here’s the trailer), allowing the reader to see for themselves just how uncanny it is. As in many images of liminal spaces that circulate online, a major element of this uncanniness is, as Freud aptly pointed out, the familiarity of the setting. You’ve never been to this place; but, then again, you totally have. Somewhere in your mind, you’re still there.

At 109 pages, Exit 8 moves quickly and ends before the reader can develop a sense of complacency. This short book is a special treat for fans of internet creepypasta like The Backrooms mythos, as well as fans of contemporary urban horror more broadly. Also, if you enjoyed Strange Houses or another of Uketsu’s books currently in translation, Exit 8 is for you. 

Though I have to admit that the novelization of Exit 8 didn’t leave as strong an impression as my original experience of playing the game itself, I’d love to see more professionally published Japanese creepypasta in translation, and I’m always happy to see authors adapt the ludic aspects of video games into experimental prose. 

Vampire Hunter D

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Vampire Hunter D is the first in a (still-ongoing) series of science fantasy novels written by Hideyuki Kikuchi and illustrated by the legendary Yoshitaka Amano. This first volume was published in 1983; and, in 1985, it was adapted into a film-length, direct-to-video animation that became a cult classic in the 1990s, when circles of genre fiction fans discovered ultraviolent sci-fi anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.   

I will admit that I was never able to get into the anime, whose art style doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I recently became interested in the novel series after rereading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe’s tetralogy is perhaps the defining work of the “dying earth” genre of speculative fiction, in which human civilization has decayed to a medieval level after a global disaster in the far future.

Vampire Hunter D is set roughly ten thousand years in the future, when what remains of humankind lives in isolated settlements supported by barely-functional robots and occasionally policed by traveling bounty hunters sent from the Capital, which is filled with ruins but nevertheless seems to be the last city of any size. The story takes place on the Frontier, which has a pseudo-American “Weird West” sort of atmosphere that will perhaps be familiar to fans of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

Lurking above the ranches and saloons and cowboys are the remnants of a European-style aristocracy, who live in gigantic castles fortified by hypermodern surveillance technology. The Nobility, as they’re called, are immortal. Through various genetic alterations, they’ve come to resemble mythical vampires, and they’re proud to refer to themselves as such. Though the scattered Nobility are capable of artificially manufacturing their own nutrition, they have grown cruel and proud, and some terrorize humans for sport.

Doris Lang, a seventeen-year-old girl who manages her late father’s ranch outside of a small and dusty town on the Frontier, has fallen victim to the attention of the local vampire lord, Count Magnus Lee. Knowing that it’s only a matter of days before she’s either taken by the vampire or exiled by her fellow townspeople, Doris stands on the highway and waylays travelers in hopes of finding a professional hunter who specializes in handling monstrous mutants.

In a brilliant stroke of luck, the first hunter Doris encounters is one of the greatest, a vampire hunter who goes simply by the initial “D.” Though he appears to be a beautiful young man, D is a mixed-species dhampir who possesses the superhuman powers of vampires without most of their weaknesses. For his own mysterious reasons, D consents to be “hired” by Doris for no other payment than room and board.

The ancient Count Magnus, who is backed by his beautiful but deadly daughter Larmica, will not be easy to defeat. To make matters even more complicated, vampires are the least of the dangers threatening the humans who live on the Frontier, and D will also have to contend with werewolves, witches, outlaws, and lynch mobs if he hopes to keep Doris safe. There are eight chapters in Vampire Hunter D, and each presents its own unique set of villains. All of these threats eventually converge into a perfect storm of danger; but, in the end, it all comes down to a battle between D and the vampire lord.    

There’s a great deal of action in Vampire Hunter D, all of which is translated in a quick and punchy style by Kevin Leahy. There’s a somewhat shonen manga style to the action scenes, in which each of the characters performs a series of special attacks that have a rock-paper-scissors way of canceling one another out. I’m not generally a fan of action scenes in prose fiction, but Kikuchi’s sense of pacing is excellent, as is the creativity devoted to D’s opponents.

I’m also impressed by how lowkey horny this book is. Stories about vampires are infamously erotic, but Vampire Hunter D has a more universal Frank Frazetta style of sexualization. Gender, age, and even species don’t matter; everyone gets the same “Vaseline on the camera lens” treatment. As with the monster-of-the-week action scenes, I found this 1980s pulp fiction style of writing to be extremely charming.

It’s perhaps because of the nostalgic charm that I didn’t mind the story’s relative lack of psychological depth or complexity. Though she’s capable of defending herself against lesser monsters, Doris is a classic damsel in distress, and D remains mysterious from start to finish. D’s opponents seem to be evil simply because they’re evil, and even Count Magnus doesn’t have a personality that goes deeper than the usual vampire tropes. His daughter Larmica is granted a modicum of character development, but this is sadly limited. Still, the gothic expressions of the “dying world” setting are fantastic, and I appreciate that the world itself has far more character than the actors who drive the plot. 

I’m given to understand that, as a series, Vampire Hunter D leaves behind its formulaic action-oriented structure after the first few volumes. I read the first volume around the time it was originally published in English translation in 2005 and didn’t think much of it, but I find it far more compelling now that I’m older and have a better understanding of the story’s genre tropes, as well as how Hideyuki Kikuchi fits into a timeline of Japanese dark fantasy that’s recently come to wider international attention with the 2022 video game Elden Ring.

Dark Horse Books has published the first thirty books in translation, which are currently being collected into ten omnibus volumes. The first novel stands alone, and it’s a relatively quick read. I’d definitely recommend Vampire Hunter D to dark fantasy genre fans, as well as to anyone curious about the roots of JRPG video game tropes and imagery.

Kitchen

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Banana Yoshimoto’s landmark 1988 novella Kitchen once inspired a great deal of heated discussion as a miserable chain of respected literary critics dismissed it as shallow and frivolous. Haters gonna hate, but I loved Kitchen when I first discovered it in high school, and I still think it’s a beautiful book that’s well worth reading. 

After her parents died in a car accident, Mikage Sakurai was raised by her grandmother, who suddenly passes away when Mikage is in college. Now Mikage feels that she has well and truly become an orphan, and she doesn’t know what to do.

Yuichi Tanabe, a young man who was friendly with Mikage’s grandmother, invites her to stay with him and his mother at their apartment while she gets her life sorted out. Though Mikage has never met either of these people, Yuichi’s kindness is exactly what she needs, and she’s so stressed out and dispirited that she takes him up on his offer.

The apartment turns out to be gorgeous – it’s bright and sunny and spacious, and also outfitted with a thoroughly modern kitchen and a giant sofa that Mikage immediately falls in love with. Yuichi’s mother Eriko is just as friendly and charming as she is beautiful, and Mikage instantly feels at home. Though she knows she’ll have to leave eventually, she makes the best of her time in a warm and comfortable space in the care of two lovely people.  

Eriko is clearly the star of this story, especially as she relates her own experience of loss to Mikage. Yuichi’s mother was the only woman she would ever love, she says, and she didn’t know what to do when her wife died after a long illness. She felt like the only reasonable course of action was to take on the role of “mother” by changing her name, getting surgery, and becoming a woman herself. She still misses Yuichi’s birthmother, but life goes on, and she couldn’t be happier. As Mikage describes Eriko at the end of the story:

Her hair rustled, brushing her shoulders. There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep that you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.

Kitchen is full of similar passages in which Mikage takes in the beauty of her surroundings while reflecting on her feelings. These moments are refreshingly light, and it’s as if the writing is washing over you in a gentle shower. Yoshimoto says that her goal is to create precisely this sense of peace, writing in her Afterword to Kitchen that “I know no greater happiness than that it may have cheered you, even a little.”

Kitchen includes a continuation of the story, “Full Moon,” which begins with Eriko’s murder. Mikage has gotten back on her feet, moved out of the Tanabes’ apartment, and become an assistant to a celebrity chef. Now that tragedy has visited Yuichi, it’s her turn to comfort him. 

Mikage is comforted and supported by Chika, a transwoman who has taken over the cabaret club that Eriko managed. Chika helps Mikage to understand that, despite being disowned by her family, Eriko lived a full life, and she encourages Mikage to find her own happiness with Yuichi. Chika’s advice feels like the central thesis of Yoshimoto’s writing: the world can be dark and confusing, so you have to actively create your own sanctuary alongside the people you love. 

All of this feels very much like shōjo manga created for teenagers, from the quiet and nonsexual love story between Mikage and Yuichi to the way that everyone seems to sparkle. The normalization of queer identity also has its roots in shōjo manga, as does the mundanity of the supernatural events depicted in “Moonlight Shadow,” the short companion story included at the end of the book. Yoshimoto’s language is filled with onomatopoeia and other cute expressions that feel directly lifted from manga, so much so that Megan Backus’s natural-feeling English translation is a genuine miracle.  

If you’re not in the target demographic for Kitchen, it would make sense that Yoshimoto’s manga-inspired style of writing might not resonate with you. And that’s okay! Lord knows that there are enough works of literary fiction written by and for older adult men.

When I discovered Kitchen as a teenager, though, this book was definitely for me. In fact, it felt like the first book I’d encountered that took me seriously as a person. Having run the gauntlet of Ernest Hemmingways and William Faulkners and John Steinbecks in my high school English classes, I felt extremely alienated by fiction as a medium. I can’t even begin to describe what an amazing stroke of good fortune it was to find that Banana Yoshimoto had reached out with her writing and spoken to me specifically.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the pop culture of the 1990s and early 2000s was a toxic slurry of homophobia and misogyny. In that sort of cultural environment, the independent young women and kind men and gentle queer sexuality of Kitchen were nothing short of revolutionary. I’m sure it was easy for older male literary critics to say that Yoshimoto’s writing was empty pablum, but it was something else entirely for me to encounter my first fictional depiction of gay adults who were treated as real human beings instead of stupid jokes or beleaguered minorities.

It felt like a revelation to see people being openly gay and also completely normal, and it would be disingenuous to say that this realization wasn’t political. Banana Yoshimoto showed me the rainbow, and sure, it was magical. How could it not be? But also, when I put this book down, I felt like I’d gained a sense of identity and purpose. When Chika tells Mikage that you have to fight for a world that accepts you, I took that advice to heart.

I was far from alone in being moved by this story. Kitchen was an instant bestseller in Japan, and it went on to gain fame overseas during the 1990s. In the 2000s and 2010s, Banana Yoshimoto enjoyed a degree of international recognition on the same level as Haruki Murakami. And she deserved it. She still does, honestly. I may have aged away from Kitchen, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect it immensely.

Admittedly, Mikage sometimes seems as though she lives in a different world, and it can occasionally be a bit painful to look back on the prosperity and optimism of the 1980s. Still, Kitchen feels as fresh as the day it was written, and maybe you’re exactly the person who needs to read it now.

The Blanket Cats

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Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s The Blanket Cats collects seven stories about the clients of a service that rents cats for a period of three days. What I appreciate about these stories is that their human protagonists are messy people who are clearly the villain of someone else’s life. Will three days with a cat fix them? Probably not, to be honest, but it’s still a nice fantasy to imagine that a brief experience of caring for an animal could completely change someone’s perspective.

“The Cat in the Passenger Seat” is a frequent companion of Taeko, a woman on the verge of retirement who often rents this particular cat to accompany her on trips away from Tokyo. With no family to support her through a recent diagnosis of a serious illness, Taeko has decided to splurge on one final vacation. As for where the money has come from, it’s fair to say that Taeko is on the run from more than her worries about the future. She’s always done the right thing and made sacrifices for everyone else, so she might as well be selfish for once, right? Thankfully, Taeko’s cat companion helps her see beyond her immediate problems.

“The Cat with No Tail” is chosen by Koji, a boy in middle school whose growing pains have resulted in the first major crisis of his life. Instead of being bullied, he’s the one doing the bullying. Well, sort of. Koji tolerated an annoying classmate all throughout elementary school; and, now that he’s in a new environment, he finally found the courage to tell this kid to leave him alone. Unfortunately, he didn’t express himself in the most diplomatic way, and his former classmate was so distraught that he made a serious attempt at self-harm and almost died. That’s a wild thing to happen to a twelve-year-old, and Koji processes his guilt by talking to the cat, who responds by showing the emotions that Koji has been suppressing.

“The Cat Who Knew How to Pretend” is rented by Hiromi, a young woman who needs a stand-in for her family’s recently deceased pet in order to fool her grandmother, who’ll be visiting her parents’ house one final time before they entrust her to a facility that specializes in caring for patients living with cognitive decline. To ensure that the visit goes smoothly, Hiromi also asks her boyfriend to attend a family dinner even though she’s on the verge of breaking up with him. It’s all well and good for the cat to pretend that everything is fine, but Hiromi realizes that the time has come for her to be open and honest about what she wants.

I recently encountered the term “joyslop” as an appellation for low-effort entertainment media, and The Blanket Cats is joyslop if I’ve ever seen it. Psychological realism isn’t a concern in these stories, nor is animal welfare. Just so everyone is on the same page, “renting” an animal to any customer who walks through the door isn’t a great idea to begin with, and cats can’t be trained to accommodate different companions in the way that certain other domestic animals can. I apologize for being crude, but I imagine that the reality of a rental service like this would be cat piss everywhere. Still, The Blanket Cats is pure fantasy, like YA fiction for adults. It’s joyslop.  

I’ve been thinking about the purpose served by The Blanket Cats and other cozy cat books, and I suspect their appeal probably extends a little deeper than simple guilty-pleasure reading. To varying degrees, the short stories collected in these books address fairly serious social issues such as, for example, dealing with school bullying as a parent or growing old without a social safety net. Books like The Blanket Cats provide a way to playact various scenarios from the comfort of your armchair – again, like YA fiction for adults.

I’m tempted to take this line of reasoning a few steps farther into social analysis and argue that the popularity of bestselling cat books might have something to do with the decline of “traditional” news media like print newspapers, morning radio broadcasts, and nightly news programs. I get the sense that, back when this sort of media was more widely consumed, journalists could provide authoritative editorial opinions of social issues, thus creating consensus and catharsis. In other words, a serious issue exists, but someone is talking about, and therefore someone must be doing something about it.  

Now that our consumption of news is so fragmented, who knows what to think? People are still looking for an editorial voice to trust, and I feel like this is partially what’s behind the success of books like The Blanket Cats. The fantasy of these non-confrontational stories about normal people dealing with hot-topic social issues isn’t necessarily that a cat is going to fix you in three days, but rather that these systemic issues can be fixed, because someone is talking about them. All things considered, The Blanket Cats is much easier to consume than, say, a political podcast hosted by wealthy kids in Brooklyn or a series of inflammatory diatribes posted to YouTube.

In any case, I’d like to express my appreciation for the translator, Jesse Kirkwood, who has found himself a lovely (and hopefully fruitful) niche in translating and localizing this sort of fiction, often through the charming vernacular of light Briticisms. This style of casual prose in Japanese requires no small amount of skill to render into the sort of English suited for a mass-market bestseller. I’ve been following Kirkwood’s work since his translation of A Perfect Day to Be Alone, and I’m always impressed.

If you’re in the market for cozy cat fiction, The Blanket Cats has more of a bite than the usual fare, but it’s still sweet and hopeful. This book hopes you’re doing okay. If you’re reading this review, I hope you’re doing okay too. After all, there’s definitely a place for joyslop in the world, and there’s no shame in needing a cat and blanket sometimes.

Nishiogi Kitan

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Nishi Ogikubo is a stop on the JR Chuo Line that runs through central Tokyo and out into the western suburbs. The neighborhood, known as “Nishiogi” to its residents, is right next door to Kichijōji, a trendy area filled with small restaurants, cafés, antique stores, art galleries, and beautiful green parks. Like Kichijōji, Nishiogi has an artsy and laid-back vibe…

…but it doesn’t exist. Not officially, anyway. So how do you get there? According to anonymous forum posts, if you take the Chuo local train that stops at every station, every so often it will stop at Nishi Ogikubo. If you choose to get off at the station that doesn’t exist, however, perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised by the people you encounter there!

Hideyoshico’s 2025 manga Nishiogi Kitan (Strange Tales of Nishiogi) collects seven stories about a fictional neighborhood where anything can happen. Despite the oddness of some of the residents, Nishiogi is chill and pleasant, and the neighborhood is a lovely place to spend time.

The second story in the collection, Mayonaka no hōmonsha (Late-night Visitor), is a great introduction to everyday life in Nishiogi. While walking home one night, an office worker named Kurata realizes that a cat is following her. It’s not like any cat she’s ever seen, but it seems to have taken a shine to her. She brings the cat home and names it Ohagi. Ohagi’s appearance changes every day, but the most noticeable shifts occur when Kurata is forced to stay late at the office.

When Kurata returns especially late one night, she finds her potted plant overturned and all sorts of leaves scattered across the floor. Hiding under her bedcovers is a big fat tanuki.

Kurata realizes that Ohagi has been exhausting itself while trying too hard to be something it’s not, and this causes her to realize that she’s more than a little tired herself. The next time her boss asks her to work late, she politely tells him that she has a pet at home to take care of, and that he can do the work himself. When given more love and attention, Ohagi becomes a little better at taking the shape of a cat… sort of.

Back in the day, Hideyoshico used to draw dōjinshi fancomics based on Yotsuba&!, and there are hints of the same themes in the collection’s fourth story, Natsu no ie (Summer House). While walking the family dog one afternoon, a young boy passes an abandoned house rumored to be haunted. As the dog frolics in the overgrown yard, an unkempt man eats instant noodles on the porch. Though the man claims to be a ghost, the boy doesn’t believe him, and the two become friends. The reader can never be entirely sure if the man isn’t in fact a ghost, but this is a very sweet and charming story.

Because I love urban legends about cursed apartments in Tokyo, I’m a big fan of the story “New Heights Nishiogi Apt. 202,” in which a young musician befriends a horrorterror straight out of a Junji Ito manga. The man’s apartment may be haunted, but the rent is cheap, and the eldritch entity is a companionable and considerate flatmate, all things considered. This story isn’t about the man learning to accept his flatmate’s “difference,” as he doesn’t seem to mind that at all, but rather about him learning to respect the spirit’s feelings and boundaries despite his difficulties understanding someone who can’t communicate in human language. 

Hideyoshico is a veteran BL manga artist, and traces of the standard mid-2010s BL illustration style occasionally surface in Nishiogi Kitan. All of the adult male characters are attractive, and I’m not complaining. There’s a wider visual range in the female characters, who seem a bit more grounded in reality, and I’m also impressed by how the artist has portrayed the cluttered interiors and alleyways of West Tokyo. Some of the background architecture is traced (which is 100% valid), but most of the ambience is hand-drawn and lovely to see on the page.

Each story in Nishiogi Kitan is perfectly paced according to a four-part narrative structure, which makes the collection easily approachable despite its array of out-of-the-ordinary scenarios. Though not saccharine by any means, Hideyoshico’s tone is unflaggingly good-natured, and the good humor of the characters is contagious. Though the themes of the stories in Nishiogi Kitan don’t shy away from darkness and nuance, the collection is a weird but warm ray of sunshine.

Mushishi

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Yuki Urushibara’s ten-volume manga series Mushishi is a gentle but eerie collection of short stories about the uneasy relationship between humans and the natural world. Originally serialized between 1999 and 2008, Mushishi is now available in a series of hardcover Collector’s Editions from Kodansha, which has done a marvelous job with the release.

Mushishi is set in Japan during an unspecified time around the late nineteenth century. Some people wear Western clothing and smoke cigarettes, but traditional ways of life still persist in isolated rural areas, which seem untouched by time.

Ginko is a mushishi (“mushi scholar”) who travels to remote villages to study and document “mushi,” a collective term for a variety of lifeforms that exist partially in our world and partially in the realm of the supernatural. Like germs or bacteria, mushi are tiny and exist unseen by the vast majority of people. Problems arise when mushi form large colonies, especially within human bodies. Even as he studies and admires mushi, Ginko is often compelled to eliminate them in order to restore health to their human hosts.

As is the case with non-supernatural illnesses, people severely impacted by mushi often find themselves unable to return to normal life. In the manga’s second story, “The Tender Horns,” people living in a village deep in the mountains find that they go deaf in one ear when the snow falls. Ginko tells the village chief that this is the result of a mushi called “Un,” which lives in human ear canals and eats sound. This is a temporary inconvenience for most people, but one woman was so deeply impacted that she died. Now her son seems to bear the same affliction, which has manifested as a set of small horns on his forehead.

The tone of Mushishi occupies a liminal space somewhere between nostalgia and horror. Many of the stories have happy endings, but they’re nevertheless pervaded with the uneasiness of living at the edge of an unseen world that has little regard for human life. Mushi, which are something in between plants and animals and spirits, act in keeping with their nature, which is simply to grow and replicate. To most mushi, humans are little more than substrate.

Some species of mushi seem to possess something akin to sapience, however, and their relationship with humans is complicated. One of my favorite stories in the opening volume of Mushishi is “The Traveling Swamp,” in which a marshland appears and disappears seemingly at will. When Ginko studies the pattern of the manifestations on a map, he realizes that the colony of mushi is traveling through underground waterways. The young woman who appears and vanishes with the mysterious swamp has become saturated with the mushi, which have welcomed her as a companion on their journey to the sea.

What Ginko sees of mushi growth and behavior is akin to many written records of Japanese folklore, such as The Legends of Tono and Tales of Times Now Past, in which inexplicable things happen to people seemingly at random. In a time before modern science and infrastructure, the natural world was just as dangerous as it was awe-inspiring. As much as people in rural areas were dependent on nature for their livelihood, they were also at its mercy.

Yuki Urushibara’s artwork delights in wild spaces, from mountain roads to deep forests to ocean vistas to overgrown villages, and her depictions of premodern architecture and clothing are equally impressive. Urushibara is especially skilled with the use of etching and screentone to convey a sense of dim lighting while still using enough contrast to creatively highlight the focal points of each composition. The inkwork is truly impressive, as are the watercolor inserts, and Kodansha’s release of the manga allows Urushibara’s art to shine.

If you’d like to bask in the twilit atmosphere of a deep mountain forest, I might also recommend watching an episode or two of the Mushishi anime (available on Crunchyroll in the U.S.), which is extraordinarily well-produced. The anime is slow and quiet and isn’t for everyone, perhaps, but there’s really nothing else like it.  

Age of Shōjo

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Numerous articles and book chapters have explored the origins of shōjo culture, and Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase’s Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girl’s Magazine Fiction contributes new insights while weaving these threads together into a tapestry depicting the history of how imagined communities of young women were shaped by the editors and contributors of popular mass-market magazines in Japan.

Age of Shōjo opens with a discussion of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, which was translated by Kitada Shūho in 1906 as Shōfujin. Through a close reading that compares the translation to the original, Dollase demonstrates how the novel “introduced a Japanese female audience to Western lifestyle and the image of a Western home” while still conforming to native Meiji-era constructions of femininity.

Chapters Two and Three introduce two key figures who helped shepherd amateur women’s fiction into professional venues. The first is Numata Rippō, who edited the seminal magazine Shōjo sekai (Girls’ World), and the second is Yoshiya Nobuko, who is famous for her contributions to this magazine, which were later published as the collection Hana monogatari (Flower Tales).

Chapters Four and Five trace the development of the portrayal of gender and sexuality in Yoshiya’s work in comparison with her contemporaries Morita Tama and Kawabata Yasunari, who also contributed short fiction to popular magazines such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend) during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Chapter Six jumps forward to the immediate postwar era, when girls’ magazines such as Himawari (Sunflower) were filled with romanticized images of the United States, and Chapter Seven chronicles how magazine fiction for teenagers took a more mature turn during the 1980s. The stories published in the 1980s were still commissioned, selected, and edited to appeal to a readership of young women, but this fiction now addressed themes relating to women in the workforce, including frustrations concerning the choice between marriage and a career. 

As related by the anecdotes in the book’s Introduction and Afterword, girls’ fiction continues to be widely read and culturally influential in Japan. Dollase handles this material with respect and care by acknowledging its problematic aspects but preferring to contextualize instead of critique. This is especially the case with the heavily censored fiction of the 1940s, as well as the work of writers whose stories were progressive when they were first published but may seem socially conservative now.

In her informative study of these texts, Dollase demonstrates how, “through magazine stories and illustrations, readers came to acknowledge themselves as shōjo, a new cultural identity,” and how the fiction of these authors contains “messages of resistance against disagreeable cultural conditions cloaked in fantasy, sentimentalism, and humor.” Along with Dollase’s deft and accessible analysis, Age of Shōjo’s annotated reproductions of magazine covers and interior illustrations are a gift to readers interested in the literature and visual culture of girlhood in twentieth-century Japan.

Mothers

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Mothers, released by Glacier Bay Books in April 2023 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, collects twelve one-shot manga stories about small but significant moments of kindness enacted in uncommon ways.

Umi Kusahara’s work is accented by touches of the fantastic but grounded in a reality that doesn’t pull its punches. These stories are particularly concerned with grieving and the emotional impact of loss, which is represented delicately but without sentimentality.

In the piece that lends its title to the collection, “Mothers,” two women visit the hospital beds of two teenagers who have only barely survived a horrible car crash. Each woman has a complicated relationship with the patient she visits, but they find sympathy and support in the connection they create with each other. As in the other stories in the collection, the catharsis lies in the moment of clarity when the characters can be finally honest with themselves about what they want and what will make their lives worth living.

Umi Kusahara originally self-published these short manga as dōjinshi, and it’s wonderful to see an American publisher uplifting noncommercial indie work that doesn’t fit into established genres. All of the titles in the Glacier Bay Books catalog are worth checking out, but I’m especially fond of Mothers, which I continually find myself returning to. Kusahara’s shōjo-inspired artwork is a lovely source of inspiration, and it’s a joy to bask in the sweetness of her worldview.

Glacier Bay Books is currently running a crowdfunding campaign for Fall 2025. The campaign will run until September 11, and this is a great way to check out and preorder their upcoming indie manga titles.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, originally published in 2003, is a sci-fi romantic comedy about a quirky afterschool club. It’s also one of the most influential light novels from the heyday of otaku culture. Although I can’t say that all of its humor has aged well, it’s a quick and fun read, and there’s a good reason why it’s still in print.

Kyon is an average high school boy who’s assigned to the same homeroom as Haruhi Suzumiya, a beautiful girl who has a reputation for being weird. True to everyone’s expectations, she marches into the first day of class and introduces herself with the declaration that she’s not interested in speaking to anyone who isn’t an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. When Kyon tries to strike up a conversation with Haruhi, he gets roped into joining the SOS Brigade, an afterschool club that Haruhi has created to research supernatural phenomena.

The plot twist is that, with the exception of Kyon, every member of the SOS Brigade is indeed an alien, an esper, or a time traveler. They gradually reveal themselves to Kyon, insisting that they’re posing as high school students in order to observe Haruhi, who unknowingly has extraordinary powers capable of restructuring the universe. If Haruhi becomes bored with the current universe, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she might inadvertently destroy it. It’s therefore imperative that Haruhi remains entertained and blissfully unaware of her power.

As you might imagine, this scenario has a number of unsettling implications. Is everyone in the story merely a figment of Haruhi’s imagination? Does anyone in the universe she created have free will? If Haruhi created “this” universe, what happened to the universe where aliens, espers, and time travelers don’t exist?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya goes right to the edge of these darker implications but ultimately backs off in favor of light comedy and mild teenage romance, a tonal balance that undoubtedly contributed to its popularity.

This light novel was adapted into an anime that aired in the Winter 2006/07 season. I admit that I’ve never watched it from start to finish, but the show was ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture fandom communities for years. The ending theme, “Hare Hare Yukai,” became a meme that spawned countless flash mobs of cosplayers recreating the iconic dance at anime conventions.

Due to its prominent place in mid-2000s otaku culture, I was considering including The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on the syllabus of a college class about Japanese science fiction and fantasy. I think it would be a good choice, but I’m still undecided. My hesitation is mainly due to the fact that one of the early chapters includes light elements of goofy sexual comedy that made sense in the cultural atmosphere at the time but might read a bit differently today.

To give an example, in order to blackmail the members of the computer club into giving her a PC, Haruhi takes someone’s hand and places it on the breast of one of the female SOS Brigade members before asking Kyon to take a photo. To me, this scene reads as the sort of stupid but harmless fantasy that might appeal to the book’s target readership of teenage boys, but I understand how it might be interpreted as sexual harassment (because, undeniably, it is).

Still, light novels are filled with this sort of thing, and I tend to think that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is on the “unproblematic” end of the spectrum. To be fair, it’s not anything worse than what’s in most Haruki Murakami novels.

I don’t read many light novels these days, but I enjoyed The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The pace is brisk, the writing is snappy, and the story offers a nice treatment of its speculative worldbuilding without getting too deeply into the weeds of hard science fiction. Looking back on this book from twenty years in the future, I found myself waning a bit nostalgic for an earlier (and, I think, more lighthearted) era of otaku culture. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an interesting cultural artifact, but it’s also a fun story that I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t yet encountered its particular flavor of high school comedy.

Shimeji Simulation

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Shimeji Simulation (シメジ シミュレーション) is a gentle but deeply surreal slice-of-life manga about two teenage girls living through the end of the world – or perhaps not “the” world, necessarily; but rather, an artificial world that they happen to inhabit. The focus of the manga isn’t on the apocalypse, which passes mostly unremarked and unexplained. Instead, the core of the story is the friendship (and understated romance) between the two girls, Shijima and Majime. 

Shijima Tsukishima has spent the past two years of middle school quietly living inside a closet, and the manga opens when she decides to begin attending high school at the beginning of the school year. Why Shijima became a hikikomori is something of a mystery, but her primary personality trait is that she dislikes being bothered. She plans to spend her time in high school silently reading books at her desk.

This plan is interrupted by a classmate named Majime, who aggressively demands that Shijima become her friend. Since a pair of shimeji mushrooms sprouted from the side of Shijima’s head during her period of isolation, Majime immediately gives her the nickname “Shimeji,” an appellation that quickly becomes as pervasive and persistent as Majime herself.

Majime bluntly inserts herself into Shijima’s life and persuades her to join the school’s Hole Digging Club, which is managed by an art teacher named Mogawa. Majime assumes that the club is little more than an excuse to hang out after school, but Mogawa is oddly committed to the endeavor, especially when encouraged by the quiet presence of a second-year student named Sumida who only communicates through abstract drawings. Meanwhile, Shijima’s older sister has dropped out of college to devote herself to the ongoing construction of a bizarre machine with an inexplicable function.

For the most part, the girls engage in mundane slice-of-life adventures. They chat in the classroom, visit one another’s houses, and attempt a study session at a family restaurant. Mogawa teaches her art lessons. Majime catches a cold. A group of girls in their homeroom start a rock band. Shijima meets a super-senior named Yomigawa who’s decided to stay in high school just to hang out in the library and read philosophy books.

What makes this manga interesting are the strange glitches in the world surrounding the characters. The mushrooms sprouting from Shijima’s head are a good example, but there’s also the fact that Shijima and her sister occupy one of the only two tenanted apartments in a giant danchi housing building that’s falling apart yet still somehow livable. 

As the story progresses, more glitches begin to manifest. Everyone wakes up to a snowstorm in the middle of summer, for example. One day, the school building is flipped vertically and becomes a pocket dimension with a separate axis of gravity. Another day, water loses its mass and floats in the air. Suburban streets twist into optical illusions, and fish swim through the sky.

Although small glitches seem to be innate to the world, they’re exacerbated by Shijima’s sister, who’s been building and experimenting with various devices that alter the fabric of reality. Each of the first three volumes of the manga concludes with a longer narrative segment that shows the consequences of these experiments for Shijima and Majime, who are briefly thrown into the gaps between the cracks of reality.

The cumulative damage caused by Shijima’s sister is countered by a godlike entity who presents as a young girl and calls herself “the Gardener.” The Gardener’s role is to ensure that the reality experienced by the characters doesn’t mutate too wildly from one day to the next, but her power is curbed by the features of the universe’s code intended to keep its residents safe. She might be able to repair gaps in reality, but she has no means of forcing her will onto humans, even if it’s for their own good.  

Like Tsukumizu’s previously serialized manga, Girls’ Last Tour, it’s difficult to say that Shimeji Simulation is “about” anything. There’s no plot to speak of, and the only real conflict is between the characters and the entropy eating away at the edges of their slowly decaying world. In addition, it’s never explained how this constructed universe and the characters who inhabit it came to exist. Instead, I think it’s probably fair to say that the manga’s primary concern is existential ontology. In other words, what does it mean to be human, and why do we exist?

I recently read an interesting essay (here) whose author argues that Shimeji Simulation is about the barriers between people, why we need them, and what happens when they disappear. If everyone were able to get exactly what they want, what happens when the desires of separate individuals come into conflict? If there were a world perfectly tailored for one person alone, could anyone else live there? And, if you retreat into complete solipsism, what’s the point of being alive?

Toward the end of the manga, Shijima finds herself in a situation very much like her self-imposed hikikomori isolation in the beginning, when she lived entirely in the darkness of her closet. In the simulated world she comes to occupy through her sister’s rewriting of the universe’s code, Shijima doesn’t bother anyone, and she never has to deal with any external input that she doesn’t choose for herself. Still, can we really say that such pristine loneliness is preferable to the messiness of human relationships?

I read Shimeji Simulation as a story about the various ways that people communicate and connect with one another. Shijima never becomes a “normal” or friendly person, but she still manages to find joy and meaning in her interactions with other people, even if most of these interactions are nothing special. This is why, in the fifth and final volume of the manga, Shijima breaks the boundaries of her personal universe to find Majime, wherever her friend might exist in the fractured constellation of simulations.

“The meaning of life is to understand love” may seem cliché; but, given how strange and surreal her story becomes, Shijima’s realization feels significant and well-earned. Life is a constant shifting and melding of interpersonal boundaries, and communication and companionship are worth the pain and trouble of being human.

Shimeji Simulation is a remarkable work of science fiction. The manga may seem to have an unassuming beginning, but its narrative structure gradually builds, loops back in on itself, and continually starts over from a weirder and more nuanced position. Likewise, Tsukumizu’s art may initially feel sketchy, but this style is perfectly suited to express the uncanny glitches and fluid malleability of the setting. Shimeji Simulation is gentle and quiet, but also immensely intelligent and creative, and it’s a manga to contemplate and enjoy slowly while allowing yourself to be transformed alongside the characters and their strange but fascinating world.

Shimeji Simulation hasn’t received an officially licensed English translation, but a fan translation is currently available to read on Dynasty Scans (here). If you’re interested in a small taste of the manga’s tone, I’d also like to recommend the short fan anime adaptation of the opening chapter on YouTube (here).