J-Lit and maid cafes
There are those of us inclined to snigger at the mere sight of one of the Book Off! chain in Japan but Japanese literature in English is becoming serious business according to the excellent J-Lit resource.
Do check out the emerging writers section and the new trends section also.
Britain’s Daily Telegraph (a conservative paper trying to get younger readers) last week mentioned the rise of Otaku literature, particularly Densha Otoko:
. . .the “real love story” of a painfully shy computer programmer and a sophisticated woman whom he meets on a train. A peculiarly Japanese twist on the beauty and the beast myth, it was written in the style of an internet chatroom exchange - the postings of a hapless nerd negotiating his first romance, running alongside the encouraging responses of an anonymous community of online “friends”.
Of course, the article wouldn’t be complete without a trip to that emerging hotbed of live otaku culture, the maid café, purely in the name of research. The correspondent believes the otaku male may yet become as recognisable a symbol of contemporary Japan as the over-worked salaryman.
The current story on the “emerging writers section” site “Chatty” by Chiya Fujino is a little on the noir end of things,but still a good read.This site is worth revisiting.(Thanks Tokyoid).
May 29th, 2006 at 7:26 am[...] I previously wrote about the rising western media perception of the otaku as somehow symbolic of Japanese males in 2006. I visited my first maid cafe in Akihabara recently and was slightly underwhelmed at the experience (there were families in there). Even the vacuous quarters of Dazed and Confused magazine (which entirely lives up to the latter part of its name) have cottoned on to the phenomenon, getting their Tokyo correspondent to hugely miss the point in the process. [...]
August 21st, 2006 at 10:28 pm