Genshiken, by Shimoku Kio

So if Lucky Star is in the upper echelons of Japanese culture-based manga and requires leveling up to fully enjoy, Genshiken would be the final boss battle.

Genshiken is a comedy-with-some-romance series set in early 2000s Tokyo. It's the story of a college club composed of otaku. (The word "otaku" is mainly used by U.S. speakers to refer to anime/manga fans, for obvious reasons; but in Japan it's more of a catch-all for anyone really really into something, and it has more of a negative tone--like calling someone who's really big into history and does reenactments of the Civil War a nerd. For Genshiken, the club members are otaku of multiple things: manga, anime, cosplay, doujinshi, and computer and video games. It's a plot point, in fact: "Genshiken" is an abbreviation of the club's full name, Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyūkai, a.k.a. [in English]: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. This sort of well-rounded geekery makes them outcasts even among the other clubs that have a more 'nerdy' bent, like the Manga or the Anime clubs. Okay, this parenthesis has taken over the paragraph.)

Genshiken follows the lives of its club members over the course of four years, using the arrival and graduation of the main character, Kanji Sasahara, as the jumping off and ending point, and delving into the friendships, enemy-ships, relationships, and unrequited-love-ships [I'll stop, I'll stop] that develop between the individual members over the course of those years. This summary really doesn't do it justice, though: Genshiken is incredibly enjoyable if you're a big geek of any part of Japanese visual culture, whether you like anime or Japanese video games or cosplay, because it's clear that Shimoku Kio is too. This isn't moe jokes like Lucky Star--this is a slow-developing, deeply compelling story that's full of love for its source material: all the good and bad that the otaku world contains.

And it's often hilarious, to boot.

Genshiken is complete in 9 volumes, which were published from 2002-2006 and translated into English by Del Ray. There's also a new series, Genshiken II, which began in 2010 and is currently ongoing; but so far no one's officially translating it. There's also--of course--an anime: two seasons at 12 episodes each, and a 3 episode OVA, which ran intermittently from 2004 to 2007 and all of which were licensed for English by AnimeWorks. There's also--if this post hasn't been meta enough for you yet--an OVA, 12 episode anime series, and two volume manga for Kujibiki Unbalance, a (once-)fictional manga and anime series within Genshiken. Kio-sensei, creator of this fictional series, created a fictional series within it and then brought that series out into the real world.

Yeah.

When you read Genshiken, never doubt that you're holding something of great metatextual power in your hands.

Anime Culture

That was a little longer delay between posts than intended! However, since I recently attended an anime convention, it seems like a good idea to talk about anime fans' subculture.

Local residents are probably familiar GenCon, which is held yearly in Indianapolis. That convention is focused on gaming (video, board, and otherwise), but the basic principle is the same. The United States hosts a lot of anime conventions (generally referred to as "cons")--more than I can even pretend to know of--and the general purpose of them is to allow anime and manga fans to gather in one place with people who share their interests. Most cons will feature fan-run discussion panels about topics related to anime, manga, and Japanese culture, as well as have showings of anime; some of the bigger cons will have popular voice actors (American and sometimes also Japanese) who also host panels and sign autographs. Otakon, a yearly convention held in Baltimore, Maryland and one of the biggest in the country, will also have Japanese rock or pop bands come in to play for the dances; and this year there was even a fashion show hosted by one of Japan's popular designers!

Another popular fan activity at cons is dressing up as favorite characters from an anime or manga series, or even from video games and Japanese TV shows. This is called "cosplay" (short for 'costume play;' despite using English words, to the extent of my knowledge this term originated in Japan. Language is crossing boundaries and getting more fluid than ever!) Below is a photograph of two people who are cosplaying characters from the video game Kingdom Hearts:


Photo from the Cosplay.com forums; photographer Paul Crino.

The bigger a convention is, the more likely it is to have a wide range of things going on during it to appeal to of its attendees. Smaller cons can have more specific themes, like focusing solely on manga, or on Japanese culture, or on specific topics and genres of anime and manga. Most cons that are focused on a specific topic will state as much in their burbs and on their webpages; bigger cons, like Otakon or AnimeExpo in California, will generally cover a lot more topics.

If you're interested in attending an anime convention, Indiana has one of its very own! It's called Ikatsucon, and is held yearly in Fort Wayne.