Beautiful Fighting Girl
From Nausicaä to Sailor Moon, understanding girl heroines of manga and anime within otaku culture
Details
Beautiful Fighting Girl
ISBN: 9781452916507
Publication date: November 30th, 2013
248 Pages
23
8 x 5
A foundational book illuminating the phenomenon of cool Japan, Beautiful Fighting Girl explains the global desire for images of little girls that kick ass. Saitō’s uncomfortably deep understanding of the particulars of this Japanese phenomenon allows us to finally begin to answer questions about the far-reaching implications of the now nearly universal fetish, of our atomizing technologies of interactivity, and of our obsessions with new media. Its place in contemporary letters is nearly unparalleled and I wouldn’t be surprised if this book gives that once a decade jostle leading to the n-th wave of feminism or a complete reconfiguration of our understanding of male desire.—Jonathan E. Abel, Pennsylvania State University
From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society.
In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saitō Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. For Saitō, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, Saitō understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world—a logical outcome of the media they consume.
Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose baroque imagination Saitō sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.
Saitō Tamaki is director of medical service at Sofukai Sasaki Hospital in Funabashi, Japan. A practicing psychiatrist in the Lacanian tradition, he is the author of numerous books in Japanese on adolescence and popular culture.
A Note on the TranslationTranslator’s Introduction J. Keith VincentBeautiful Fighting GirlPreface1. The Psychopathology of Otaku2. Letter from an Otaku3. Beautiful Fighting Girls outside Japan4. The Strange Kingdom of Henry Darger5. A Genealogy of the Beautiful Fighting Girl6. The Emergence of the Phallic GirlsAfterword to the First Edition (2000)Afterword to the Paperback Edition (2006)Commentary: The Elder Sister of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2006)Hiroki AzumaNotesIndex