The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan [Hardcover]

This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions ofThe Tale of Genjiuse gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another.

Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, Boy Love, boys and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, themanga Genjisvisually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study ofGenji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of the Heian society that come full circle in themangaversions.

The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Mangautilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga-and manga and anime in general once they went global.

An exploration of how manga versions ofThe Tale of Genjiusegender, sexuality, and desire to challenge Japanese cultural and social mores.Lynne K. Miyakeis Emerita Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures and the Asian Studies Program at Pomona College, USA. She has published and presented onThe Tale of Genjl³