Here are 100 books that The Moe Manifesto fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
This book came out only a few years after my first encounter with anime and just blew me away, introducing me to a completely different world – a world that at the time was mostly out of reach because Western translations were still rare.
Having been published in 1983, it may be considered outdated, but manga translator and historian Frederick Schodt is a master narrator and does a great job of explaining how Japanese comics evolved during manga’s golden age. Now we can find any kind of information on the internet, but Schodt’s thorough analysis and engaging prose are second to none.
If you are into cultural history and like to go beyond simple manga talk, this is still a must-read.
Illustrated with the most representative examples of the genre, this book in English explores the world of Japanese comics. Since first published in 1983, Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics has been the book to read for all those interested in Japanese comics. It is virtually the bible' from which all studies and appreciation of manga begins. More than that, given the influence of Japanese manga on animation and on American-produced comics as well, Manga! Manga! provides the background against which these other arts can be understood. The book includes 96 pages'
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
The mother of all otaku guides was published by currentOtaku USA magazine’s honcho Macias and famous otaku writer Machiyama and reflects their tastes and idiosyncratic approach to the subject. Admittedly, you can find better, more complete, and updated otaku travel guides now (e.g. my book… wink wink) but this colorful book has a funky turn-of-the-century design and features things that you will hardly find elsewhere, like interviews with Mandarake owner Masuzo Furukawa, magazine editor Hisanori Nukata (about action figures), past cosplay queen Jan Kurotaki and Japan’s most notorious plastic model kit collector Chimatsuri. It’s a wonderful blast from the past.
If you're into anime (and manga), there's no place like Neo Tokyo. Here otaku dress-up cos-play style for real, 100,000+ fans attend cons to buy and trade, and anime soundtracks are performed in concert halls. Neo Tokyo is where anime has become both urban fashion and cultural zeitgeist, and this is its first street-smart guide in English. Featuring interviews with tastemakers, it covers studios, toys, museums, games, film "locations," music, plus where to hang and how to cruise. Four-color, with maps and index.
Patrick Macias, a specialist in Asian film and Japanese pop culture, is the author of TokyoScope.
I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
Together with TV anime, the first video games (e.g. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong) arrived in Italy between 1978 and 1981 and completely changed the way my friends and I spent our free time and pocket money. Ten years later I moved to Japan and, again, spent insanely long hours in dark game arcades playing Virtua Fighter. If, like me, you are a game addict, this book will tell you everything you need to know about game history and the intricacies and main personalities of each genre, from shooting and fighting games to retro and card-based games. It’s a huge saccharine high. Now excuse me but I gotta have my fix.
Home of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony, Japan has a unique and powerful presence in the world of video games. Another thing that makes Japan unique in the gaming world is the prevalence of game arcades. While the game arcade scene has died in the U.S., there are 9,500 "game centers" in Japan with more than 445,000 game machines. Arcade Mania introduces overseas readers to the fascinating world of the Japanese gemu senta. Organized as a guided tour of a typical game center, the book is divided into nine chapters, each of which deals with a different kind of game, starting…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I have lived in Japan for the last 30 years but my love for manga, anime, and games is much older and dates back to when UFO Robot Grendizer was first shown on Italian TV a fateful summer evening in 1978. Many years later, I was able to turn my passion for all things Japanese into a job and now I regularly write about politics, society, sports, travel, and culture in all its forms. However, I often go back to my first love and combine walking, urban exploration, and my otaku cravings into looking for new stores and visiting manga and anime locations in and around Tokyo.
Both the Italians and the Japanese are obsessed with food, and I’m an Italian living in Japan. You do the math. My first shocking encounter with sushi notwithstanding (I mistook wasabi for some kind of green mayonnaise) I love Japanese cuisine, and anime stories are full of people eating all kinds of food.
If you have found yourself watching an anime and wishing that you could taste a particular dish, with this book you can go one step further: you can make it yourself. Here you will find simple but detailed instructions on how to make lots of Japanese dishes, and their connections with a particular anime title. I wish I owned this book when I first entered Otakudom.
Experience the World of Japanese Pop Culture Through a Whole New Medium-Japanese Food!
#1 New Release in Animated Humor & Entertainment
With dishes inspired by otaku culture, this cookbook brings Japanese anime and manga to chefs of all levels.
Experience Japanese culture like never before. Japan fever has taken the West by storm. Praised for its attention to detail, it's no wonder that some of the most appealing images are colorfully culinary. From beautifully animated bowls of ramen and curry to cakes and confectionery, Japanese food culture never looked so good. If only you could reach out and take a…
Doug Walsh is the author of over one hundred officially licensed video game strategy guides for BradyGames and Prima Games. From Diablo to Zelda, his work covered nearly every major gaming franchise for two decades.
It is impossible to talk about gaming without mentioning the influence Japanese culture has had on the pastime. Specifically, Nintendo. This collection of essays and photos offers an anthropologist’s view to the Kansai region of Western Japan, and helps gamers (and travelers) understand the complex culture in which Nintendo is based.
In Kansai Cool anthropologist, writer and filmmaker Christal Whelan offers profound insights in the only collection of essays to focus on Kansai, Japan's ancient heartland. Kansai ; the region in Western Japan that boasts the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara, the bustling commercial city of Osaka and the cosmopolitan port city of Kobe ; has a character all its own, right down to its dialect, mannerisms, and cuisine. It is home to some of Japan's oldest history and an area where the country's most time-honored arts and crafts still thrive. Worldly and otherworldly, spirited and spiritual, trendy and traditional,…
I’ve been working in coffee for nearly 20 years, and teaching people about coffee for most of that. I love sharing how interesting, diverse, and fun the world of coffee is, and I want people to enjoy and value the coffee they drink a little more. It is a passion and a career that’s taken me around the world, and continues to reinforce the idea that just a little effort or interest in your morning coffee has surprisingly large rewards. The books on this list inspired my own passion for coffee and I hope they do the same for you.
This deeper exploration of coffee culture in Japan, a place we all associate with tea, is an interesting and surprising read. The author’s time in Japan serves as the backbone for exploring aspects of gender, perfectionism, and how the cafe in Japan helps people stay punctual.
This fascinating book - part ethnography, part memoir - traces Japan's vibrant cafe society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White's book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’m the author ofIs Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, which won the 2021 Diagram Prize, and The Darkness in Lee's Closet and the Others Waiting There. I write about pop culture forThe Forward and CNN.com. My writing has appeared in a range of publications, including New York Daily News, Jerusalem Post, and Philosophy Now. I’ve taught English and writing at the City University of New York and am a former writer-in-residence fellow at the New York Public Library.
Paul Levitz was a writer, editor, editor in chief, publisher, and president of DC Comics for decades. This oversized coffee table book is a treasure trove of his insights, memories, and analysis. It’s the definitive history of DC, which only he could write. And it’s full of fun colorful images, making it interesting to younger readers as well as a perfect gift to any pop culture or comics lover.
In 1935, DC Comics founder Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson published New Fun No. 1-the first comic book with all-new original material-at a time when comic books were mere repositories for the castoffs of the newspaper strips. What was initially considered to be disposable media for children was well on its way to becoming the mythology of our time-the 20th century's answer to Atlas or Zorro.
More than 40,000 comic books later, TASCHEN has produced the single most comprehensive book on DC Comics. More than 2,000 images-covers and interiors, original illustrations, photographs, film stills, and collectibles-are reproduced using the latest technology to…
Twelve Percent Dread is about the curious state of anxiety that underpins living in the 21st Century, when we’re aware of so many current and looming disasters. However, it’s a bit of a misleading title, my book is actually very funny! Most of my work is built around stuffing as many jokes in as possible, and I want the reader to really chuckle and feel joy when they read it. In this book, the jokes come from the state of anxiety that the characters work themselves into. Assuming you, the reader, also experiences a certain level of dread throughout the day, here’s a list of books that will hopefully help relieve it.
I wanted to recommend a couple of funny graphic novels to help stave off dread, and this book by Lisa Hanawalt is simply the funniest graphic novel I have ever read. The author is perhaps best known as one of the co-creators of Bojack Horseman (with her signature animal characters) as well as Tuca & Bertie. It’s a collection of musings and essays, told through Lisa’s incredible artwork. She has such an unexpected left-field sense of humour that is sharp but somehow always warm, underpinned by her beautiful illustrations. This book is like riding on a strange multicoloured rollercoaster though a candy dreamland, but you’re very securely fastened into your seat and feel very snugly held throughout.
Sharply observant, laugh-out-loud funny comics from The Believer cartoonist and New York Times illustrator
My Dirty Dumb Eyes is the highly anticipated debut collection from award-winning cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. In a few short years, Hanawalt has made a name for herself: her intricately detailed, absurdly funny comics have appeared in venues as wide and varied as The Hairpin, VanityFair.com, Lucky Peach, Saveur, The New York Times, and The Believer.
My Dirty Dumb Eyes intermingles drawings, paintings, single-panel gag jokes, funny lists, and anthropomorphized animals, all in the service of satirical, startlingly observant commentary on pop culture, contemporary society, and human…
Van Gosse, Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College, is the author ofWhere the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left, published in 1993 and still in print, a classic account of how "Yankees" engaged with the Cuban Revolution in its early years. Since then he has published widely on solidarity with Latin America and the New Left; for the past ten years he has also taught a popular course, "Cuba and the United States: The Closest of Strangers."
Perez is a commanding figure in this scholarship, deeply learned. I like teaching this concise book of his, full of powerful illustrations (cartoons over many decades), because it really gets at how North Americans have projected their racialized and sexualized fantasies and obsessions onto this island, unable to perceive Cubans as real people, let alone historical actors.
This title presents the images of beneficence, acts of aggression.For more than two hundred often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images - Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. One of the foremost historians of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and uncovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island.Perez analyzes the dominant images and their political effectiveness as they have persisted and…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
My interests as a historian involve examining how Americans organize to
change policy or politics through affiliations beyond political parties
and, by extension, thinking about how culture is made and supported
through institutions and businesses. These messy networks and
relationships ultimately define how we relate to one another in the U.S.
Indie music scenes are one way to trace all of these relationships,
from federal policy governing radio stations and what goes out over the
airwaves to the contours of local music scenes, to the business of
record labels, to ordinary DJs and music fans trying to access
information and new sounds that they love.
Alice Echols is not only a renowned historian of the post–World War II era, exploring gender, politics, and pop culture, but she is also a former club DJ herself. She brings those experiences to her resurrection of the much-reviled disco scenes of the 1970s, which, before they became corporate big business, were the site of contests over the voices of American culture.
But more than that, Echols reveals how disco was an underground phenomenon, one whose origins are somehow more hidden than punk’s, and connects transnationally across oceans and across U.S. communities that reveal a complicated map of U.S. culture that defies common tropes.
More than a chronicle of disco’s rise and fall, Hot Stuff instead explores “shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered,” as well as reveals the dynamics between underground and commercial that would roil college radio. On top of it all, Echols’s engaging writing…
In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the question, "Do you wanna dance?" became divisive, even explosive. What about this music made it such hot stuff? In her incisive history, Alice Echols reveals the ways in which disco transformed popular music, propelling it into new sonic territory and influencing rap, techno, and trance. This account probes the complex relationship between disco and the era's major movements: gay liberation, feminism, and the black freedom struggle. You won't say "disco sucks" again as disco pumps back to life in this pulsating look at the culture and politics that gave rise…
