Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga

<b>This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics</b>. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of <i>The Tale of Genji</i> use gender sexuality and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership morality and ethics and what is translatable from one culture to another.<br/><br/>Lynne K. Miyake shows that through their girls ladies Boy Love boys and young men and informational comics remediations of the tale the <i>manga Genjis</i> visually 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 of <i>Genji manga</i> 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 the <i>manga</i> versions.<br/><br/><i>The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga</i> utilizes 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.