Note: The article I discuss comes from volume 5 of Mechademia. While an eBook can be purchased via the University of Minnesota Press’ website, here, the article can be freely read through JSTOR by making a free account.
“World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative.” By Ōtsuka Eiji. Translation by Marc Steinberg. Mechademia 5 (January 2010): 99–116.
As Japanese media scholar Marc Steinberg writes in his translator’s introduction to Eiji Ōtsuka’s chapter, “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative,” “Ōtsuka is one of the most important writers on anime and manga subcultures in Japan” (EIJI 2010, 99). To provide a bit more historical context, throughout the 1980s, Ōtsuka worked as both an editor of magazines and cultural critic. It was in 1983 that under Ōtsuka, Manga Burikko emerged as a pioneering lolicon magazine (Galbraith 2019, 41), a result partially motivated by the influence of earlier shōjo magazines, such as Ribon, on male readers(Galbraith 2019, 35). Furthermore, Manga Burikko would be the originator—if not at least one of the primary cultural forces responsible—for the spread of moe culture (Galbraith 2019, 79). Four years later, in 1987 Ōtsuka debuted as a manga writer with Madara, a franchise that became exemplary of the media mix campaign, giving way to anime, video games, radio dramas, and more. Around this time, Ōtsuka was also publishing cultural criticism in the Yomiuri Shimbun, focusing on youth culture and the “Miyazaki Incident” (宮崎事件). Having been attuned to the developments happening within otaku culture, it was finally in 1989 that Ōtsuka published his book, A Theory of Narrative Consumption (物語消費論).
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