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krpalmerStill casting around for new manga to start reading, I followed up on a title that had managed to catch my eye a little while ago and was able to read the first two volumes of My Lovesick Life as a ’90s Otaku in rapid succession. The decade in the title could have got my attention most of all. In the first half of my own 1990s, I was sorting out just what anime and manga were (for all that I saw almost nothing of either of them in those years); in the second half of the decade, I went off to university and joined the anime club there (and, before the decade was out, did manage to buy a first few “pre-unflipped” manga collections). Knowing a bit of what things were like over here, I was interested in a presentation of something of what things were like over there.
One thing I did happen to run into in the second half of the 1990s was insistences that using the word “otaku” amounted to unwitting invocation of a Japanese term condemning the most unbalanced and unsettling sort of fanatic. I tried to keep the simpler word “fan” in my own head. It stayed there even as a sort of wider pushback developed in following decades (along with a “homegrown” name that more or less put down anime fanatics over here, although that name did get pared down to something used with a bit more good cheer). The manga begins by contrasting then and now, with Megumi Sato, a single mother in her early forties, somewhere between shocked and aghast that her own daughter is “dressed like she’s going to Comiket” but still “walking to school with a popular-looking girl.” Megumi flashes back to her own teenaged years in the middle of the 1990s, moving to a new high school and trying hard to come across as ordinary. After she’s tried too hard, supposing she’ll wind up alone once more she starts sketching something like a “self-insertion comic” also featuring a heartthrob main character from the basketball manga Slam Dunk (which, I’ll admit, I only “know about” without ever having read to this date). The class president Masamune Kaji then shows some sympathy despite a somewhat intimidating appearance including hair slicked back from his forehead; when that hair happens to fall forward, though, he begins to resemble the Slam Dunk character...
When it seems everything is going Megumi’s way at last she dares to ask Masamune what he thinks of otaku; he replies, with a smile, “I despise them.” Megumi is left to try and hide her interests around Masamune, correspond with a penpal who she thinks is another girl but is actually another boy around her age (it has to do with his name being written using two kanji characters that, if read as a single composite kanji, become a girl’s name), and run into another and less stylish girl at school who reads dojinshi fan-comics at her desk (“Nerves of steel!”, Megumi thinks.) This more determined fan invites her to trample on an anime magazine with an Evangelion cover (which invokes a bit of Japanese history explained in the translation notes) to prove she can renounce her otaku ways to the point of finding actual love with Masamune. By the end of the first volume we start to get a sense of just why Masamune despises otaku; at the start of the second volume Megumi starts to happen on this reason as well. This seems more significant than her creating her own dojinshi for Comic Market, where her penpal does show up but can’t quite find the courage to reveal the truth to her.
I do have to admit to getting a good number of the anime and manga references when saying they didn’t seem overbearing to me; the translation notes make their own effort to explain things. The artwork had a bit of cartoony simplicity to it, but does seem able to present “teenaged fan-art” and make it look distinct. I did ponder the author’s pen name of “Nico Nicholson,” but also noticed an author’s afterword page where Nicholson talks about “channeling my old memories.” That did have me wondering how someone younger than me would take this manga; a back-cover blurb did recommend it for fans of Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, a manga I did get through but have to admit found a bit less compelling than the first two volumes of this one. That has to do with the tensions between fan and non-fan here being more interesting for me.
One thing I did happen to run into in the second half of the 1990s was insistences that using the word “otaku” amounted to unwitting invocation of a Japanese term condemning the most unbalanced and unsettling sort of fanatic. I tried to keep the simpler word “fan” in my own head. It stayed there even as a sort of wider pushback developed in following decades (along with a “homegrown” name that more or less put down anime fanatics over here, although that name did get pared down to something used with a bit more good cheer). The manga begins by contrasting then and now, with Megumi Sato, a single mother in her early forties, somewhere between shocked and aghast that her own daughter is “dressed like she’s going to Comiket” but still “walking to school with a popular-looking girl.” Megumi flashes back to her own teenaged years in the middle of the 1990s, moving to a new high school and trying hard to come across as ordinary. After she’s tried too hard, supposing she’ll wind up alone once more she starts sketching something like a “self-insertion comic” also featuring a heartthrob main character from the basketball manga Slam Dunk (which, I’ll admit, I only “know about” without ever having read to this date). The class president Masamune Kaji then shows some sympathy despite a somewhat intimidating appearance including hair slicked back from his forehead; when that hair happens to fall forward, though, he begins to resemble the Slam Dunk character...
When it seems everything is going Megumi’s way at last she dares to ask Masamune what he thinks of otaku; he replies, with a smile, “I despise them.” Megumi is left to try and hide her interests around Masamune, correspond with a penpal who she thinks is another girl but is actually another boy around her age (it has to do with his name being written using two kanji characters that, if read as a single composite kanji, become a girl’s name), and run into another and less stylish girl at school who reads dojinshi fan-comics at her desk (“Nerves of steel!”, Megumi thinks.) This more determined fan invites her to trample on an anime magazine with an Evangelion cover (which invokes a bit of Japanese history explained in the translation notes) to prove she can renounce her otaku ways to the point of finding actual love with Masamune. By the end of the first volume we start to get a sense of just why Masamune despises otaku; at the start of the second volume Megumi starts to happen on this reason as well. This seems more significant than her creating her own dojinshi for Comic Market, where her penpal does show up but can’t quite find the courage to reveal the truth to her.
I do have to admit to getting a good number of the anime and manga references when saying they didn’t seem overbearing to me; the translation notes make their own effort to explain things. The artwork had a bit of cartoony simplicity to it, but does seem able to present “teenaged fan-art” and make it look distinct. I did ponder the author’s pen name of “Nico Nicholson,” but also noticed an author’s afterword page where Nicholson talks about “channeling my old memories.” That did have me wondering how someone younger than me would take this manga; a back-cover blurb did recommend it for fans of Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, a manga I did get through but have to admit found a bit less compelling than the first two volumes of this one. That has to do with the tensions between fan and non-fan here being more interesting for me.