This is a paper I wrote in 1989, when I was an M.A. student in East Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a new convert to shōjo manga. I was bursting to say something about this incredible genre I had discovered, and particularly about HAG...

I'm often asked about this paper I wrote in 2003, because a lot of people are interested in what we used to call yaoi and now mostly call "Boys' Love" or just "BL." I've had it uploaded to Academia.edu for a while, but there's something sketchy about that site, and I d...

First, a couple of things. You may noticed I've changed my name. Here's how and why. Since coming out as transgender of couple of years ago, I had been sticking with the name my parents gave me at birth. Needless to say, it doesn't sound like a woman's name. People wer...

Today's post is a translation of a post I made to my Japanese blog a year ago. I think it's relevant to my post of a few days ago. (Names are in Japanese order, surname first.)

Last June I spent an afternoon at the research center of the Kyoto International Manga Museum...

Since I recently ranted on Twitter about the Magnificent Forty-Niners (here, here), and specifically about how glorifying them diminishes the contributions of their predecessors (here), I suppose I should offer some information about the giants on whose shoulders the w...

No, not the Eighteen-Forty-Niners of the California Gold Rush. The Nineteen-Forty-Niners, who created the golden rush of girls' comics in Japan in the 1970s. I was just reading the English-language Wikipedia article on the topic, and frankly it's pretty awful. Sadder y...

To everyone who has already purchased or ordered my translation of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas, please note that there are numerous errors. Most significantly, there is text missing in panels 4, 5 and 6 on page 29. They should read as follows:

Panel 4, Oskar: ….

Pan...

While I'm still trying to put together a coherent intro to the main theme of this blog (to wit, the decline of shōjo manga), I've decided to fill the awkward silence with an essay I wrote in 2004 that seems relevant to the very recent controversy about Scarlett Johanss...

Way back in the early days of the World Wide Web, I created the Shōjo Manga Home Page. I was pretty good at maintaining it throughout the nineties (hah!), but slacked in the new century to the point where updates were coming in once every two or three years. Now known...