The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan (SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan)

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