Otaku: Japan's database animals

Description

Preface to the English edition / Hiroki Azuma -- Translators' introduction -- What is otaku culture? -- The otaku's pseudo-Japan -- The pseudo-Japan manufactured from U.S.-mode material -- Otaku and postmodernity -- Narrative consumption -- The grand nonnarrative -- Moe-elements -- Database consumption -- The simulacra and the database -- Snobbery and the fictional age -- The dissociated human -- The animal age -- Hyperflatness and hypervisuality -- Multiple personality.;"Hiroki Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan's leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also a perceptive account of Japanese popular culture"--Provided by publisher.