Word: shojo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shojo manga are a big part of that boom. Mostly written and drawn by women, shojo usually put cute, strong-willed 13 to 16 year old girls at their center. The stories typically focus on relationships and romance, but often also include adventures in magical worlds outside the humdrum realities of school and home. Mecca Moore, 13, of Los Angeles, buys manga every week and claims to spend $1,000 a year on the stuff. She says she likes shojo because, "They tell a story in art that makes a person have a special connection. You can actually feel what...
...Zimmerman, who teaches a course on "Gender and Popular Culture in Japan" for Wellesley college's Japanese department, sees shojo's appeal from a more distanced perspective. "Shojo manga are popular because they tap into the social obstacles and challenges that girls face: feeling excluded by cliques, having crushes on boys, and often wrestling with issues of their own sexuality," she wrote me in an email from Japan. She continued, "But they are also popular because they present a glossy image of a different kind of existence where everyone dresses up fashionably and looks cute...
...currently top-selling shojo title, "Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play," by Yu Watase, typifies the style. Deftly combining action with melodrama, it tells of Miaka Yuki, a lazy student with exam nightmares. A strange library book allows her to visit ancient China where she meets a handsome but avaricious young warrior. Like most shojo the style of Fushigi Yugi includes lush costumes, impossibly beautiful boys and, yes, those big, saucer eyes and tiny, button noses. What new readers may be surprised at are the frequent shifts into goofball humor and the author asides -- both of which are manga tropes...
TOKYOPOP's big release of the new year will be the first volume of Natsuki Takaya's "Fruits Basket," coming out this month. One of the biggest-selling shojo titles in Japan, it features Tohru Honda, an orphaned junior-high student who discovers that the cutest boy in school turns into a rat whenever hugged by a member of the opposite sex. Far from repulsed, she moves in with him, as a housekeeper, and discovers an entire family cursed to turn into animals at the most awkward times...
...adult male, I have to admit that after reading nearly a dozen different shojo titles I find it impossible to critically distinguish between them all. Like the male-targeted superhero books, none of them achieve much more than being amusing but disposable entertainment. The better ones stand out for the quality of the artwork and clarity of storytelling. Miwa Ueda's "Peach Girl" (TOKYOPOP), about the overly dramatic personal life of high-schooler Momo Adachi, seems a cut above with excellent art and slightly more mature themes. For younger readers, Miho Obana's "Kodocha: Sana's Stage" (TOKYOPOP) about...