Right to Left, Manga's for Girls

When I arrived at the manga aisle of the Barnes and Noble where I went to research this article (that is, read Japanese comic books for an afternoon), two things surprised me. I already knew the statistics: manga sales in the U.S. have increased 140 percent in the last two years—they are the fastest growing section of the American book market and now take up more shelf space at large chain booksellers than American graphic novels. Nevertheless, I was amazed at exactly how much space that was. An entire side of a full aisle was devoted entirely to digest-sized manga; there were easily hundreds of titles.

Even more intriguing was what I found on the floor in front of the manga shelves: a gaggle of young teenage girls sat in a tight circle amidst piles of manga, reading comics. Perhaps the most interesting statistic of the manga boom is that approximately 60 percent of the readers are female. The more-than-doubling of the market is due almost entirely to the interest of teenage girls.

Manga is the Japanese term for comics; translated literally it means “random sketches” (note briefly that use of the phrase “manga comics,” a common faux pas, is redundant). Most of the manga published in America is specifically targeted and consumed by 12- to 16-year-olds.

Teen-oriented manga is further divided into two types: shonen, aimed at boys, and shojo, aimed at girls. Shonen doesn’t usually stray very far from the extant path of boy-fiction. There are heroes, villains, swords, sorcery, and in the words of Nobuhiro Watsuki, author of Ruroni Kenshin, “the defiant-eyed young man with mussed hair is a must.”

Ruroni Kenshin, a “Meji swordsman romantic story,” is the most popular shonen in America right now. Set in Japan’s Meji era (1868-1912), it chronicles of the exploits of a traveling ex-samurai. There’s nothing terrible about Kenshin, but it doesn’t cover any ground that American comics and young adult fiction hasn’t already. The same could be said of shonen in general.

Shojo is a bit more interesting, on a cultural, if not literary level, anyway. When I was younger, I always suspected that girls had a taste for the fantastic, but I could never prove it. The subject matter of most of the popular fiction aimed at young girls was fairly mundane--—babysitting, high school romance, or, as a fifteen-year-old family acquaintance recently informed me, “traveling” pants. While shojo has its teen romance, spunky orphans, and devastatingly cute boys, it also features distopian futures, family curses, and magical powers.

Fruits Basket, the most popular shojo of 2004, is about a charmingly determined orphan girl who ends up living in the home of the dreamiest boy in school. Standard fare, except that the boy’s entire family is possessed by the vengeful spirits of the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and anytime they come into physical contact with a normal person, they transform into the animal that corresponds to their birth year.

Works like Fruits Basket represent a shift in the subject matter of fiction aimed at the tween and teen girl set. The large number of young women now reading imaginative fiction, regardless of medium, means that in at least this corner of popular culture, there is a voice telling girls that they can suspend disbelief and enjoy the fantastic once in a while. No one’s wildest hopes and dreams should involve making $10 an hour watching Disney movies with an eight-year-old and then scoring a date with the hot older brother who comes home early.

It has always seemed to me that there was an essential human need to be amazed, to experience something bigger than our mundane lives. I’m just glad the fiction that appeals directly to this need is making inroads here, particularly with a section of the population that has been starved of it for some time.