| Sumario: | This book studies how transgressions of the boundaries of life and death are represented in Japanese contemporary visual media. Specifically, the book examines three case studies: the manga Fullmetal Alchemist, the animated film Journey to Agartha, and the computer game Shadow of the Colossus. By addressing how this theme is constructed by three different media, the book focuses on the narrativization of Japanese ontological anxieties. The book argues that, although these texts deal with matters of afterlife through fantasy worlds, the content of their stories, the archetypes of their characters, and their existential journeys echo contextually-situated conversations. Matters of gender, societal structure and, most of all, the tensions between individuality and sociocentrism not only permeate but structure the interrogation of our relation to the afterlife. This book stands to contribute significantly to media studies, literary studies, comics studies, and Japanese studies. Miguel Cesar completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his degree in History at the University Complutense of Madrid in 2013, an MSc in American Anthropology at the same university, and an MSc in Japanese Society and Culture at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently an independent researcher studying the role of contemporary Japanese visual media in the shaping of current discourses on individualism and community.
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