"Manga" leads a double life in Japan. Its popularity as entertainment for the masses is well-known: Subway riders furtively flip through its pages, young people crowd into convenience stores to read the latest installment of their favorite series, and gaggles of schoolgirls chat about their heroine's latest escapades. There are manga coffee shops and bookstores, manga conventions and art exhibits, manga Web sites and international conferences. In fact, manga is such a ubiquitous form of contemporary popular culture that it has often been compared to air.
The private world of manga, however, is relatively unknown to a large segment of the English-speaking audience. Award-winning authors like Fred Schodt, in "Manga, Manga! The World of Japanese Comics and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga," have deepened readers' general appreciation of manga, but very few studies have concentrated on the interrelationship between the industry and contemporary Japanese culture and society.
Sharon Kinsella's "Adult Manga" is the first English book to give a detailed, "behind the scenes" account of this reclusive industry. In her introduction, for example, she describes the volatile relationship between the contemporary creators of manga and their editors: "The manga world vibrates with secrets and rumors about artists abducted by their editors, artists who escaped through toilet windows, artists who fled their studios overnight, artists who beat up their editors, leaving them with facial scars, and artists who committed suicide."