Genderifying Manga : Shōnen and Shōjo Yokai

To modern manga readers it comes as no surprise that manga is heavily designated by gender and age. You have shōnen and seinen for males and shōjo and josei for women. Each genre has specific narrative boundaries and tones that are heavily weaved into each title and make it easier for consumers to gravitate toward the magazines that hold what they want.

The main reason why I have started thinking about this idea was that lately, I have been interested in reading manga that depict Japanese traditional culture, particularly yokai, Japanese traditional monsters and spirits. After I read Black Bird, I really noticed something in the way that all the yokai were drawn by Sakurakoji in comparison to the yokai that I read about in Kekkaishi.

What follows is a quick foray into my thoughts on not only yokai manga, but how manga has been slowly breaking out of the genderification that it has, almost willingly, put itself into.

     

Kekkaishi

I just finished an epic manga marathon that lasted about a week and a half and spanned 345 chapters.

I love Kekkaishi. It has this wonderful drama, intrigue, character development, and traditional Japanese culture that makes it absolutely foreign and familiar at the same time. To tell the truth, I actually started reading Kekkaishi years ago after the anime came out. I let me nerd out with a vengeance and marathoned the show, downloaded all I could from the internet, and discovered that the story wasn't over! There were hundreds of chapters of manga just waiting for me to devour. Alas, the manga wasn't finished in Japan and I was forced to wait years to get the complete story.

Now the manga is officially complete, it even has a complete guide for those who want all the statistics and characters in an organized form, I have been able to gloriously marathon the manga and completely forsake my other work.