More than a decade ago, I took on our high school's Anime Club not knowing much more than I loved many of the students since they were library regulars and needed an advisor. This is when it was simply a club of otakus watching anime and needing a place to hang.
It has morphed more times than I can count over the last fifteen years including a name change last year to Japanese Culture Club. We were watching less anime and spending more time on other pursuits such as drawing, attending cons, and gaming. But there were years with plenty of Pokemon and others where we borrowed the gym to do some epic cosplay. We even survived a year and a half of virtual club during the pandemic (hello, Among Us).
During this time, my reading life morphed as well, as it does with most readers over time. I was reading more nonfiction for sure, but also diving headlong into graphic novels and manga mixed with YA fiction and children's books. I have always enjoyed manga more than anime and like the best attempts at making a movie out of a fantastic book, I often do not watch the anime of manga I love for fear of the same issues that rear their head with books to movies. And in presentations with other librarians, I talk heavily about giving manga a chance for those that just "don't get it."
Enter my teenage son, Max. Both of my teen sons are bookish, but in different ways and this is evident in their divergent reading choices. Newfound friends, his love of origami, and a more popular culture lean toward anime and manga have driven him to copiously consuming both. He's borrowing stacks of volumes of manga and squeezing in episodes of his favorite anime. He's buying tshirts with iconography from his favorites as he moved into high school this year. He attended a Comic Con last year when I was there with a group of my Japanese Culture Club students. He wanted me to take pictures of our library's manga collection to see if there are series he hasn't read. He sought out the manga section of all thirty-six libraries that we visited this summer as part of a local expedition challenge in our area. And he's definitely got thoughts on his high school library's selections.
What matters the most are the conversations he and I are having about what we're reading. If I borrowing a first volume of a series, I usually slide it over to him before I return it. He's doing the same for me. And it benefits me in more ways because my clientele at school is now my son, just at a different school. I am indebted to him for making me look cooler than I am because he's borrowing manga that I am now being asked to buy for my library. Plus, it's the shared moments of dinner time or random conversations about plot, character, romance, or gore that I'm discovering more about him than I would simply by asking him how his day was.
I love this journey of Max, manga, and me.
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