Hello everyone, it is time for another manga review. With everyone starting to settle into the new school year, I felt it would be a good idea to look at a manga series about the lives of a group of students. The manga I chose was Shimoku Kio’s highly praised Genshiken, which is a slice-of-life comedy that revolves around the lives of the members of the Genshiken, short for Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyukai, which translates to The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. The members of the club are Kanji Sasahara, Makoto Kousaka, Saki Kasukabe, Harunobu Madarame, Souichiro Tanaka, Mitsunori Kaguyama, Kanako Ohno, Chika Ogiue, and Manabu Kuchiki. The majority of the members of Genshiken are otaku, and no not just the typical anime loving kind. While most of the members also love anime and manga, some of them are otaku for other things as well. For example, Kousaka is also a video game otaku, favoring particularly fighting games and erotic games, Tanaka is a cosplay costume making otaku and also loves plamo, or plastic models of mechas, and Ohno is a straight up cosplay otaku who always tries to scheme the other female members of Genshiken into dressing up as well.
The story begins when Sasahara, our main character for the majority of the series, tries to find a club to join at his university in his freshman year. Sasahara is a closet otaku and is somewhat ashamed of his love of anime and manga, getting visibly flustered as he walks up to the booths of both the school’s anime club and its manga club. He then walks by the tiny booth belonging to the Genshiken and becomes interested, deciding to attend a club meeting a few days later. On his way to the meeting, Sasahara runs into Kousaka, another freshman, who does not look a thing like the typical otaku, he dresses fashionably, and has the face of a model. Once inside the Genshiken room, the rest of the club members slowly leave the room one at a time until Sasahara is by himself. After a while, Sasahara gets up and looks around the club room, showing some of his inner perversion by looking up the skirt on one of the female figures in the room, and then begins looking throughout the room for porn.
Because every club has porn.
Sasahara succeeds in finding the club’s massive stash of dojinshi, or fan made, porn hidden in plain sight inside of a storage locker. He then proceeds to flip through several different issues, amazed at what he was seeing, because he was too embarrassed in the past to buy any for himself. Suddenly, much to Sasahara’s horror, he hears the club room door open.
Gotcha, bitch!
As it turns out, this was all a test to see if Sasahara was an otaku or not, as they spied on him from the other side of the building their club room is in, seeing him look at the figure and at the porn. The members tell Sasahara not to be embarrassed as it is a test they put all potential new members through, and all of them except for Kousaka have fallen for it. After trying to calm Sasahara down, Kousaka’s friend, Kasukabe, arrives to pick him up and meets Sasahara for the first time. Sasahara asks her if she is a member of Genshiken as well. Kasukabe hates everything about otaku, only coming to the meetings because of Kousaka, so she responds to Sasahara in the most logical way possible.
Logical
After skipping out on Genshiken meetings for a few days, Sasahara runs into Kousaka in the school’s cafeteria and Kousaka invites him over to play some games at his apartment. When Sasahara goes into Kousaka’s room, Sasahara realizes the main difference between Kousaka and himself is that Kousaka has the confidence to accept his otaku nature, as evident by his apartment being filled with posters and figures based on anime, manga, and video games, as well as huge stacks of manga. Kousaka calls over the rest of the members to play fighting games with them, and Sasahara slowly begins to accept his otaku nature, and finally agrees to join Genshiken as an official member. The rest of the manga follows Sasahara and the other memebers of Genshiken as they go through their time as students, adding some new members to the club as the series progresses.
The series has had two runs to date, the initial run was comprised of 55 chapters and was made into 9 volumes that were licensed in North America by Del Ray Manga, the second run was a relaunch of the series that happened a few years after the initial run ended and is currently still going. The relaunch has had one volume made so far, but no word on when, or even if, it will be released in North America. The series has spawned a total of 27 anime episodes that is broken up into two 12 episode seasons and one 3 episode OVA. A light novel was also made based on the series.
One interesting aspect of Genshiken is it had a manga within a manga, and thus in the anime it had an anime within an anime, in both cases this series within a series was called Kujibiki Unbalance, and Kujiki Unbalance was made into an actual manga and anime series of its own, with both the anime and the manga being headed by Shimoku Kio, though Kio only did the writing for the manga.
Genshiken is a really funny series that pokes fun at some of the aspects of otaku culture. The series is a personal favorite of mine that I highly recommend people should experience.