Manga Medievalism: The European Middle Ages

Essentially, the belief that the superiority of western countries has its roots in the ‘crises and turning points’ of the Middle Ages lies at the heart of the nineteenth-century national medievalism.4 Berger, National Medievalism in the Twenty-First Century, p. 33. On the one hand, adopting this discourse has had a profound impact on Japan’s perception of its own past (as will be discussed in the next section); on the other, it led to the early transmission, translation, and dissemination of medieval texts in Meiji Japan. Amongst these, the first that were introduced were Arthurian romances, notably Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, which was included by the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn in his lectures on western literature. Employed at Tokyo Imperial University between 1896 and 1903, Hearn chose Malory as he believed the tales of the Knights of the Round Table represented a ‘strong western moral’, one that his Japanese students might be especially susceptible to due to the similarities between the medieval concept of chivalry and ‘the old Samurai idea implied in this country’.5 Masako Takagi, ‘Malory in Japan’, in Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (eds), A New Companion to Malory (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 271–95, at p. 273. For the full list of non-Japanese who taught in English Studies at Tokyo Imperial University, see Hisaaki Yamanouchi, ‘Saitō Takeshi (1887–1982)’, in Hugh Gortazzi (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Vol. 8 (Leiden, 2013), pp. 596–607, at p. 597. Among them, one notable individual is the American lecturer Augustus Wood, who was Hearn’s predecessor and whose interests encompassed Middle German, Old English, and Old Norse literature and philology. His obituary of Lord Tennyson, translated by the then-student Natsume Soseki, no doubt influenced Soseki’s own interest in Arthurian materials and his later incorporation of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in his Arthurian fiction Kairo-kō. Takagi, ‘Malory in Japan’, pp. 279–84. Hearn’s influence, along with the growing exchange between Japan and the West (especially through Japanese intellectuals who studied in Germany), engendered a succession of Japanese academics who studied, wrote on, and translated Arthurian texts and from there gradually expanded their interests and areas of expertise into other fields of medieval literature and linguistics.6 Takagi, ‘Malory in Japan’, pp. 285–9. Medieval Icelandic literature, as mapped out by Minoru Ozawa in this volume, would soon join the fray as a particularly admirable literary repertoire of the Germanic past.7 See also Halldór Stefánsson, ‘Foreign Myths and Sagas in Japan: The Academics and the Cartoonists’, in Gísli Pálsson (ed.), Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (Oxford, 1994), pp. 75–99; Kunishiro Sugawara, ‘A Report on Japanese Translations of Old Icelandic Literature’, Scripta Islandica, 27 (1976), 24–37.

Though largely confined to academia, these early studies and translations contributed in turn to the dissemination of medieval images in other cultural spheres. They paved the way for the popularisation of the Arthurian framework (i.e., knights and their quests), which provided a foundation for Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) to build his own fictional world. Still to this day, his two Arthurian fictions, Kairo-kō: A Dirge (The Shallot Dew)8 The title Kairo-kō is borrowed from a second-century Chinese elegy, in which the poet compares the collapse of the Han Dynasty to the morning dew on kai, a type of shallot. The title thus mourns the transience of life, while punning on Shalott. and Maboroshi no Tate (Shield of Illusion), both published in 1905, remain the most conventional medievalist recreation of the Arthurian world by an East-Asian author. Kairo-kō is a mixture of Clark’s two medievalisms, as it is a directly reworking of a medieval work – in this case Malory’s Elaine of Astolat episode – meshed with the reworking of a medievalist product, namely Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’;9 Clark, ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xii. Maboroshi no Tate is a chivalric romance entirely of Soseki’s own creation, featuring a pair of star-crossed lovers and a magical shield that once belonged to a Nordic giant.10 For Soseki’s Arthurian fictions, see Momma, ‘Medievalism—Colonialism—Orientalism’, pp. 141–51, and Ann-Marie Dunbar, ‘“Three Leagues Away from a Human Colour”: Natsume Soseki in Late-Victorian London’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 46 (2018), 221–36. In particular, Dunbar also argues that Soseki identifies himself with English women, who however consider him to be an other; in Kairo-kō, Soseki uses the Lady of Shalott to reflect ‘the extent of his alienation from actual English people’ (at p. 231). Kairo-kō has been translated to English in Natsume Soseki, ‘Kairo-kō: A Dirge’, trans. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Andrew Armour, in Richard Barber (ed.), Arthurian Literature II (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 92–126. Maboroshi no Tate unfortunately remains untranslated to this day, but a plot summary can be found in Momma, ‘Medievalism—Colonialism—Orientalism’, pp. 149–51.

Likewise, medievalist manga follow a similar trajectory, indiscriminately and creatively taking inspiration from both medieval and medievalist sources, with a distinctive taste for the adventure/quest-based structure, which works particularly well for long-term serialisation. Once incorporated, these elements – often fragments of the European Middle Ages – are recontextualised and freely adapted so as to, on the one hand, speak to the Japanese readership, to reflect their collective experience, and to channel both their and the manga artist’s concerns; on the other hand, as consumed merchandise, they must conform to generic conventions, local interests, and contemporary trends. This intricate process of creation will surface time and again in this volume, in the cases of not only high-profile manga series such as Vinland Saga and Berserk, but also other imported cultural products such as American baseball culture. While the titles examined here are confined to the post-war years, especially after the first manga fantasy boom in the 1980s, an early example can be found in Katsuji Matsumoto’s Nazo no kurōbā (The Mysterious Clover), a sixteen-page shōjo (young girl’s) manga published in 1934. The story revolves around Clover, a shepherdess, who fights off, while wearing a mask, the brigands who have toppled the king and have been violently looting her village. Despite obvious changes, Clover proves to be a remarkably fine rendering of Robin Hood both as depicted in the medieval legends and in the 1922 silent movie Robin Hood.11 Ryan Holmberg, ‘Matsumoto Katsuji: Modern Tomboys and Early Shōjo Manga’, in Ogi Fusami, Rebecca Suter, Nagaike Kazumi, and John A. Lent (eds), Women’s Manga in Asia and Beyond: Uniting Different Cultures and Identities (New York, 2019), pp. 199–226. In particular, Matsumoto’s choice to reimagine Robin Hood as an otenba (tomboy) sets a precedent for the so-called sentō bishōjo (beautiful fighting girls) trope: a type of lady knight who became particularly popular in the 1980s and developed into a standard figure in manga aesthetics and narration. In this volume, we will see familiar Old Norse entities such as Fenrir and the Valkyries recast in this very model, as well as the female King Arthur/Artoria in the Fate franchise, who remains the best-known example of this character-type.12 Tamaki Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis, 2011); Danesin and Hernández-Pérez, ‘Mangaesque Knights’, pp. 60–1.

The 1960s and 70s saw the early adoption and adaptation of the ‘Sword and Sorcery’ genre, thanks to the prompt translations of European and North-American fantasy authors (e.g. J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and Ursula K. Le Guin), which inspired among other things Kaoru Kurimoto’s long-running novel series Guin Saga (1979–). It was also during this period that elements from Old Norse mythology and the sagas found their way into the manga media. As Sayaka Matsumoto’s Old Norse-related manga database demonstrates, four out of the eight medieval North-inspired historical fictions began their serialisation in the 1980s, not to mention the large number of contemporary titles featuring isolated, decontextualised Old Norse elements, the earliest of which is traced back to the 60s.13 Sayaka Matsumoto in this volume, pp. 55–8. To these one may also add Isao Takahata’s animated movie The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968), which is set in ancient Norway.14 It is important to point out that, according to Yasuo Ohtsuka, the movie’s supervising animator, the name Horus is not derived from the Egyptian god, but would be more accurately spelt ‘Hols’, thus giving off the impression of having a Nordic/Germanic origin, in line with other characters’ names, such as Hilda and Grinwald. The confusion of the English title is caused by the fact that the sounds of /r/ and /l/ in English are not distinguished in Japanese, and very likely the Egyptian god’s association with the sun. ‘Prince of the Sun: The Great Adventure of Hols’, <http://www.nausicaa.net/wiki/Prince_of_the_Sun:_The_Great_Adventure_of Hols/> [accessed 03 May 2025]. Intriguingly, the plot is based on Kazuo Fukuzawa’s puppet play, Chikisani no taiyō (The Sun Above Chikisani, 1959), which is in turn an adaptation of an Ainu yukar or oral saga.15 The Ainu are an indigenous ethnic group residing in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, whose status as Japan’s indigenous people was only officially recognised in 2019. For an overview of the Ainu people, see Takamitsu Jimura, Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Japan (Abingdon and New York, 2022), pp. 108–28. The stories and struggles of the Ainu people have also made their way into manga, as in Golden Kamuy by Kaizawa Toru, an Ainu manga artist, which features on the cover page of the British Museum’s Manga exhibition catalogue. See also the artist’s interview in the catalogue: ‘Comments on Golden Kamuy’ and ‘Manga Extracts: Golden Kamuy’, in Rousmaniere and Ryoko (eds), The Citi Exhibition, pp. 34–43. While the story was relocated to Norway mainly in order to avoid controversy, the choice of Norway and Viking imagery hints at a perceived parallel between the landscape in northern Japan and Scandinavia, and between ancient Japanese and Viking Age village communities. In an early show of the cultural kaleidoscope that characterises modern manga medievalism, the viewers are introduced to Nordic elements (e.g., the Viking longships, the funeral rite of Horus’s father) along with non-Nordic tropes, such as the ‘Sword in the Stone’. The Japanese-German anime adaptation of Vicky the Viking (1974–75) is also relevant to this volume, as it ended up inspiring both Oda Eiichiro’s One Piece (1997–), and the first full-fledged, Viking-themed, historical manga, Vinland Saga (2005–2025).16 See later in this volume Yukimura Makoto’s translated lecture, p. 78.

From the 1980s on, the major features of medievalist manga rapidly took shape and developed into a substantial, recognisable genre, in which the fragments and fact(oid)s of the European Middle Ages are freely expanded, transformed, and mixed with other cultural and historical elements according to the artist’s own imagination and the everchanging market. A decisive new contributor is Dungeons & Dragons, which, upon its Japanese debut in 1985, was closely followed by a number of remarkably successful local productions: the RPG sagas Dragon Quest (1986–) and Final Fantasy (1987–), the novel series Slayers (1989–) and The Record of Lodoss War (1988–93), both of which were later adapted into animated series. These works, on the one hand, further popularised and disseminated the ‘sword and sorcery’ type that had already taken hold in Japanese fantasy; on the other, they facilitated, accelerated, and extended the spread of medieval(ist) imaginaries in the manga media, which were quickly acculturated as per generic conventions. The result is, in the words of Karoline Postel-Vinay, a ‘mediatised relationship’ between the Japanese public and European cultures: ‘Europe as an international reality […] coexists in the Japanese consciousness with Europe as a space of imagination, a bucolic place where one finds stone castles and unchanging landscapes’.17 Karoline Postel-Vinay, La révolution silencieuse du Japon (Paris, 1994), p. 21. A good example is the tendency to recontextualise European medieval elements in modern Japanese urban settings (as in the Fate franchise), which gradually became increasingly preeminent and resulted in the establishment of the 異世界 isekai (other world) subgenre in the 2010s, a type of ‘portal fantasy’ comparable to Mark Twain’s A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.18 In particular, Mark Twain’s books were among the literature imported in the Meiji Era and they have remained influential since. His medievalist novel, The Prince and the Pauper, translated and published in the pioneer children’s literary magazine kai tori (1918–36), was especially well received by the Japanese readers. A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was first published in translation in 1963, and was made into a musical in 1994. See Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia and London, 2005). As such portals enable movement in both directions, isekai fantasy allows the incorporation of Japaneseness – such as the famous Japanese salaryman – into a medieval(ist) Europe, where the salaryman diverts his dedication from office work to completing adventurous quests and, in doing so, voices an entertaining criticism of modern Japanese corporate culture. This illustrates the vast expansion of the European Middle Ages in the manga media and the creative ways in which its atmosphere can be altered through the lens of the local fantasy, to the point that, analogous to the salaryman’s suits as analysed by Postel-Vinay, the European Middle Ages have been absorbed into the very ‘cultural fabric’ of contemporary Japanese popular culture, blurring its foreign origins.19 Postel-Vinay, La révolution silencieuse, p. 32.

Now, decades later, this perception of Europe as a Janusian figure, between familiarity and exoticism, has far from dwindled. Rather, thanks to the sheer intensification of borrowings and remediation of medieval(ist) elements in the manga media, the European Middle Ages have become ubiquitous in post-war Japanese popular culture. As a result, Japanese popular cultural products easily stand out as an exemplary case of neo-medievalism: ‘not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism. It is medievalism doubled upon itself’.20 Atsushi Iguchi, ‘Appropriating the Other on the Edge of the World: Representations of the Western Middle Ages in Modern Japanese Culture’, Journal of the Open University of Japan, 28 (2010), 63–9, at p. 65. See also Cory Lowell Grewell, ‘Neomedievalism: An Eleventh Little Middle Ages’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s) (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 34–43, at p. 40.