Otsuka, Eiji

Eiji Ōtsuka (大塚英志) is a Japanese social critic, folklorist, media theorist, and novelist born in Tokyo in 1958. He is currently a professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto and an author of nonfiction books on Japanese popular cultures. Ōtsuka graduated from the University of Tsukuba with a degree in anthropology and folklore, and his doctorate in artistic engineering from Kobe Design University. He later became editor-in-chief of Manga Burikko, a leading magazine where he pioneered academic research on otaku subculture in the 1980s. He is a professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.

In the late 1980s, Ōtsuka was involved in a murder trial that criminalized the public's perception of manga. As the murderer had a large collection of manga, public media depicted manga readers broadly as psychologically disturbed perverts. Since then, Ōtsuka has defended manga and developed a theory of media consumption: consumers collect small narrative to construct a grand narrative. His book, A Theory of Narrative Consumption, explains this theory further.

As a manga writer (working with artists rather than illustrating himself), Ōtsuka is best known for two long-running horror series: MPD Psycho, a psychological thriller about a detective with multiple personalities investigating serial murders, and "The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service", a darkly comic series about college students who help restless spirits of the dead.

1980s

1990s

2000s