Resumen de The Yokai in the Database: Supernatural Creatures and Folklore in Manga and Anime
Many Japanese anime and manga narratives draw on Japanese folklore, reimagining tales for a modem audience, and contain references to or examples of supernatural creatures, or yökai.1 As in Western culture, yökai, which can be translated as monsters, spirits, or demons, are a rich source of material for contemporary pop culture narratives, especially for stories in science fiction, fantasy, action, and adventure genres. Azuma links the database to video games and a computerized approach to fiction, which breaks narrative down into levels, stages, or interchangeable character traits, which he claims allows fans to focus on these details rather than on narrative.\n Azuma, drawing on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, sets up a dichotomy between a database and a narrative-centered consumption of popular culture texts; more specifically, he claims that older generations of fans prefer the grand narrative of a complex, overarching storyline, whereas fans since the mid-1990s focus instead on the database, or what he calls the grand nonnarrative (34).
