Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

It was the most shocking anime plot twist I've seen in more than a decade, and for a time I wondered if the hand of Joss Whedon was at work. Two weeks ago, GeGeGe no Kitaro - a children's show - killed off its most popular character, out of nowhere and at the hands of another popular character. Let's see if I can give you a summary without running on too long. Neko-musume (the name literally means "cat-daughter") is a yokai , a Japanese fairy-like creature who looks like a stylish teenage girl most of the time but turns into more of a feral cat-like creature in order to fight (or when she smells fish). She is the best friend of Inuyama Mana, a middle school girl who serves as the audience's link into the world of the yokai . As the episode two weeks ago unfolds, the Big Bad tricks Neko-musume into attacking Mana's mother, just as Mana walks in to find her mother lying on the floor bleeding out. Mana reacts the way you might expect - only the Big Ba...

There's an often far-too-brief window in a child's life, around the tween years, when the universe opens up before them and reveals its wonder and glory and magic and mystery in ways they hadn't realized before - and often, they respond to the power that opens up around them by finding their own power within themselves. Those years are where stories like Stranger Things or The Hunger Games come from, or E.T. a generation earlier, or even the Oz franchise a century ago. In Japan, they've been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Boogiepop franchise, a series of light novels that set the standard for the light novel genre that came alive in the 2000s. The story is about an ordinary, mild mannered girl named Miyashita Touka, who becomes a mysterious supernatural hero named Boogiepop and battles threats to the world. One big difference from the typical superhero story is that Touka is completely unaware of Boogiepop's existence, and it's never completel...

You don't have to watch anime for long before you encounter stories about yokai (also known as ayakashi ), the various ghosts and otherworldly creatures said to inhabit the Japanese islands, just beyond the range of normal human sight. Some of my all-time favorites feature them, including the long-running GeGeGe no Kitaro , currently in its sixth incarnation. A common feature in these shows is that the main characters often get into trouble and have to turn to some elder-figure - a grandparent or grandparent stand-in, usually - who knows the old stories about the creatures who lived with humans during the old times, before science and technology came along and drove magic away. That trope isn't unique to Japan, of course. It's been a regular feature in European stories too, and I expect it's in stories from Africa and other parts of Asia as well. Here in America, though, we have a problem. Here in America, any magical creatures from the old times wouldn't...

I don't always do an end-of-year "Best Of" list or anything like that. In fact, some time ago I gave up calling it a "Best Of" list, because how would I really know what the best of anything is? This year, however, I've got the New York Times helping me out, by including my personal favorite anime series of the year among their Best TV Shows of 2018 . You wouldn't expect any anime to make the New York Times list (unless it had Hayao Miyazaki's name attached to it, anyway), but A Place Further Than the Universe pulled it off. This 13-episode series about four high school girls who join an expedition to Antarctica works on so many levels - characters, plotting, details, and themes. It's also one of the few shows that's ever affected the course of my real-world life. That doesn't happen often, but I'm a writer, so it does happen from time to time. In this case, when I heard about the habitat restoration project on San Nico...

The weirdest anime of the season has offered me a new perspective on the writing experience. Hisone and Masotan tells the story of Hisone, a young woman in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force who becomes a "D-Pilot," someone who flies a dragon (her specific dragon is named Masotan). In the world of the story, dragons are real, and are a vital part of Japan's survival as a nation. But the public can't know about them, so the JASDF disguises them as military planes when they take to the air. Unlike in most dragon stories, though, Hisone and the other D-Pilots don't get to ride on top of the dragons. Oh no, that would be too mundane. In this story, the dragons swallow the D-Pilots, who must then fly the mission from inside the dragons' guts (which somehow transform into a hi-tech cockpit display). When the mission is over, the dragons obligingly barf their D-Pilots back out. Yes, I know it's silly, and I'm leaving out a number of problemati...

My weekend had a bit of craziness to it, and not just because I was getting over a cold. I took an unexpected loop around my brain and ended up with some renewed writing motivation. And it was all thanks to my Number One Anime Nerd Girl of Science . Okay, some background. Kemono no Sou-ja Erin or Erin the Beast-Player was a 2006 anime fantasy series about a girl growing up in a world with giant lizards called "touda" and giant wolf-headed eagle creatures called "beast-lords." We follow Erin from her days as a curious ten-year-old in her home village, through various adventures until she ends up as a twenty-year-old teacher in her kingdom's beast-lord refuge. What struck me about Erin was that she's a passionate scientist through-and-through. She may be dealing in made-up science about made-up creatures, but her methods of scientific inquiry and deduction are real-world solid. As I've said before, if we had more characters like Erin in our f...

(Not to be confused with "Girls Gone Wild," which is a topic for some other blog to write about...) Trying to forge your own writing path is hard, and it gets me down sometimes. This morning, for instance, although I'm better now. For those of you tuning in late, I've been trying to develop a way of storytelling that communicates math and science concepts, or at least inspires enough interest in them for kids to go and find out more for themselves. One thing that's hard about it is not having anything to compare myself to. Yeah, yeah, I know - "What part of 'forging your own path' did you not understand?" I knew what I was getting into, but that doesn't make it easy. One of the big reasons I've gotten into anime and other Japanese programming so much is that it's one of the few places where I can find at least a few shows that point toward what I'm trying to do myself. On Japanese TV, you can see random references to the...

"The world is not beautiful. Therefore, it is." So says the gender-nonconforming title character of Kino's Journey , by far the most challenging anime show of the year. "The world is not beautiful: And that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty." Kino shows us that world by traveling through it on Hermes, a talking "motorrad" (German for "motorcyle" - there's no other German in the story, so I have no idea why everyone calls Hermes that). It's mostly a lush, green, peaceful-looking place, but it's dotted by mostly walled city-states whose citizens can do the most awful things. Kino's visits last three days and two nights, all the time needed, supposedly, to find out the country's character. (And now I'll do the obligatory aside about pronoun usage. Kino was born a girl named Sakura - more on that in a moment - but now presents as male and is often taken to be male. On the anime discussion board I frequent,...

You don't have to watch anime for very long to notice some things about Japanese culture that are very different from the West. It's one of the things that draws me to it, actually, and one major difference I find fascinating is the completely different spiritual world. Shinto is an "animist" religion, where everything has a kami , a "god" or spirit, roughly equivalent - by my reckoning - to a patron saint. But what struck me as particularly different from what I'm used to is the notion, presented in more than one show, that the kami depend on having believers. Ones with many believers or worshippers are big and powerful. Ones with few are small and weak, and even in danger of disappearing. Thus the kami are inclined to grant their believers' wishes, so as to keep them believing. Now, I know better than to judge an entire religion based on a few anime episodes. I'm sure they've misrepresented some things (you should see how Christi...

I'm not sure I've ever gone this long without a journal update. The week-long audit I've spent more than a year preparing for begins tomorrow. Getting ready for it has been hampered by other craziness in the day-job world, and I haven't had the mental energy to do much else. I've gotten so out of my writing mindset that I feel like I can't even put a decent blog post together, let alone anything else. So today I'm going to do something low-pressure and fun, to get my momentum going again. I give you... The Anime Nerd Girls of Science! Five female anime characters I've come across who take science more seriously than their American counterparts. That is, if they even have American counterparts. #5) Senomiya Akiho, Robotics;Notes The "Science Adventure" series of visual novels and anime series had to have at least one character on the list. My first thought was Makise Kurisu from Steins;Gate , but she's too much of a male ...

Without a doubt, the most haunting and thought-provoking anime series I've ever watched is Jigoku Shoujo , which translates to English as Hell Girl . Note that I do not say it's the best anime series I've ever watched, because it's often repetitive and depressing - but it sticks with me like no other show has. This summer, it's back for its fourth season after a nine-year layoff, and it hasn't missed a beat. The premise is simple - There exists a mysterious, otherworldly website, which can only be accessed at midnight by someone bearing a strong hatred. On that site, you can enter the name of someone you want revenge against. At that point, you're whisked away to the Realm of Eternal Twilight, where you meet a girl named Enma Ai and her assistants. Ai has one of the assistants turn into a straw doll with a red string around it, which she then gives to you. If you untie the red string, the person whose name you entered will be taken directly to He...