Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Adaptations of Time Travel Narratives in Japanese Multimedia: Nurturing Eudaimonia across Time and Space

2014; International Research Society for Children's Literature; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/ircl.2014.0128

1755-6201

Sung-Ae Lee,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

To displace a character in time is to depict a character who becomes acutely conscious of his or her status as other, as she or he strives to comprehend and interact with a culture whose mentality is both familiar and different in obvious and subtle ways. Two main types of time travel pose a philosophical distinction between visiting the past with knowledge of the future and trying to inhabit the future with past cultural knowledge, but in either case the unpredictable impact a time traveller may have on another society is always a prominent theme. At the core of Japanese time travel narratives is a contrast between self-interested and eudaimonic life styles as these are reflected by the time traveller's activities. Eudaimonia is a ‘flourishing life’, a life focused on what is valuable for human beings and the grounding of that value in altruistic concern for others. In a study of multimodal narratives belonging to two sets – adaptations of Tsutsui Yasutaka's young adult novella The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Yamazaki Mari's manga series Thermae Romae – this article examines how time travel narratives in anime and live action film affirm that eudaimonic living is always a core value to be nurtured.