Exploring Isekai: Mapping Worlds through Anime, Manga, and Light Novels (Global East Asian Screen Cultures)

Exploring Isekai offers the first comprehensive study of isekai in anime, manga and light novels in which characters from the “real world” are transported, summoned, reincarnated or trapped in fantastical realms.

Challenging the misconception that isekai is mere escapism, the volume brings together an international group of contributors to consider how the genre reflects contemporary anxieties, desires and social structures through game-like world-building, moral frameworks and recurring underdog heroes. Examining classics like Spirited Away (2001) alongside globally popular series such as That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (2013–25) and Overlord (2015–), the volume traces the thematic and aesthetic evolution of isekai, revealing how these narratives reimagine identity, labour and belonging in an increasingly digital and transnational world.

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). She is a NEH (National Endowment for
Humanities) awardee in 2019-20. She has guest edited a special issue for Feminist Media Histories on Asian feminist media (2019), and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on the topics of Chinese cinema studies, independent documentary, star studies, ecocinema, race gender and early cinema, film remakes and adaptation.