Abstract

Manga (Japanese comic books), known as a cultural ambassador of Japan, has formed a new popular culture in Western countries over the last few decades. In seeing this particular cultural phenomenon and to answer Meek’s (1992) call for the public’s attention to hear children talk about their reading so as to understand their literary competence and the attraction of certain texts to them, I conducted a case study to explore 16 British teenage readers’ responses to manga. In this paper, I will set out to discuss the employment of cinematic techniques in manga, with a special focus on close-up shots. I will argue that extreme close shots are one of the distinct features of manga. They present characters’ emotional life and are intended to draw readers’ emotional responses. Moreover, they play a key role in building up tension by drawing readers’ attention to the unperceivable space outside the panel frame.