Manga and Science

About

In this celebrated essay, the physicist and literary stylist Torahiko Terada finds a startling kinship between two seemingly unrelated fields: cartooning and science. Drawing on Hokusai's manga sketches and the medieval scroll caricatures of Toba Sojo, he argues that the way a cartoonist abstracts an essential "type" from human figures closely mirrors the way a scientist extracts laws from natural phenomena. Both pursuits, he suggests, live at the meeting point of analysis and intuition, and both are ultimately in search of truth. A warm, lucid meditation on art and science by one of Japan's finest essayist-scholars.

About the author

Available rights