Opening lines:

残酷な天使のように

少年よ 神話になれ！

Around the spring of 2015, or maybe it’s winter ーI can’t be bothered to check nowー, but at any rate, in the year 2015, Prof. Shimizu Yoshio began lecturing on Puella Magi Madoka Magica in Toukai University. A true Meguca course. If I remember correctly, you had to turn in a 10k+ word paper in the end too. Harcore Meguca.

To cut it short, this book is the edited collection of lecture transcripts throughout the course of the 14/15-week module. Naturally, it’s condensed a great deal, lacking the on-ground discussion that might (or probably might not) have occurred, so it can read rather dense, but thankfully the contents of the book are easy to pick up and it’s not difficult to read. I suppose you could call it less of a book, certainly not a monograph, than a digest, for better or for worse.

Apparently this book was also used as part of lecture materials for his 2017 rerun of the Madoka Magica lectures, albeit this round with lots of new content and a great deal more focus on Rebellion ー though the contents of these will probably only stay within the lecture hall for now (seems he also got many guest lecturers to speak for the 2017 edition too). Might translate some of the other supplementary material too to cover the gap.

The contents of this book can roughly be split into three parts:

The Introductory Parts

A Close Reading of all 12 episodes of PMMM

A Treatment of Rebellion and a closing note on Media Arts and Literature

It’s a small book of around 160 pages or so. We’ll be translating and releasing the book in these three installments, and hopefully we’ll be done with it by the end of the year, amongst all the other translations. Hopefully this resource will be of use or interest to anyone.

Erratum:

Pg 12. “… rests uniquely upon the construction of an expressive visual world…” should be “… rests upon the construction of a unique depictive-world / world of expression / Weltdarstellung.”

