Times Out of Mind

While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. As he drifts through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto, he happens upon a number of mysterious figures-Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, sumo wrestlers, Big Bird-and, by good chance, many famous Japanese animators, both living and dead. Each encounter takes him into a deep, dark, mysterious world of Japanese animation that does not include Godzilla, Akira, anime, manga, or Hayao Miyazaki.

The original book is titled Time Out of Mind. It rewrites this history through the artists Robinson meets and studies-Atsushi Wada, Taku Furukawa, Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, Maya Yonesho, and many more-while his drifting becomes part of the method: a travelogue that keeps slipping into something stranger.

Times Out of Mind combines that original book with a new section written fifteen years later. Robinson revisits Japan to meet a new wave of animators and reopen the same uncanny current-new conversations, new detours-while some figures from the first book reappear. Alongside that return, he encounters artists like Koji Yamamura, Masaaki Yuasa, Kenji Iwaisawa, Sawako Kabuki, Yoriko Mizushiri, and Orikasa, plus the independent creators who orbit them. What results is part travelogue, part memoir, part fiction, and part off-the-map animation history.