“When we were growing up, our parents wouldn’t buy us things, so we worked hard and now we can: buy all volumes of manga, buy toys in bulk, buy DVD box sets”

Insufficient Direction is a humorous autobiographical manga by Moyoco Anno, the wife of Hideaki Anno, who direction Neon Genesis Evangelion. Moyoco is a manga artist and this book chronicles their life together. The main theme is that Hideaki is a huge otaku and Moyoco is trying to remain normal but keeps getting sucked deeper and deeper into an otaku lifestyle. It’s interesting reading this from the 2024 viewpoint of the nerds having taken over the earth and casting my mind back to when being a nerd was seen as a deeply shameful and anti-social thing to be doing, especially in Japan, where “otaku” had a very specific negative connotation. There’s something very sweet about Moyoco getting more and more into her own interests and becoming less ashamed as the book progresses. She states early on that she had only dated “normal guys” before in an effort to also become more normal and popular, but she clearly loves being around Hideaki and reading manga and singing anime theme songs together, which was pretty heartwarming to me.

Another big theme is Moyoco’s own civilizing influence on Hideaki, who when they first met was only bathing about once or twice a week, not doing laundry (he would just throw his clothes away and buy new ones) and generally living in squalor. She describes how she’s lowered her standards a bit and his have improved, which was again a heartwarming portrayal of compromise. She gives space to his collections and he learns how to clean up a room. The whole book is told through a funny viewpoint with nonstop anime and manga references. I understood a lot of these because I am apparently also a huge otaku, but there is an extremely comprehensive “Annotations” section in the back that explains every reference. There’s also an interview with Hideaki about his views on the manga, which I enjoyed reading. It’s a nice package overall. I think if you don’t know anything about anime and manga this would be incomprehensible and frustrating, so I wouldn’t recommend it to the layperson, but for those in the know this is a treat.