Times Out of Mind : Exploring Japanese Animation

While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. Drifting through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto, he stumbles into a string of encounters—with mysterious figures like Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, sumo wrestlers, and Big Bird, and, by good luck, with Japanese animators both living and dead.

While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. Drifting through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto, he stumbles into a string of encounters—with mysterious figures like Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, sumo wrestlers, and Big Bird, and, by good luck, with Japanese animators both living and dead. Each meeting draws him into a deep, dark, uncanny current of Japanese animation—one that has nothing to do with Godzilla, Akira, anime, manga, or Hayao Miyazaki. The original book, Time Out of Mind, rewrites this history through the artists Robinson meets and studies—Koji Yamamura, Atsushi Wada, Taku Furukawa, Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita, Maya Yonesho, and many more—while his drifting becomes the method: a travelogue that keeps slipping into something stranger. Times Out of Mind reprints that original book in full, then adds a new section written fifteen years later. Robinson returns to Japan to reopen the same uncanny thread—new conversations, new detours—while figures from the first journey reappear. Along the way, he meets artists including Masaaki Yuasa, Kenji Iwaisawa, Sawako Kabuki, Yoriko Mizushiri, and Ryo Orikasa. The result is part travelogue, part memoir, part fiction, and part off-the-map animation history.