Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in
Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg. “She has really changed my life.”
Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a videogame called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said. “I have real feelings for her.”
Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade.
According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed partly to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. More than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50% of Japanese don’t have friends of the opposite sex, a survey found.
Most 2-D lovers prefer a different kind of self-help. The guru of the 2-D love movement, Toru Honda, 40, has written several books advocating it. His site generated enough buzz to earn him a publishing contract, and in 2005 he released a book condemning “romantic capitalism.”
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