At this year’s Kodansha House, we had the opportunity to speak with Fujita, the mind behind the manga Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku. The romantic comedy follows a professional man who’s secretly a hardcore gamer and a woman who’s secretly a fujoshi as they navigate the ins and outs of relationships, secrets, and each other’s lives. Ichijinsha began publishing the manga in print in April 2015 and 11 volumes were published, with Kodansha USA being the English publisher. Additionally, an anime series adaptation of the manga aired from April to June 2018 and a live action film released in 2020.
During our conversation, centering on the Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku manga, Fujita explained the origins and inspirations of the story, why certain choices were made regarding its characters, and went into excellent detail about the creative process undergirding the series.
Portions of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.
Q: How did you initially come up with the concept for Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku, and did any major aspects of it change from the time when you first thought of it to when it began being published?
A: I’m very much an otaku and I have many friends who are also otaku. We were talking amongst each other, just about everyday life, relationships, and what kind of relationship would excite us. When we were having this discussion, I raised my hand and said, “I will write a manga about this.” So I started to write a manga experimentally and started to put it up on Pixiv, which is an online place where you can publish your own work. From there, somebody from Ichijinsha contacted me with an interest to make this into a full-fledged longer series, with the offer of serialization and publishing. From there, we worked together to develop the idea of Wotakoi into a long-running series.
Q: Speaking of Pixiv, what was the transition like, moving from a platform like Pixiv to Comic Pool, and eventually to print manga? Did any aspects of your artistic process need to be adjusted between platforms?
A: As you know, reading manga on Pixiv is free. When I got the offer to publish my work and compile it into a manga, I was afraid that I would no longer be able to offer my stories and content for free. I wanted to make sure that I would be able to continue to let everyone read my content for free. I didn’t want to reduce the amount of pages to do that. To work this out, I offered to make extra content that is only available in the book. If you buy the book, you get to enjoy a whole lot more than you were reading for free. One of the most important things to me was not to reduce the experience of reading the free content, but instead to add value if you buy the book format. And also, as for the art style changes, when it was just a personal comic for me when I was posting it on Pixiv, I very much focused on drawing the characters and not much on the background. But when I started to get the publishing deal and started to have my work released on Comic Pool or become a publication, I had to really enhance the backgrounds by receiving help from my assistant to make it into a much more fleshed-out artwork. It might look different in Pixiv than in the published work.
Q: Do any particular moments stem from personal experience you’ve had in your life?
A: It’s not just based on my experience per se, but as I mentioned earlier, I have many friends who are otaku too and I really enjoyed the otaku conversations that we were having. And I wanted to portray that in a very high resolution in the manga, and I think that’s kind of what’s reflected in the story.
Q: Why did you choose to focus on adult characters specifically in the workplace?
A: Back when I started to work on this series, I was around the same age as all of the characters who appear in the story. I could have possibly written a story about students, or someone very youthful, but, in order to emphasize the fact that there are adults who are grown up but still have a youthful side and enjoy their hobbies and such — to show that contrast the main characters have to be adults. And I think it was really important that I was working on a character that was set around my own age group, because that’s how I could relate to the characters the most. This is a little bit of a side story, but I get inquiries from those young readers who started to read Wotakoi when they were younger. They told me “I imagined my adulthood to be much more fun, like in this story.” So I kind of felt a little bit bad towards them that I built up their expectations.
Q: The series plays around a lot with the idea of characters that show one thing to most people, but have a massive secret about their life. How do you think this kind of setup influences the way characters operate in the story?
A: That’s kind of a difficult question to answer. You say that the characters have secrets and such, but I think all of us have sort of a secret side. But it’s not like they have a dark side — it’s just that there are things that we have and that we feel about ourselves that are kind of embarrassing or that are kind of private such that you really don’t want to share with too many people. But that’s also normal as a human to have such a side of yourself. My hope was that we could have an understanding towards each other that it’s okay to have these sides of ourselves and be kind to each other. That was something that I had in mind when I was working on this series.
Q: How did you balance comedic elements of the story with more romantic or serious ones?
A: I feel like the ratio that I give to the series out of 10 total is comedy at 8 to romance at 1.5 and seriousness is about 0.5. I feel this way because I try to avoid the aspects that I’m not too great at and I don’t feel like the romance or seriousness were my strengths. But comedy is something that I never really got any bad feedback about from the editors as I was writing. So I wonder how the readers would feel when they read this series. In addition, I personally love comedy so much. Therefore, I like to add lots of comedy aspects into the story. However, if a character is going through some personal struggle or something much deeper, I didn’t want to take it lightly. I didn’t want to make it sound like I was teasing them. So that was something that I kept in mind when I was writing more serious parts of the plot.
Q: What was your strategy and thought process when it came to creating side supporting characters? Did you think of them as their own entities or did some of them come to mind as natural supports for main characters?
A: When I think of these side characters, I always try to have in them a role or aspect that is missing in the main characters. For example, Taro and Hanako, who are older than the main characters, Narumi and Hirotaka, they already have gone through the life stages that Hirotaka and Narumi are going through currently. They see beyond that. They would have more useful advice to say. In contrast, Hirotaka’s younger brother is much younger than him. Ko and Naoya are much younger than Hirotaka and Narumi. Hirotaka and Narumi have already seen the stage of life that Ko and Naoya are going through. Therefore, they might have some advice that’s useful for them. I also imagine during those moments that something was troubling Naoya, then Narumi would most likely say something to give him advice. That’s the natural progression that I had to develop each of these characters.
Q: Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku is a bit unique in that the relationship starts early on and develops over time, rather than a lot of the story being a “will they, won’t they” about a potential relationship. What inspired you to start the relationship early this way?
A: As I mentioned, I started this series on Pixiv as my own personal submission, so I wasn’t really going to continue this series for a very long time in the beginning. I honestly feel like it could have really been concluded in the very beginning, in the first volume, where the characters who are otaku haven’t seen each other, will meet each other once they start to communicate and become very close to each other, and then get together. The story could have really ended there. But the series continued until Volume 11. And I feel like I really owe it to Ichijinsha, who picked up my title, and to those fans, not just in Japan, but also all over the world supporting this series, who allowed me to continue this series until Volume 11. I’m really grateful for that.
We’d like to thank Fujita for taking the time to speak with us about Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku and shed light on what went into making such a bright and imaginative series as great as it is. We’d also like to thank Kodansha for putting on such an exciting event with Kodansha House and bringing creators to New York City. Alongside Kodansha House, you can head over to the Kodansha Reader Portal to activate your free account and read Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku. You can learn more about Kodansha House on their official website.
© Fujita/Ichijinsha Inc.
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