Cervantes y el anime japonés: Refracciones y reflexiones quijotescas en el anime Sword Art Online

Abstract

In the Japanese contemporary entertainment culture, few narrative universes have attracted such overwhelming local and global attention as Sword Art Online . Focusing in the first sixteen episodes of the eponymous anime, the following paper aims to explore and critically analyze it by reflecting it against the most famous and celebrated Spanish literary work: Don Quixote of La Mancha . Through the cross-cultural and cross-epochal juxtaposition of both works, this study proffers a suggestive reading of the ways in which the relationship between the anime’s protagonist Kazuto Kiragaya and his avatar Kirito mirrors, both distorting and reflecting, that between Alonso Quijano and his alter ego Don Quixote in Cervantes’s masterpiece. In addition, a close reading of these characters will explore how this anime series furthers the questioning of the notions of reality and appearance already begun in Spanish Golden Age texts. In this sense, this anime, despite being the product of different socio-historical and temporal conditions, shows wide-scale baroque sensibilities that can help an audience familiar with Japanese popular culture to reconsider and rediscover seventeenth-century Spanish literary figures.