Japan's real-life Bridget Jones made geeks sexy

Artesia, a pseudonymous blogger whose blog will be published as a book next month in Japan, has all of Japan curious about her identity, according to Leo Lewis of the (London) Times.

The pathological secrecy surrounding the 30-year-old freelance advertising consultant is all part of her extraordinary power. Nobody has a clue who she is or where she lives, so everybody believes they might know her.

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We know that she attended one of the top five state universities in Japan, that she wears a lot of Gucci and that her female friends are high-flyers — doctors, lawyers or businesswomen. When she meets them she goes drinking in Izakaya bars where she talks about her boyfriend, but never her blog. Artesia (her name comes from one of the characters in Gundam — the manga/cartoon in which humans command giant warrior robots) reads widely, has travelled extensively and worked for an elite consulting firm for six years before going freelance.

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The love of her life, the mysterious “No 59”, remains equally anonymous, but also of a type that anyone in Japan can recognise. He took her to see the splatter-fest Alien vs Predator as a romantic Christmas date. His best shirt cost him £2. He talks of robots and cartoons. For her birthday, he gave Artesia an intricately detailed plastic fish. He collects and farms stag beetles. He is, in her words, “ utterly clueless” around women and was still a virgin at 32. He is, in short, an otaku — a word that describes the swollen Japanese ranks of geeky obsessives. Young men who become scarily focused on specialised interests such as manga comics, big-eyed dolls or complex role-playing games, and are otherwise divorced from the rest of the world.