For diverse fans of manga, there is no place more storied than Kinokuniya bookstore

We all have our sanctuaries, our personal spaces where we can indulge and escape. The conservatory at Volunteer Park. The Big Picture movie theater in Belltown. And for folks fixated on Japanese comics called manga, there's Kinokuniya, a bookstore in Uwajimaya Village.

Its vast collection of black-and-white serialized stories crosses all genres: fantasy, romance, historical, sports, sci-fi, horror, horribly cute. It feeds the manga hobby, obsession, addiction, even lifestyle. You get hooked on the comic-book characters, and suddenly you're populating every available empty space in your apartment with plastic figurines. You get hooked on the characters, and you cut your hair so at least you have bangs like your favorite Kamikaze Girl. Or you sew up costumes that look like the characters' outfits, and then you dress up and "cosplay."

Any cosplayer worth his bangs, though, ought to have a firm grasp of his or her story, which brings us back to manga and this bookstore, a reminder that communities, no matter how "alternative," still thrive in the real world.

Manga readers are a remarkably diverse group. Over several visits to the bookstore, those who roamed the manga aisles included: a tattooed and pierced aspiring comic-book artist in his mid-20s, a mother accompanied by her 19-year-old daughter, an engineer approaching middle age and a boy aged 10.

A couple of guys say they're regular Thursday customers with a set routine: Browse for new titles. Shop. Walk over to International Model Toys and Pink Godzilla, a game store down the street, and grab a beer at R Place or The Cuff.

College students Michio Imanaka and Jesse Durfy, who run the Anime Discovery Project at the University of Washington, typically stop by on Saturdays. The bookstore, Durfy says, "is almost like a little watering hole."

Kinokuniya, or "Kino" to some, is part of a storied chain of bookstores throughout the Pacific Rim and the United States. It has occupied a space in Seattle's Chinatown/International District for the past 15 years; first, upstairs at the old Uwajimaya market, then in one corner of the Uwajimaya residential/shopping complex at the corner of Weller and Sixth.

The bookstore has always offered the usual fare: novels and cookbooks, foreign-language tapes, fashion and celebrity-ridden magazines. It has a bounty of stationery and, hands down, the city's best selection of writing utensils, particularly for the sort who likes Pocket Monsters positioned on the caps of their pens.

But then came manga, first popularized by Osamu Tezuka, or manganokamisama ("god of comics"), in the late 1940s in his native Japan. Tezuka chronicled a story about a boy named Pete. His "Jungle Tatei" manga was about Leo the lion cub, and it became an animated TV series. His form of Japanese animation, or anime, like his manga, included that singular characteristic that continues in the art forms of today: protagonists with saucer eyes.

More manga inspired more anime; popular anime became manga, and a craze for both arrived to our shores.

Manga sales in North America totaled $20 million in 2001, according to ICv2, a trade publication on pop-culture products. Four years later, sales were predicted at $150 million, a figure aided, no doubt, by how mainstream it's become: "Howl's Moving Castle," the 2004 anime film by Hayao Miyazaki, is now sold at Target.

But the most erudite of manga fans — and yes, these are true scholars — flock only to the stacks at Kinokuniya for a monthly, sometimes weekly, fix.

"There was a girl in my high-school class who was always drawing, and she turned me onto it," Lisa Ferguson, a 20-year-old Seattle Central student, says as she surfs the bookstore before heading off to Japanese-language class.

"I'm trying to limit myself to (buying) just one manga, one anime a month," she says. Her manga of the moment is "Nana," about two fashionable teens named, well, Nana, who are on the cusp of womanhood.

"When I was younger I'd read Marvel and DC Comics, but U.S. comics are very static," says Deidre VanHise, who's in her 30s and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. "Manga is really like one big illustrated novel with one cohesive plot. Most of the people I work with say, 'Isn't that for little kids?' But some of this I wouldn't give to kids."

Which isn't to suggest some manga isn't racy or erotic with busty heroines and nudity and plots that weave in and out of grim subjects. The appeal of manga, fans point out, is that there's bound to be a narrative to satisfy just about anyone.

There is cutesy or more romantic/emotional manga like "Fruits Basket" and "Sailor Moon," explains Brent Nelson, studying linguistics, Japanese and math at the UW. There's action-driven manga like "Naruto" and "Yu Yu Hakusho." Little kids: "Doraemon." More mature tastes: "Hellsing" and "Berserk."

"If you like 'Iron Chef,' you'll like this one," says Satoshi Ida, assistant manager, pointing to a series of books with sushi on their covers. He's standing in the Japanese-language manga section of the store.

"This one's about a girl who has been bullied and is trying to survive high school," says employee Yuko Harmon, standing in the nearby English-language section. Over the years, as manga mania has swelled, the bookstore has kept expanding its offerings by cramming in as many of the shrink-wrapped paperbacks, read right to left, as it could. Shelves of English-language manga now stand beside shelves of manga written in Chinese.

"This one's about a bunch of hot guys who work in a coffee shop," remarks Ferguson, the Seattle Central student, browsing the shelves.

"It's the retelling of a classic Chinese legend," VanHise, the Coast Guarder, says about her favorite series, "Saiyuki."

"It's about a boy who can see ghosts, and one day he's attacked by an evil spirit called Hollow and he's saved by a Death god," says Anthony Macasieb, another UW student, about his beloved "Bleach."

Macasieb gravitates toward action and romantic comedy manga. He's an earnest, open-faced 19-year-old who, on this day, happens to be wearing a red "FullMetal Alchemist" hoodie not because the sweatshirt fits in so perfectly here ("Alchemist" is both manga and anime), but because it was clean. He has thick black hair that he plans to dye orange so he could cosplay Ichigo this weekend.

"Once you start, you can never stop," he says as he shops for a "Bleach" volume written in Japanese, even though he can't read the words. Manga and anime, he says later, stoke your imagination and provide escape. Sometimes what people want is to journey away from whatever's happening in the world right now.

Seattle Times researcher Gene Balk contributed to this story.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com