Akihabara with Gonta, Who Loves Miku More Than You’ll Ever Love Anything

Hatsune Miku started as software—a voice synthesis program, a digital instrument—and became something stranger and more interesting: Japan’s most successful pop idol who has never existed. The teal twin-tails, the tiny skirt, the voice tuned in a lab to trigger something in the otaku nervous system, which, to be fair, it was designed to do. She sells out concert halls as a hologram. She has more merchandise than most living artists. She is entirely fictional and somehow more famous than most real people.

I have a small Miku figure on my desk. She stares at me with that slightly glazed expression they all have—part accusation, part vacancy. I find it weirdly comforting.

A guy named Gonta, one of her more devoted fans, lives in Tokyo and took a camera through Akihabara—the electronics and anime district that is basically the physical manifestation of everything the internet was before it went mainstream. Floors of figurines, walls of phone cases, shelves of artbooks and limited-edition CDs for a performer who produces no sound unless someone programs her to. There is something almost philosophical about it: the pure fan relationship, uncomplicated by the celebrity’s actual personality or her ability to disappoint you in a press interview.

Gonta is not embarrassed. That’s the thing. He knows exactly what this is and he’s fine with it, which is more than most people can say about their own obsessions. More people should probably be on Miku.