How it got so popular in Japan is beyond me though, I knew Lolita was a fashion trend there, but I have no clue how it ended up as a love for little anime girls.
It was popular everywhere. Until the '90s when everyone settled on
Ulysses, it was at the top of every "Greatest Novels of the 20th Century" list.
(I assume it's topped by some nigger book now.
Invisible Man is actually good and was usually somewhere on the list, so maybe that. The other black-guy option is Delaney's
Dhalgren. He was an actual pedophile who wrote actual pedophile books, but he's gay so that's
great.)
Japanese "Lolita" fashion isn't
sexy kid fashion. It's a variant of goth that's more influenced by ghost stories—in which little girls do feature, of course, because they're the most innocent thing that can surprise you by being a monster.
In that sense, the Japanese may understand
Lolita better than the rest of us. Humbert is the obvious villain of the story, but Dolores too is terrible, and one way Nabokov messes with your sympathetic identification(s) as the story goes on is by making you know (very clearly) but not want to believe that she's manipulating him too. There's a moment like in
Psycho when the car almost doesn't sink and you hope Norman gets away with it, where you
might change your mind about her and him and switch your allegiance. You
should despise everybody, except her retarded brute of an age-appropriate boyfriend, who's a victim of them both. He's very, very under-characterized, partly so you can "self-insert" as him, if that's the way you read things. But ideally you don't "identify with" anybody in the story, and it's made so you almost can't.
Nabokov was a really fucking good writer.