Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime

Bolton, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Important work of scholarship and criticism, reviewed insightfully and in some detail by Neil Easterbrook in SFRA Review #287 (Winter 2009): pp. 10-12, who offers passim his own useful observations some of which we quote.[1]

Easterbrook finds this "a terrifically useful collection of new and reprinted essays[...,] a welcome addition to the growing body of work that opens us to the traditions, genres, and nature of SF outside western Europe and North America. It indexes a cluster of concerns interesting to anyone involved with SF: the topoi and tropes are similar — disasters and monsters, lost worlds and robots, cybernetic prosthetics and space operas — as are the thematics — progressive and reactionary responses to" in Roger Luckhurst use, mechanism as a useful 19th term for the advent of "technological machinery transforming human life" (p. 10).

In either the East or the West, SF is best understood as a response to the rise of modernity —initially optimistic, but after Hiroshima increasingly problematic in its accounts of technology. [...] Western “proto-SF” begins with anxieties about technoscience and mechanism (as, for example, in the instance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). In Japan, there is a small body of work that corresponds to the “proto-SF” of the West, but the earliest influences came after the mid-nineteenth century [... in the opening of]] the Meiji period. [***]

• As Miri Nakamura tells us in “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan,” “The forerunner of contemporary Japanese SF” was the “irregular detective fiction” of Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura magura (1935 — the untranslatable title might be rendered as “Trickery” or “Sorceries”) (4). Nakamura’s essay not only starts the volume’s organizational scheme around rough chronological sequence, but it also offers an acute analysis of what will be the book’s central interpretive trope — the uncanny, as drawn from Freud’s famous but infrequently read 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche.”[2][3][4] [...I]t is the central thread that connects each essay to the whole. While no one in this volume does so, one might argue that the uncanny is the most general trope for literatures of the fantastic, and in SF, it is even more essential than cognitive estrangement [...]. In Nakumura’s reading of Dogura magura and related texts, she is most concerned with notions of doubling and robotic automata, privileged tropes for the psychological and ontological problems produced by the intersection of machines and human beings, which she calls the “mechanical uncanny.” (Easterbrook p. 11, our emphasis)

• The final chapter of the book’s first section is William O. Gardner’s “Tsutsui Yasutaka and the Multimedia Performance of Authorship.” [...] Gardner outlines [...] how Tsutsui was among the first writers to analyze “hypermediated society” ([Robot Ghosts] 96, Easterbrook p. 11, our emphasis). [...]

• Susan J. Napier’s “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments: Lain.” One reason for the prominence of visual media in Japanese SF is the history of [...] "[...] scroll printing and woodblock printing, in which narrative is as much pictorial as literary” (105). Napier considers how two complex series provide enigmatic treatments of the relation between the human imagination and mechanism.

• Christopher Bolton[, ...] “The Mecha’s Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime.” Mecha is the general name for the mechanized or robotic bodies that humans use (or sometimes transform into) in anime or live-action TV. Both Bolton and Napier are concerned with the general question of whether “human–machine hybrids [reveal that we] have lost all human- ity,” whether these “increasingly technologized bodies...[will] turn out to be empty shells” (123).

• [...] “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture and Experiments on Subjectivity” by Sharalyn Orbaugh. Orbaugh is concerned to show how mecha and cyborg bodies identify anomalous representations of sexual difference (180), focusing primarily on Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost in the Shell.

RDE, finishing, 19/20Jan21