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

Abstract

Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds., Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 288pp. us$20 (pbk).Isolde StandishThe collection of essays in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams brings together a group of Japanese and North American academics in a highly readable text that takes the form of an historical survey imaginatively linking Japanese sf literature from the early twentieth century to its contemporary global manifestations in the new media of manga, anime and gaming. As stated in the introduction, 'For western audiences, [the] dominance of Japanese visual science fiction has eclipsed the fact that Japan also has a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction' (x). And it is this lack in the western student's and/or fan's knowledge that the first half of the book addresses with informative chapters on the early links between Japanese 'imaginative detective' prose fiction and sf. This is followed by discussions of two seminal authors, Abe Kobo (1924-1993) and Komatsu Sakyo (1931- ), in an essay by Thomas Schnellbacher that considers the Pacific Ocean as a trope around which Japanese national identity is negotiated. The avantgarde writer Abe Kobo's Inter Ice Age 4 (1959; translated 1970) was 'instrumental' in launching sf as a genre in Japan. This first section also encompasses an overview of the vibrant forms of women's sf literature by Kotani Mari.Susan Napierfs eWhen the Machine Stopsf, based on a reading of two key anime series from the 1990s, Shin seiki evangerion (Neon Genesis Evangelion; 1995.1996) and Serial Experiments: Lain (1998), is a pivotal essay. Moving freely among literature (Japanese and western), manga and anime, it explores sf animefs apocalyptic vision and the fragmentation of individual identity in an increasingly technology-driven, postmodern world. Indeed, it is this theme of the dehumanising effects of technology that links the two sections of the book, as the opening essay by Miri Nakamura contextualises this theme in relation to early industrialisation and the machine in the Taish. period (1912.1926); while Susan Napier, Christopher Bolton, in eThe Mechafs Blind Spotf discussing Kido keisatsu patoreba: The Movie 2 (Patlabor 2; Oshii 1993), and Livia Monnet, in eInvasion of the Women Snatchersf on Fainaru fantaji (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within; Sakaguchi and Sakakibara 2001), question the mechanisation of the body in the contemporary age of digitalisation and simulation. The introduction points out that ethe films Bolton and Monnet discuss are struggling to rediscover an organic body or spirit in contemporary science fiction narratives about technology' (xv). With a feminist inflection, Sharalyn Orbaugh, in 'Sex and the Single Cyborg', contextualises the cyborg within the organic subjectivity of Luce Irigaray's concept of 'not-two' of Siamese twins and the hermaphrodite: 'Within herself, she is already two - but not divisible into one(s)' (Irigaray qtd in Orbaugh 175).While the majority of essays focus on an analysis of content within the cultural specificities of Japan, several innovative chapters tackle wider issues. Azuma Hiroki's chapter looks at the relationship between sf and philosophy. Identifying sf as the last bastion of the Hegelian 'ideal of totality' in the postmodern age of fragmentation and the disavowal of meta-narratives that characterises contemporary philosophy, this essay argues that 'over the last seventy-five years, it has been science fiction, more than any other genre, that has appropriated this vision and continued to develop it' (77). …