Brief Visions of a Vast Landscape

Collections of essays are difficult to review. Each essay opens windows into fascinating topics, and one wants to devote many words to each, but one cannot. So reviewers may fall back on hand-waving generalities—"Excellent essays, all of them," "Thoughtful analyses of topics of major interest to all serious thinkers and readers," "Insightful and interesting"—all true in this case but lacking in specificity, perhaps?

Let us focus briefly on another sense in which the essays in these two collections are important and interesting. Current writing on manga and anime is dominated by what appears on the Web—viewer opinions, reviews, blogs, and commentaries. These are often by fans and other enthusiastic, sometimes highly critical readers, usually targeted at like-minded fans. Such commentaries offer personal assessments of quality and give buying advice. They tend not to be analytical essays delving into the origins and nature of manga and anime, not even for the work under review. Such commentaries may offer valuable insights into fan culture, its interests, quirks, and styles of thought and writing. But—this is the nature of the Web, perhaps—they are also ephemeral. After three years no one cares what someone calling himself "Kwodbog6" thought of volume 2 of Death Note—it's yesterday's news. So serious readers, scholars, and people who use reviews professionally (like librarians, who use reviews to assist in making purchasing decisions) do not have a wide range of solid commentary to depend on. Enter collections like the two here.

Both may be seen as "topic-centered." For example, in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams, Miri Nakamura has contributed a fascinating discussion of robot themes in manga and anime that places these familiar figures not into comparisons of one mecha show versus another but into a Japanese aesthetic history involving robots and semisentient machines who become uncanny surrogates for people, kami, and other entities. Robots and other forms of mechanized humanity are also discussed by Susan Napier in relation to Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain and by Christopher Bolton for Patlabor 2. Livia Monnet rounds out the discussion with an essay about artificial life and the uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Gender and sexuality also attract attention. Mari Kotani provides historical and biographical details about Japanese women science fiction writers, including stories about women warriors and communities of pregnant women. Kotani also discusses Hagio Moto's 1978 manga Staa Reddo and the theme of woman-as-monster: "The metaphor of monsters is certainly a literary tool through which women can defy society and express their frustrations. At the same time, it is perhaps a symbol of their cry for reform and may stand for their grief that they often have no other choice but to turn into monsters" (57). Readers who have seen Fumihiko Takayama's 2001 anime WXIII, the third Patlabor film, will recognize and resonate with Kotani's insight.

Sharalyn Orbaugh and Saitō Tamaki likewise contribute essays on sexuality to the Bolton et al. collection. Orbaugh tackles the complexities of cyborg sexuality in Neon Genesis Evangelion and in Oshii Mamoru's Ghost in the Shell. Orbaugh's lenses are the concepts of "subjectivity" and "transformation," in which older keystones of subjectivity—sexuality and singularity—have been shaken by the deep transformations of postmodernism. "As the imagined social body has become increasingly more perfect and controlled—more and more closely fitting the modernist model of (male) autonomous subjectivity—the likelihood of the eruption of the repressed body, in all its abject, excessive, imperfect, uncontrolled, boundary-challenged 'femaleness' increases" (181–82). And that, for Orbaugh, is a source of some, but only some, optimism for the future.

Saitō Tamaki's take on modern sexuality seems more...