Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (In)Difference, the Eye, and the Gaze in ©Murakami

Preface: Otaku 101

Otaku is the rubric applied to a set of young Japanese male, adult super fans of anime (animation films), manga (comic books), and related genres. Otaku literally means "your home." It is used because these fans are geeks who spend their lives withdrawn from mainstream society, holed up inside their rooms consuming pile upon pile of comic books and watching anime on home monitors. Many of these otaku are simultaneously amateur authors of spin-off comics and stories based on, or inspired by, ones they have read. Rather than interacting with real friends or lovers, so the story goes, the otaku are most satisfied by solitary and masturbatory imagined relationships with comic book or animation characters. In fact, they contend that they love the characters they fantasize about. Finally, otaku are also infamous for their appetite for pornographic comic books, with subgenres offering visual representations of a wide variety of sexual "perversions" or socially aberrant sexual practices.¹ Psychoanalyst Saitô Tamaki observes that otaku are stimulated by these genres because of their erotic orientation toward fantasy rather than reality.²

This, of course, is a stereotype, that moreover slyly partakes of a lurking culturalist reductivism. This suggests the very queerness of Japanese postmodern culture as an unfathomable otherness: "Can you believe those Japanese prefer the fantasy of sex with comic book characters to the real thing?" The term otaku homogenizes a widely divergent group of devotees of comics and animation. The artist Murakami Takashi would be a case in point. Critics, commentators, and Murakami himself have pointed out that his art is deeply referential to and inspired by otaku culture.³ His characters, such as Mr. DOB, Second Mission Project Ko², the figure of a girl-jet transformer, and the diminutive Kiki and Kaikai, all incorporate citations to widely circulating animation or popular culture icons. For example, Mr. DOB Murakami's "signature character" who has appeared over and over in his work, taking various forms and transformations (his ears are marked with the letters D and B, and his face is the round O), is apparently culled from Doraemon and Sonic the Hedgehog, both popular anime figures, as well as bearing some resemblance to Mickey Mouse.⁴ These fantastic, imaginary figures, some cute and well marketed by Murakami in various venues,⁵ some apocalyptic (such as the huge Tan Tan Bo Puking [aka Gero Tan]), bear little, if any, relation to real-life forms, often hybridizing animal, human, cartoon, and robot all in one. In other words, these artworks display complete disinterest in verisimilitude. Instead, they take as their referents the staple, stock images and themes circulated in popular culture animation and comic books, themselves without any referents outside of creative imagination, and offer up riffs or recombinations of these referents with no counterparts in the real world.⁶

At the same time, Murakami reports that he has taken inspiration from early modern Edo period (1600-1868) "eccentric artists" because of the way the spectator's gaze travels over the surface of the paintings, in a process of acceleration and deceleration, or following a sort of zigzag pattern. According to Murakami, these eccentric artists' pictures control "the velocity of the observer's gaze, the manner of the gaze's scan, and the attendant information content." And, their "frequent use of a trick that makes the viewer aware of the painting's extreme planarity—a planarity with no discontinuities [literally: gaps, 隙間]—is a special characteristic of these artists' compositional methodology."⁷

The culmination of the combining of these influences—of traditional planar Japanese art forms and contemporary, globally circulating, non-realist, nonhumanist, anime-manga chimerical life forms—is, according to the artist himself, the notion of superflat.⁸ Superflat represents Murakami's attempt to reanimate a pre-Westernized, putatively indigenous, Japanese artistic perspective in forms that simultaneously accommodate a thoroughly Westernized popular culture:

Murakami's goal . . . to establish an organic line of connection across the centuries in Japanese representational aesthetics, leads him . . . to explore in detail continuities in the spatial and formal dynamics of...