Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (review)

Professor of English at Tokyo's Keio University, Takayuki Tatsumi is a prolific critic, specializing in science fiction's generic developments in Japan and North America. In this particular study, perhaps best viewed as a survey of his recent work, Tatsumi draws on a range of familiar deconstructive and feminist theorists to create a model for understanding the increasingly complex literary interactions between the U.S. and Japan in the late the twentieth century. Though focused on science fiction, slipstream, and cyberpunk, the book treats these generic forms as a lens through which to examine the larger concept of meta-fiction as it appears in everything from novels and short stories to folklore, performance art, TV shows, and even opera.

Those accustomed to Western scholarly norms may find that the chapters end suddenly, without articulated conclusions. Indeed, at times the work does read more like a series of loosely related conference papers than an integrated monograph. In part, this stems from the author's admittedly ambitious goals, such as when he suggests a consideration of "everything that would influence the fate of postmodernism in the 1990s" (38). It should be said clearly, however, that the rhetorical patterning of this book reflects Japanese critical conventions. The structure of the book is part of Tatsumi's argument: by presenting his readers with English criticism organized according to Japanese norms, he is asking us to consider the fact that "the western concept of logocentric reality" is "no more than a dominant narrative" that can be interrupted to create dialogue (9).

Tatsumi's chief project is to explode the notion of Asian "mimicry" (9). In his "Theory" section he elaborates the ways in which Japanese cultural self-image transitioned out of a mind-set of defeat and into what he terms "creative masochism." Tatsumi contrasts Kobo Abe's 1967 play Friends with Masahiko Shimada's 1989 novel Dream Messenger to highlight a narrative switch from an alienated and isolated postwar protagonist to a capitalized and consumerist postmodern one. The postmodern hero, Tatsumi argues, is both creative (authoring a saleable self-identity) and masochistic (content to offer that identity up for the consumption of others). If the Western reader imagines an ideal, orientalized hero, then the Japanese hero is equally active in imagining an ideal, occidentalized reader.

By examining literary coincidences, Tatsumi argues against a "logic of imitation" and points instead to a "logic of synchronicity" in which trans Pacific traffic in fantastic images, motifs, settings and plot devices occurs multi-directionally and at an ever-quickening tempo (14). In his "History" section he addresses the origins of American speculative fiction as rooted in 1880s and 1890s notions of Yellow Peril, and he reads this against Japanese gothic imaginings of a Western other. The following chapter reveals the ways in which Kunio Yanagita (often credited as the father of Japanese ethnology) drew inspiration from the work of Lafcadio Hearn, who naturalized as a Japanese citizen in the late 1890s. Tatsumi suggests that Yanagita's view of the northern Japanese supernatural was strongly influenced by Hearn's own imaginings of the southern Japanese supernatural vis-à-vis African American folklore.

Later chapters focus on the late twentieth century. The "Aesthetics" section begins with a classic reception study of Japanese authors' encounters with American cyberpunk in the 1980s, and then explores changes in Japanese literary practice as authors responded to an exotic "Japan" seen through the lens of U.S. science fiction. The "Performance" section excavates the ways in which playwright Shuji Terayama appropriates material from Edgar Allen Poe, while the final section traces Japanese appropriations of filmic idioms from American westerns. Tatsumi considers Japanese science fiction as versions of a frontier narrative in which the gold rush is refigured as a postwar scrap metal market and the iconic Apache is refigured as the Okinawan and Korean heirs of war-time forced labor.

Tatsumi's critical range is wide, but he rarely delves deeply...