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

Takayuki Tatsumi teaches in the Department of Literature at Keio University, the same institution where the conceptualizer of hypertext, Ted Nelson, held a position for several years in the 1990s. Among a wealth of other genres and cultural phenomena, Tatsumi studies science fiction and takes it seriously. He writes of his cozy familiarity "chatting" with U.S. science fiction writers Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and especially Larry McCaffrey, author of the book's Introduction. McCaffrey appreciatively calls the object of Tatsumi's interest "Japanoids," multicultural mixmasters adapting Bartók and Poe to local imagery, passions and obsessions and coming up with results as peculiar as a Hummer stretch limousine. Tatsumi shares McCaffrey's appreciation of the Avant-Pop, the realm where distinctions are collapsed between the avant-garde and popular culture. Tatsumi dates the beginning of such postmodern fiction to works written in the U.S.A. after the JFK assassination, to include the cyberpunk wave of the early 1980s, Ridley Scott's movie Blade Runner and Mark Jacobson's snappy novel Gojiro.

The year Tatsumi was 18, 1973, "turns out to be the year when Anglo-American writers' discursive ravishing of Americans coincided with Japanese writers' creative reappropriation of Jewishness, and ended up accelerating imaginary internationalism and protoglobalism." As this rich premise is left unpacked, the reader is left to presume that Tatsumi sees parallels between Japanese interfaces with influences from outside the Land of the Rising Sun with the generation of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Budd Schulberg and Irwin Shaw in the United States, negotiating in big novels between multicultural urban America and their parents' circumscribed lives and culture. Yet Tatsumi can be quite insightful in his examination of exchanges between "oriental" and "occidental" tropes. He notes how playwright Shuji Terayama, stalwart of his clown-faced Tenjo-Sajki Theater in Tokyo, was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and adapted Gabriel García Márquez and Bela Bartók for a young, experimental Japanese audience.

Tatsumi's Japan embodies an ideology of technoconsumerism. It is found in a tourist campaign to discover "exotic Japan" by railroad, and in the 1980s and 1990s phenomena of Western actors and celebrities selling consumer products (Warhol did so, and the fad was the basis for Sofia Coppola's movie, Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray as the actor). He calls the dying Showa Emperor a cyborg, whose last days played out the "creative masochism" of Japan's postwar era.

Tatsumi calls a media-saturated reality rooted in Japanese fiction "mikadophilia," seeing it as a mimicry of the West, its folktales based on shapes provided by immigrant Lafcadio Hearn to serve a Pax Americana. He finds a model "postoccidentalist" in Hearn, a.k.a. Koisumi Yakumo in Japan, whose book Kwaidan (1904) presented Japanese stories as similar to African American ones of voodoo and zombies the author had learned in New Orleans. Hearn in turn influenced Kunio Yanagita, whose book Legends of Toro evoked the "deep north Gothic" of America's Washington Irving; the collection included one about a farm girl married to a horse, which Tatsumi compares to Peter Schaffer's play Equus. Tatsumi also offers an insightful "post-orientalist" reading of late 19th-century novels predicting wars with Asians, including one by H.G. Wells published in 1898. Among anti-Chinese novels published in the U.S.A. in the 1880s, one featured inventor Thomas Edison as its hero.

Tatsumi gives a "cyborg feminist" reading of Donna Haraway's study of sexually indeterminate characters, human, android and things in between, the "gynoids" that inhabit these subterranean metafictions rumbling beneath our feet. Shozo Numa's strange, illustrated, frequently reworked (unfinishable?) novel Yapoo, the Human Cattle, appeared in installments and different forms between 1956 and 1991 and presents the story of men morphing into furniture and utensils for the benefit...