Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji

In 2007, Toboso Yana began publishing Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), a manga series set in late Victorian England about a beautiful butler named Sebastian, who is actually a devil in disguise, and his young master, Count Ciel Phantomhive. With its Western European setting, its aestheticization of the demonic and the deathly, and its penchant for roses, Rococo motifs, and the color black, Kuroshitsuji exemplifies a type of “Gothic” style that has become popular in postwar Japanese shōjo culture since Hagio Moto’s classic vampire manga Pō no ichizoku (1972–76, The clan of Poe).¹ Through a reading of Kuroshitsuji as a representative case study, I examine this shōjo Gothic style and its relation to Japanese national identity in the age of postmodern globalization and post-colonial reevaluations of the legacy of nineteenth-century Western imperialism.² In the first part of the essay, I consider the relationship between the superflat visual aesthetic and the postmodern condition of simulation, which the shōjo Gothic style makes explicit. I then discuss how the shōjo Gothic style, as a postmodern and postcolonial practice of enunciation, simulates, recontextualizes, and reinvents a Western European past in order to articulate the enduring desire of the contemporary Japanese nation for an idealized “Western modernity,” characterized by “tasteful” consumption. In the last part of the essay, I argue that Kuroshitsuji, through its Gothic style, paradoxically intervenes in its own idealization of Western modernity to celebrate contemporary Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures and to disseminate its hybrid cultural commodities around the world as a cultural superpower in the age of postmodern globalization. The shōjo Gothic style in Kuroshitsuji thus expresses the profound ambivalence of postcolonial Japanese national identity vis-à-vis the West in the twenty-first century. Through reinscribing the signs of a Western European past, Kuroshitsuji articulates the split in the Japanese “Self” between the endless striving for the ideal of “Western” modernity and the nationalistic affirmation of an empowered “Japanese” (post)modernity, while eliding the inherent cultural hybridity of the shōjo Gothic style and of the national identity articulated through this style. Lastly, it is important to note that Japan was (and is) a (neo)colonial power in Asia, and I touch on the significance of this double postcolonial relationship at the end of the essay.

Murakami Takashi first introduced the concept of “superflat” within the context of an art exhibition titled Super Flat, which was presented in 2000 at the PARCO department store gallery. He later developed the concept through two more exhibitions: Coloriage (2002) and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005). Murakami and several other critics, including Azuma Hiroki and Sawaragi Noi, interpret superflatness as a visual manifestation of the postmodern collapse of hierarchies and the fragmentation of the modern Cartesian subject.³ In this essay, I will argue that the shōjo Gothic style points to a connection between superflatness and another principal element of the postmodern condition: simulation. In “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Fredric Jameson reads the formal planarity of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes as a symbolic expression of “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality” in our world where objects “now become a set of texts or simulacra.” ⁴ Likewise, the shōjo Gothic style suggests that the superflat visual aesthetic implies a particular postmodern mode of vision and knowledge—a “way of seeing” (John Berger) or “scopic regime” (Martin Jay)—that “flattens” all “real” phenomena in the world into hyperreal signifiers “without origin or reality.” ⁵ Kuroshitsuji illustrates this connection between literal and figurative flattening through its depiction of the Undertaker’s shop. In Figure 1, the façade of the shop is depicted in a highly planar, nongeometric perspectival style. The figures of the characters, the door of the shop, and the coffin and tombstones flanking the door are positioned in a highly linear arrangement, and the speech bubbles add to the planarity through their superimposition, also in a linear fashion, over the picture...