Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime (review)

This collection of eleven essays canvasses Japanese science fiction in literature, manga, film, and television from the early twentieth century. The overarching assumption is that Japanese science fiction has been enriched by the Western science fiction tradition while in turn reimagining and influencing global culture. Current Japanese manga and anime, with their international audiences, reflect the “cyborgian” culture of modern Japan, prefaced in the Taishō and early Shōwa eras of the 1910s and 1920s, but emerging in full bloom after the American occupation. Not surprisingly, the collection has many gaps in coverage—literature is slighted for more recent anime—and many of the essays favor trendy scholarship over clarity of expression.

The book’s first two essays trace the unique trajectory of science fiction in Japan. If the Western science fiction tradition can be traced back to the nineteenth-century gothic novel, in 1920s Japan, mass production and a fascination with the West (including psychoanalysis) emerged alongside a popular obsession with robots. This story is detailed in Miri Nakamura’s essay “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan,” which indicates that science fiction incubated in the “irregular detective” novel genre, an avant-garde literary movement of this era. Nakamura examines Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura Magura (1935), a meditation on dehumanization featuring an unreliable narrator, plagued with doubles, who appears to be a murderer but may in fact be a fetus in his mother’s womb. Thomas Schnellbacher’s essay “Has the Empire Sunk Yet?” suggests that, following the modernist-flavored 1920s, Japanese science fiction remained fallow until the post–World War II era, when the avant-garde novelist Abe Kōbō published Inter Ice Age 4 (1959), a reflection on loss of empire that avoided the nostalgia of more nationalistic speculative narratives common then and since.

Kotani Mari’s “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies” examines feminism in Japanese post-1960s science fiction. Kotani describes feminist utopian novels that include visions of female-dominated societies and stories that hinge on daughters entrapped by monstrous mothers or in bizarre marriages. She looks at Matsuo Yumi’s novel Murder in Balloon Town (1994), which depicts a community to which pregnant women are banished; it is then beset by murders. This notion of the pregnant woman as a monstrous Other— or of the feminine as an aspect of the grotesque—is also taken up in the essays that examine gender and sexuality in anime. Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Sex and the Single Cyborg,” while noting that many feminist theorists have celebrated the cyborg as “postgender,” focuses instead on the cyborg body as a challenge to masculinity. She analyzes the anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96) and anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) and notes that cyborg or “mecha” bodies tend to be depicted as “feminine”—that is, as “open systems” that incorporate or engulf their human pilots of either gender. She argues that these depictions highlight the threat to masculinity —and modern “subjectivity”—that emerges from the interpenetration of the human with high technology.

The final essay, Saito Tamaki’s “Otaku Sexuality,” is adapted from a longer psychoanalytic study. The otaku or highly stigmatized Japanese “nerd” subculture first reached notoriety in 1989 when an anime devotee became a serial murderer of young girls. Members of the otaku subculture are obsessed with young heroines: Saito calls them “armored cuties” or “phallic girls.” Saito argues that despite its marginalization, the otaku culture’s “big bang” moment took place when the acclaimed anime director Miyazaki Hayao, then a teen, fell in love with the girl hero of a 1958 animated film and went on to make his many artistic films, such as Spirited Away (2001), with their young female heroes. Several of the essays, including Saito’s, also look at Japan’s yaoi subculture, in which female readers and fans create and circulate manga parodies of popular culture that feature boy-boy...