38 research outputs found
Double Visions, Double Fictions
No full textA fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature-past and present Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Dopplegänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the dopplegänger in Japanese literary and cinematic texts at two historical junctures: the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s and the present day. According to author Baryon Tensor Posadas, the doppelgänger marks the intersection of the historical impact of psychoanalytic theory, the genre of detective fiction in Japan, early Japanese cinema, and the cultural production of Japanese colonialism. He examines the doppelgänger’s appearance in the works of Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, as well as the films of Tsukamoto Shin’ya and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, not only as a recurrent motif but also as a critical practice of concepts. Following these explorations, Posadas asks: What were the social, political, and material conditions that mobilized the desire for the dopplegänger? And how does the dopplegänger capture social transformations taking place at these historical moments?.</p
Beyond Techno-orientalism: Virtual Worlds and Identity Tourism in Japanese Cyberpunk
No full textIn “Beyond Techno-Orientalism: Virtual Worlds and Identity Tourism in Japanese Cyberpunk,” Baryon Tensor Posadas demonstrates how the impact of techno-Orientalism on Japanese SF opens up an important space to articulate the larger stakes of how the mechanisms of colonial cognitive estrangement continue to set the terms for the imagination of futurity. It goes beyond the mere cataloging of cultural misrepresentations. He uses Gorō Masaki’s Venus City (1992) to bring attention to the structural pervasiveness of the gendered and racialized infrastructure that sets the terms of the genre’s attempts to imagine other worlds and futurities
Remaking Yamato, remaking Japan
No full textRecent years have seen the development and production of several Hollywood remakes of Japanese cultural commodities, among which are some based on sf Japanese animations. Some of these remakes have provoked criticism from fan communities for their ‘whitewashing’ of casts, settings and storylines. Given the hegemonic position that Hollywood occupies within the world-media system, these criticisms are undoubtedly warranted. Yet insofar as they operate on the basis of a politics of representation, they at once run the risk of fetishising a notion of Japanese authenticity that re-inscribes mutually reinforcing techno-orientalist and cultural nationalist undercurrents in the discourse surrounding Japanese animation. My essay argues that rather than an approach that privileges notions of originality and authenticity, the transnational cultural politics of remakes and reboots can be more effectively apprehended when the intertextuality built into the very structural logic of the sf genre is properly recognised. Taking up the recent live-action remake of Space Battleship Yamato (2010) as an illustrative example, I suggest that the nostalgic desire and staging of retroactive continuities that drive both its story and its critical reception call attention to its repetitions of tropes from not only the preceding titles from within the Yamato franchise, but also a longer legacy of nautical adventure stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by this textual genealogy, I highlight the text's engagement with the linkages between the history of imperialism and the formation of sf as a genre in Japan and beyond
Rampo's repetitions: the doppelganger in Edogawa Rampo and Tsukamoto Shin'ya
No full textPsychoanalytical discourse has been instrumental in forming the figure of the doppelganger as a coherent concept and genre of film and fiction, typically linking it with notions of 'the uncanny' and 'repetition compulsion'. In this paper, I explore the functions of the figure of the doppelganger in a text that repeats across (and in effect foregrounds the relations between) two separate historical moments: Edogawa Rampo's short story 'The twins' and Tsukamoto Shin'ya's subsequent adaptation of this story titled Gemini (Edogawa 1969; Tsukamoto 1999). In these texts, the doppelganger appears in relation to other motifs such as feigned amnesia and concealment of memory, the deployment of confessional narrative strategies, as well as the problem of adaptation, in effect addressing the stakes of questions of repetition. Moreover, when situated against the constellation of discourses (e.g. psychoanalysis, urbanization, visuality) that are constitutive of its formation as a concept and genre, the doppelganger also serves as a productive point of departure from which to articulate the stakes of the critical practices through which objects of investigation are produced.</p
“That Day Does Not Belong to Our Generation”: Komatsu Sakyō’s Affective Futurities
No full textCommentary that observes the frequency of the appearances of images of disaster pervades much of the discourse surrounding postwar Japanese popular culture, and especially Japanese science fiction. Against such approaches, I argue that it is more productive to read these narratives of disaster through the critical lens of the genre’s engagement with the problem of futurity. My contention then is that these narratives of disaster do not merely function as imaginative repetitions or re-enactments of past events, but also take on an anticipatory quality, affectively preparing and the ground for and pre-empting responses to future events. I examine the work of Komatsu Sakyō (1931–2011) in particular, whose writing makes for an illustrative test case for articulating the premediative dimension of disaster narratives in postwar Japanese science fiction
Fantasies of the end of the world: The politics of repetition in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi
No full textA striking feature of Kurosawa Kiyoshi's film Retribution (Sak ebi, 2007) is the extent to which it is haunted by tropes and images from preceding films in his own body of work, perhaps the most noteworthy of which is its repetition of the apocalyptic finale of Pulse (Kairo, 2001). In this respect, Kurosawa's film could very well be aligned with the broader phenomenon of proliferating apocalyptic fantasies that are symptomatic of a failure to imagine a way out of "end of history" of the present. The author contends in this article that, rather than being merely symptomatic of the contemporary cultural milieu, Kurosawa's film, through its precise foregrounding of such tropes of repetition, attempts to work through this impasse at the end of Japan's so-called long postwar without merely reproducing the compulsion to repeat a disavowal of the past. Instead, the film gestures toward a desire to envision difference out of this repetition, to imagine a way out of the endless everyday of the present.</p
Double Fictions and Double Visions of Japanese Modernity
No full textAt roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Several authors – including Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and others – repeatedly deployed the doppelganger motif in their fictions against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, and the restructuring of all aspects of everyday life by a burgeoning commodity culture. Interestingly, as if enacting the very compulsion to repeat embodied by the doppelganger on a historical register as well, a repetition of this proliferation of doppelganger images is apparent in the contemporary conjuncture, in the works of authors like Abe Kôbô, Murakami Haruki, or Shimada Masahiko, as well as in the films of Tsukamoto Shinya or Kurosawa Kiyoshi.
To date, much of the previous scholarship on the figure of the doppelganger tends to be preoccupied with the attempt to locate its origins, whether in mythic or psychical terms. In contrast to this concern with fixing the figure to an imagined essence, in my dissertation, I instead place emphasis on the doppelganger’s enactment of repetition itself through an examination at the figure through the prism of the problem of genre, in terms of how it has come to be discursively constituted as a genre itself, as well as its embodiment of the very logic of genre in its play on the positions of identity and difference. By historicizing its formation as a genre, it becomes possible to productively situate not only the proliferation of images of the doppelganger in 1920s Japan but also its repetitions, resignifications, and critical articulations in the present within the the shifting constellation of relations among various discourses and practices that organize colonial and global modernity – language and visuality, the space of empire and the construction of ethno-racial identities, libidinal and material economies – that structure (yet are nevertheless exceeded by) its constitution as a concept.Ph
Japanese Science Fiction
No full textAlthough contemporary Japanese sf has gained global visibility through the circulation of, and emergence of fan cultures around, Japanese animation, English translations of literary sf from Japan remain relatively scant. Consequently, Japanese sf has historically tended to occupy a peripheral position within histories of global sf. What makes the case of Japanese sf peculiar, though, is how the very imagination of ‘Japan’ is arguably already wrapped up in the language of sf. Indeed, it is frequently observed that a plethora of science-fictional ‘Japans’ populate the worlds of Anglophone sf texts, tracking the shifting historical dynamics of power in the US–Japan relationship. As such, despite appearing to occupy a peripheral position within the coordinates of global sf’s Anglocentric imaginary, Japan arguably plays a more formative role in the historical development of the genre since its beginnings than is usually acknowledged. It therefore seems only proper that greater attention be paid to the development of Japanese sf itself. This chapter tracks the development of Japanese sf from its emergence against the backdrop of Japanese imperial expansion, its reconstitution in the aftermath of the Second World War, to its contemporary manifestations, both literary and animated
