New Spaces for Old Motifs? The Virtual Worlds of Japanese Cyberpunk

Denis Taillandier

doi:10.3390/arts7040060

Abstract

North-American cyberpunk’s recurrent use of high-tech Japan as “the default setting for the future,” has generated a Japonism reframed in technological terms. While the renewed representations of techno-Orientalism have received scholarly attention, little has been said about literary Japanese science fiction. This paper attempts to discuss the transnational construction of Japanese cyberpunk through Masaki Gorō’s Venus City (Vīnasu Shiti, 1992) and Tobi Hirotaka’s Angels of the Forsaken Garden series (Haien no tenshi, 2002–). Elaborating on Tatsumi’s concept of synchronicity, it focuses on the intertextual dynamics that underlie the shaping of those texts to shed light on Japanese cyberpunk’s (dis)connections to techno-Orientalism as well as on the relationships between literary works, virtual worlds and reality.

Highlights

Cyberpunk and Techno-OrientalismWhile the inversion is not a very original one, looking into Japanese cyberpunk in a transnational context first calls for a brief dive into cyberpunk Japan
Anglo-American pioneers of the genre, quite William Gibson, and Pat Cadigan or Bruce Sterling, have extensively used high-tech, hyper-consumerist Japan as a motif or a setting for their works, so that Japan became in the mid 1980s the very exemplification of the future, or to borrow Gibson’s (2001, p. 1) words: “the global imagination’s default setting for the future.”
The pervasive use of a science fictional Japan has spurred the rise of what Morley and Robins (1995), and later Ueno (1999, 2002), have called

Summary

Introduction

While the inversion is not a very original one, looking into Japanese cyberpunk in a transnational context first calls for a brief dive into cyberpunk Japan. Angels of the Forsaken Garden series (Haien no tenshi, 2002–) is in keeping with the genre’s themes in its exploration of the philosophical and social questions raised by virtual reality (the status of VR experience or the status of fictional entities), it considerably refashions the genre by breaking away from techno-Orientalist representations and mapping comparatively archaic motifs on to the high-tech environment of cyberspace. Such as the works of Tatsumi Takayuki, Kotani Mari, Susan Napier, Baryon T.

Masaki Gorō’s Cyberpunk

The Grave of Desires

Intertextuality and Intersubjectivity

To Conclude