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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime Gerald Figal Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Edited by Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Takayuki Tatsumi. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 269 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $20.00. The decibel level of the quiet boom in English-language works on modern Japanese popular culture has been raised a few notches with the publication of this well-integrated edited volume that spans varieties of Japanese prose science fiction and SF animation. Joining Frederik Schodt’s work on manga, Susan Napier’s (and many others’) on anime, Jennifer Robertson’s on Takarazuka, Anne Allison’s on toys, and Ian Condry’s on hip-hop—not to mention William Tsutsui’s homage to Godzilla and Mark Schilling’s ever-increasing list of guides to popular genre films—Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams comes on the heels of the first two issues of Mechademia, an innovative new journal on Japanese popular culture also published by University of Minnesota Press and also involving editors Christopher Bolton and Takayuki Tatsumi and several of the authors found in this volume. The network of affiliations and the fact that nine of the eleven articles (and the afterword) appeared previously as journal articles (most notably in Science Fiction Studies 29:3, 2002) might suggest simple repackaging, but it is repackaging of the best sort in one convenient and usable book. Much of the credit for the coherency of this book—never a given with edited volumes—must go to the editors, who have thoughtfully arranged the collection and have written an introduction that provides useful historical, literary, and intellectual contexts. They point out the literary and visual history of science fiction in twentieth-century Japan, tying it to both domestic trends and international influences. Much emphasis is placed on Japanese prose science fiction’s “complex communication with other cultures, other media, and other genres,” which renders its origins and boundaries as “not unitary” and “fractally complex” (p. xi). Indeed, this focus on the interplay among cultures, media, and genres lends the volume its distinctive edge. The extent to which each contribution fulfills the promise of the introduction varies, but collectively they succeed at introducing the shape and span of Japanese science fiction and at delineating avenues of inquiry within it. The book is divided into two large parts: “Prose Science Fiction” and “Science Fiction Animation.” Both boast an international mix of scholars from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. Miri Nakamura sets the scene of early twentieth-century Japanese science fiction with a fascinating examination of what she fashions as “the mechanical uncanny” in avant-garde detective-fiction writer Yumeno Kyūsaku’s [End Page 445] bizarre 1935 novel Dogura magura. Akin to Jennifer González’s notion of a cyborg body as being “both its own agent and subject to the power of other agencies,” the mechanical uncanny, as Nakamura draws it out from Yumeno’s novel, revolves around the question of the degree to which people have control over their body and mind in an age of mechanical reproduction wherein the boundaries of the mechanical and the biological, of the artificial and authentic, of the copy and the original are blurred and thrown into doubt, producing a “particular brand of horror” (p. 5). Her association of these dichotomies with the “foreign” and the “Japanese” is less developed, but provokes thinking about various doublings within Japan’s experience of modernity. While Nakamura’s article serves to introduce contexts for prewar Japanese science fiction, the following piece, by Thomas Schnellbächer, does the same, to some degree, for postwar Japan by taking up the trope of the Pacific Ocean in configurations of (former) empire and island nation in four notable science fiction works: the film Gojira (Godzilla, King of the Monsters, 1954), Abe Kōbō’s novel Dai yon kanpyōki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1959), the manga and anime Uchū senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato, 1974–1983), and Komatsu Sakyō’s bestselling novel Nihon chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, 1973). Recognition of this highly charged trope across media is striking in itself and makes for a series...