"Stranger on a Train": Denshaotoko, Serialization, and Otaku Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

This paper examines a popular Japanese television drama series Denshaotoko as a site of inflecting imaginary constitution of ”unnatural” and marginal communities bound by nakamaishiki (仲間意識). The focus of this paper is an inquiry on hypertextual serialization of fragments and its relationship to the contingent formation of otaku community. The effect of serialization, signifying an attempt to extend the time and frequency of consumption, is the prolonged fulfillment of consumers, yielding both narrative addiction and commercial profitability. This inquiry seems to open up an ”economics of serialization” on one hand, and requires a particular reading of the possible dissolution of the very idea of ”collectivity” or community on the other. The performative consciousness of such cosmopolitan communities designates a non-static model of decentered grouping and membership in reaction to the reification of modern communities. On this issue, it engages in a dialogue among diverse ”fragmentary writings” on indefinite/inoperative communities by Blanchot and Nancy. In light of the rhetoric of global dynamics, internet chatroom and other virtual communities seek to reinforce a logic of synecdoche, that is, parts signifying a whole. Everyday narratives such as Denshaotoko focus on incidental occurrences (in lieu of main transformational actions) and render the ways of story-telling fundamentally episodic and unfocused. The lack of narrative determinacy and closure, a condition of hypertextual communications, represents ”an affirmation irreducible to unity” (Blanchot). Furthermore, in Denshaotoko, the process of such tele-visual ”flow” facilitates and modifies Benjamin's notions of phantasmagoria and flâneurie and Lefebvre's theory of everyday ”living space.” The fuzzy and incidental inter-subject communications in this television series will also be investigated from the perspectives of the shifting conditions of communities under the global system.