Takayuki Tatsumi

Ranpo Edogawa

Seth Jacobowitz

Edogawa Rampo (pseudonym of Hirai Taro, 1894-1965) is the acknowledged grand master of Japan's golden age of crime and mystery fiction. He is also a major writer in the tradition of Japanese Modernism, and exerts a massive influence on the popular and literary culture of today's Japan. The Edogawa Rampo Reader presents a selection of outstanding examples of his short fiction, and a selection of his non-fiction prose. Together, they present a full and accurate picture of Rampo as a major contributor to the Japanese literary scene, helping to clarify his achievements to the English-speaking world. All the content of the Rampo Reader is brand-new to English. His non-fiction work has never been translated into English before. This is the only place to find a comprehensive one-volume introduction to the world of Edogawa Rampo.

The Edogawa Rampo Reader

DIVCompares modern science fiction and the avant garde pop scene in America and Japan./div

Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America

Full Metal Apache

Christopher Bolton

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr

Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture. Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre. Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U. Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University. Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.

Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams

Alfred Hornung

Nina Morgan

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies

Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan’s leading cultural critics, renowned for his work on American literature and culture. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fan’s love of both Japanese and American art and literature, he is perhaps uniquely well situated to offer this study of the dynamic crosscurrents between the avant-gardes and pop cultures of Japan and the United States. In Full Metal Apache, Tatsumi looks at the work of artists from both sides of the Pacific: fiction writers and poets, folklorists and filmmakers, anime artists, playwrights, musicians, manga creators, and performance artists. Tatsumi shows how, over the past twenty years or so, writers and artists have openly and exuberantly appropriated materials drawn from East and West, from sources both high and low, challenging and unraveling the stereotypical images Japan and America have of one another. Full Metal Apache introduces English-language readers to a vast array of Japanese writers and performers and considers their work in relation to the output of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Jack London, J. G. Ballard, and other Westerners. Tatsumi moves from the poetics of metafiction to the complex career of Madame Butterfly stories and from the role of the Anglo-American Lafcadio Hearn in promoting Japanese folklore within Japan during the nineteenth century to the Japanese monster Godzilla as an embodiment of both Japanese and Western ideas about the Other. Along the way, Tatsumi develops original arguments about the self-fashioning of “Japanoids” in the globalist age, the philosophy of “creative masochism” inherent within postwar Japanese culture, and the psychology of “Mikadophilia” indispensable for the construction of a cyborg identity. Tatsumi’s exploration of the interplay between Japanese and American cultural productions is as electric, ebullient, and provocative as the texts and performances he analyzes.

Mike Mosher’s “Some Aspects of Californian Cyberpunk” vividly reminds us of the influence of West Coast counterculture on cyberpunks, with special emphasis on 1960s theoretical gurus such as Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan, who explored the frontiers of inner space as well as the global village. Frenchy Lunning’s “Cyberpunk Redux: Dérives in the Rich Sight of Post-Anthropocentric Visuality” examines how the heritage of Ridley Scott’s techno-noir film Blade Runner (1982) that preceded Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) keeps revolutionizing the art of visuality, even in the age of the Anthropocene. If you read Lunning’s essay along with Lidia Meras’s “European Cyberpunk Cinema,” which closely analyzes major European cyberpunkish dystopian films Renaissance (2006) and Metropia (2009) and Elana Gomel’s “Recycled Dystopias: Cyberpunk and the End of History,” your understanding of the cinematic and post-utopian possibility of cyberpunk will become more comprehensive. For a cutting-edge critique of cyberpunk manga, let me recommend Martin de la Iglesia’s “Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?” which radically redefines the status of Akira (1982–1993) as trans-generic, paying attention to the genre consciousness of the contemporary readers of its Euro-American editions. Next, Denis Taillandier’s “New Spaces for Old Motifs? The Virtual Worlds of Japanese Cyberpunk” interprets the significance of Japanese hardcore cyberpunk novels such as Goro Masaki’s Venus City (1995) and Hirotaka Tobi’s Grandes Vacances (2002; translated as The Thousand Year Beach, 2018) and Ragged Girl (2006), paying special attention to how the authors created their virtual landscape in a Japanese way. For a full discussion of William Gibson’s works, please read Janine Tobek and Donald Jellerson’s “Caring About the Past, Present, and Future in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Guerilla Games’ Horizon: Zero Dawn” along with my own “Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga”. The former reconsiders the first novel of Gibson’s new trilogy in the 21st century not as realistic but as participatory, whereas the latter relocates Gibson’s essence not in cyberspace but in a junkyard, making the most of his post-Dada/Surrealistic aesthetics and “Lo-Tek” way of life, as is clear in the 1990s “Bridge” trilogy.

Takayuki Tatsumi

About

Books

Join the club