What is the Japanese fascination with the monstrous and mechanical? Miri Nakamura's Monstrous Bodies and Jennifer Robertson's Robo Sapiens Japanicus attempt to answer this question. The former explores the monster as a product of modernity, noting the uncanniness of monstrous—but not visibly grotesque—humans within modern Japanese literature. The latter considers how the portrayal of robots plays into a contemporary conservative imaginary and paves the way for a nostalgic future. Both suggest that the monstrous and mechanical are qualities that can interrogate the possibilities of the present and the shape of the future, each a fantasy that acts as a “mirror image of modern Japanese history, the reverse side of myths of constant progress, economic miracle, and social harmony.”Footnote ¹ Yet, if certain monsters arise from modernity, then the reviewed works together hint that the monstrous synthesis of body and machine may become a postmodern platform for imagining a different tomorrow.

The uncanny, the central theme in Monstrous Bodies, may be understood as the unheimlich, as something “uncanny” and unsettling due to its strange, inexplicable familiarity.Footnote ² Ernst Jentsch, reputed inventor of the concept, argues that the uncanny sensation arises from “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate, and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”Footnote ³ The feeling appears where an object troubles a dichotomous category. Freud developed the idea along personal and civilizational lines, arguing that the uncanny “occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”Footnote ⁴ Uncanniness composes a reminder and remainder of the constitutional processes of the subject and of so-called modern civilization, and its power extends to the specific, foundational dichotomies involved, such as the distinction between self (modern) and other (premodern). What is at stake in the uncanny, then, is the comfort of our psychic and “civilizational” home; it unsettles because it shakes the epistemological foundations—the possibility—of the present moment from the inside.

Japanese studies has explored modernity through the uncanny because it indicates constitutive weaknesses in the episteme. Nina Cornyetz argues that the uncanny in Izumi Kyōka's work stems from the creation of the modern male subject. Woman as a particularly modern Other became “empowered by her link to the uncanny realms of the spirits, the dead, and the supernatural,” that is, a figment upon which was projected the irrational past, during the male subjectivity's attempts to establish its own modernity.Footnote ⁵ Marilyn Ivy similarly draws upon the uncanny as part of a perpetually vanishing traditional “Japanese-ness.” Particularly, Yanagita Kunio's Tales of Tōno (1910) “marks a period when the uncanny becomes unplaceable, free-floating, part of a new, larger, national-cultural imaginary.”Footnote ⁶ The tales created a premodern, “other” Japan—one pinioned in a spectral stasis between life and death, present and past—and themselves became the uncanny remainder of Japan's modernity. For both Cornyetz and Ivy, then, the uncanny points to what modernity must forget of itself to be possible, and the hauntingly imperfect dichotomies that result from these repressions.

Nakamura's Monstrous Bodies engages this line of inquiry by charting the positivist imaginings that underlie monsters unique to Japanese modernity—human bodies marked by a grotesqueness that was itself produced by the scientific gaze. For the modernizing nation-state and its “new and improved national bodies, images of monstrosity also proliferated: pathogenic women, evil twins, psychological doppelgängers, and humanoid automata” (Nakamura, p. 2). However, the dichotomy between ideal and monstrous was always fragile; consequently, the idea of the normal was haunted by the volatile abnormality that created it. In tandem with Freud's repressive model, Nakamura follows Jentsch by arguing that it is “the uncertainty about whether or not the normative binary could be sustained … that lies at the crux of the uncanny”; thus, her “modern monsters are anatomies, informed by newly imported sciences, that ignite an uncanny sense of terror by blurring the normal-abnormal binary” (Nakamura, p. 6). For her, modern uncanniness denied the power of the scientific gaze and its biopolitical authority to bring life under its sway by perpetually opening normative typology to an uncontrollable alterity.

As this principle of categorical irresolution troubled by the repressed, Monstrous Bodies’ theoretical frame works best in the middle two chapters. Take Nakamura's discussion of Edogawa Ranpo's “Sōseiji: Aru Shikeishū Ga Kyōkaishi Ni Uchiaketa Hanashi” (1924). The story's murderous twin—a figure produced through eugenic studies of heredity—signifies the colonized Koreans and their uncanny ability to mimic the Japanese. The killing of the brother falling outside of the law invokes the specter of colonial violence, and particularly the massacre of Korean subjects after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Nakamura is “not arguing that Ranpo was somehow trying to criticize the Japanese media or the emperor by writing a story about a ‘noncrime’ murder,” but rather that the repressed costs of imperialism returned unbidden to haunt the present and the text (Nakamura, p. 65). Monstrous Bodies’ third chapter concerns Yumeno Kyūsaku's Dogura Magura (1935), a novel wherein the patient of a mental ward slowly comes to suspect that the Japanese person he believes himself to be is the fictional other to his true self, a Chinese murderer. Nakamura reads uncanniness into this doubling of the protagonist, a duplication aided by the filmic imagery in the text that becomes a synecdoche of the Japanese-Chinese colonial relationship. The story's perplexing ending, where the patient realizes he is an unborn fetus, traps him in a moment before he can (mis)identify with himself in the Lacanian mirror stage. Here, “[t]he horror—the uncanny—arises when the protagonist, as part of his incomplete mirror stage, is forced to face his Chinese look-alike on-screen, causing his repressed Chinese ancestry to return to him” (Nakamura, p. 98). The lack of subjective and narrative closure points to fears of the incomplete distinctions between monstrous and normal, sane and schizophrenic, and colonizer and colonized, each of which were the preconditions of imperial rule configured through modern scientific knowledge.

In places, however, Monstrous Bodies seems less concerned with the uncanny than with the ambiguous. For me, ambiguity is an amorphousness frustrating the scientific gaze. It need not imply the uncanny, which, arising within and against something's possibility, summons impossible existential questions—for how can we undermine our home's foundation without tumbling down with it? Because it interrogates and critiques, ambiguousness instead creates the potential for dialogue and commentary. The importance of this distinction is apparent in Nakamura's treatment of Izumi Kyōka's Kōya Hijiri (1900) as a site of reproducing the homosocial bonds of hygienic discourse with the alluring, but invisibly infected, female body. Given that in Meiji “[i]nvisible disease was … turned into a physical monster, marked by perceptible bodily and racial differences,” the story's sorceress is uncanny because her pathogenic nature is imperceptible without the scientific gaze (Nakamura, p. 22). The same, Nakamura claims, holds true for the monk protagonist who possesses the unexplained ability to resist these monstrous female wiles. Yet, is the monk uncanny, a vague body troubling the possibility of hygienic categories? Or is he an open question, suggesting the need to revisit their veracity?

Monstrous Bodies’ final chapter raises similar doubts. Here, Nakamura reads the artificially created children in two science fiction short stories as commenting on female reproductive rights and the legal definition of personhood. During the Taisho era, illegitimate children could not “be declared ‘human,’ for they ha[d] no status in the legal space. For a nameless, fatherless child born out of wedlock, the closest thing to identify with, in 1920s Japan, was a robot” (Nakamura, p. 125). This suggests doubts about legal and gender formations to me, but not the uncanny return of the foundational repressions behind the categories of these respective systems.

Monstrous Bodies adeptly shows that these five stories have a relationship with at least three sites of conflict within modern science, located around the body: colonial racial structures, new gendered and hygiene regimes, and the feminist troubling of personhood's legal definition. Yet, in so resolutely charting why her sources are uncanny, Nakamura stops short of considering how ambiguous monstrosity might have commented, consciously or otherwise, on modern society. Any doubts, questions, or dialogues the stories might have inspired above or beyond their uncanniness go unremarked upon by Nakamura. Her conclusion demonstrates as much: “[r]ather than arguing that they are somehow supporting the imperial projects, my point is simply to state that they were very much engaged with these discourses” (Nakamura, pp. 133–34). The specifics of this engagement—how these monsters may have affected other discourses of modernity—may have better captured the imagination of the reader.

While Nakamura's monsters emerge from modernity, Robertson's robots step forth in the postmodern era to figure in utopian visions of the future. She begins her book with Tetsuwan Atomu (1952–68), the friendly postwar cartoon robot who represented the hopes of a defeated nation for a technological tomorrow. Tezuka Osamu's manga set the tone for the future coexistence of robots and humans—the frame of Robertson's study. She argues that “robots have been imagined as a technological solution for, or the perfect tool for imagining solutions to, perceived social problems such as the aging population, decreasing marriages, the declining birthrate, and the shrinking labor force” (Robertson, p. 191). However, Robo Sapiens Japanicus shows that the robot, fantastic or real, cannot bear the weight of these sociopolitical hopes.

Robertson masterfully argues that the robotic figure has come to populate conservative visions of the future. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has appropriated the mechanical person as the means of moving Japan forward, beyond its current age, gender, birthrate, and labor problems. This outlook is apparent in Innovation 25, a 2007 Abe administration proposal that pictures a future for the Japanese family whose every social or household task has a technological solution. By design, these fixes allow for the restoration of nationalist values of political uniformity, maintaining the gendered division of labor, and preserving supposed ethnic homogeneity. The three points together underwrite what Robertson terms “reactionary postmodernism, a nostalgic pastiche” that constitutes more “an imagination of a golden ‘future-past’ than a plausible, much less possible, ‘future-future’” (Robertson, pp. 57, 78). As heir to the utopian dreams of Atomu, reactionary postmodernism sees a strict division between humans and robots, which can be tools of social renewal. By documenting how roboticists impose arbitrarily gendered limits on real robot functionality—thereby accepting both gender roles and the division of labor as natural—Robertson demonstrates the depth of the imaginary's roots.

This conservativism extends into an ethno-national discourse that underlies the discussion of robot rights and ethics in Japan, where “there is growing popular support, on one hand, to deny civil rights to permanent residents and, on the other, to confer the rights of citizenship and residency to robots and nonhuman animals, and even to cartoon characters” (Robertson, p. 123). Unlike humans, robots have received citizenship jus soli, as production on Japanese soil can secure a legal place in the koseki system with popular support. However, the reality of robots, and particularly humanoids, cannot help recover what roboticists and politicians alike deem “desirable social arrangements, in this case the restoration of the family—natal, marital, corporate, national—and the harmonious coexistence of humans and robots” (Robertson, p. 178). The actual everyday conjunction of robots and humans, and the ideas they vouchsafe, is far from realization.

The reactionary postmodernism implicit in coexistence also raises its head in terms of disability. In light of the upcoming 2020 Olympics and efforts to make Tokyo more accessible, Robertson points to the mass media and corporate attention on the technology of prosthesis, and its blindness to Paralympians themselves. As a robotic solution, this “cyborg-ableism” conceives of disability in the specific embodied terms of “gotai, or ‘five body parts,’ and thus [seeks] to reintegrate disabled persons into the larger able-bodied society” (Robertson, pp. 168–69). The coalescence of gotai and the robotic elides the real social and architectural challenges that inflect and define lived meanings of “disability” at an everyday level; that is, that exclude the differently abled by privileging certain normative somatic conceptions. The cyborg becomes a means of augmenting or restoring the functions of normative fully-limbed bodies, a complex figure that sutures human and machine together but leaves “the social and behavioral barriers faced by persons with disabilities … intact” (Robertson, p. 174).

In many regards, Robertson builds upon Frederik L. Schodt's Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia, which broadly contends that “the [Japanese] Robot Kingdom is part myth, part reality, and part state of mind” spread out across government initiatives, industry interests, and popular media representations.Footnote ⁷ As to why Japan promotes coexistence with robots, Schodt suggests social and historical reasons more than religious ones. Writing three decades later, Robertson argues that the reason behind envisioning the robot within the Japanese family lies in a traditional animism. Given Schodt's interpretation, I felt that Robertson could have benefited from greater historical explication when she argues that “[r]obots are ‘living things’ in the Shintō universe,” facing less social stigma than in America or Europe (Robertson, p. 15).

In fact, there is a twentieth-century anxiety attached to the robotic that the conservative imaginary effaces. Even Atomu is implicitly ambiguous: with his inbuilt nuclear engine, he is a sign of scientific advances shadowed by the threat of science ill-used.Footnote ⁸ Since the appearance of the first mechanical people in Karel Čapek's 1923 Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), the robot has been plagued with uncertainty. As Nakamura notes, the play's Japanese translation sparked a fascination with, and fear of, the robotic (Nakamura, pp. 105–10). Seth Jacobowitz's research on Meiji literature has traced this anxiety, associated with the mechanization of humankind, to the localization of European Romanticism. He points out the fact that R.U.R. is concerned with artificially produced people, rather than robots per se. This creation of a spectrum between humans and artificial beings under the signifier jinzō ningen, or manmade person, is linked to a modern fear of people becoming machines alienated from their own humanity. This marked “an episteme already in place by the late nineteenth century in which mechanical man is both a leading indicator of modernity and inevitable consequence wrought by ‘civilization and enlightenment.’”Footnote ⁹

Behind this discussion and Nakamura's artificial children sits an unease with the mixing of the mechanical and biological. Robertson alludes to the possibilities of embracing this unease, and the dirtying of modern dichotomies it portends, as “resistant postmodernism.” Rather than the return to the past that reactionary postmodernism fetishizes, resistant postmodernism “is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition” (Robertson, p. 201n17). In Japanese popular media, this manifests in the often-monstrous transgression of the human-machine divide. The result, the cyborg, casts a long shadow within both popular and avant-garde cultural production, ranging from the ambivalence expressed in any number of anime and manga to the outright grotesque. Steven T. Brown, analyzing Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence (2004), notes that director “Oshii [Mamoru] not only blurs the boundaries between human and machine, animate and inanimate … but also shows us the chiasmic intertwinement between the human and the machinic—the machinic in the human and the human in the machine.”Footnote ¹⁰ This entanglement bears upon human narcissism: we recreate our image in machinery, but in so doing unwittingly disfigure the boundaries of the human. Technology will never allow for a transcendence of this process, only a negative cycle of reproducing the human form and its troubles in displacement. In the end, Oshii suggests a posthuman (re)turn to our organic relations with nature that modern definitions of humanity precluded.

In this light, the ambiguity of human and machine becomes a point from which to reconsider the status quo. Oshii's reconfiguration of the human follows from, and in fact cites, Donna Haraway's cyborg, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.”Footnote ¹¹ This blending of group and individual, biological and mechanical, has found monstrous expression in the Japanese cyberpunk horror film Tetsuo (1989), which fuses men and metal together. Director Tsukamoto Shin'ya uses the cyborg to nullify “on screen the dominant ‘cultural assumptions and institutional arrangements’ … through a biting satire of salaryman masculinity[,] the status quo of heteronormative state capitalism and the mechanisms of social domination and control that maintain it.”Footnote ¹² The mechanical is not a distinct category here, but rather one that becomes intimately bonded with two humans—who themselves ultimately fuse together into an assemblage of flesh and metal beyond everyday categories. A figure of resistant postmodernism, this posthuman cyborg grotesquely transgresses the human-machine dichotomy to suggest perhaps the true monster: modern society, its bodies, and its mores.

For Nakamura, the uncanny, or ambiguity, conceptually questions an episteme. On the other hand, for Robertson, reactionary postmodernism looks longingly backwards at the specific structures of the Japanese modern era in order to shape the future. The monster is a product of modernity's doubt in itself, while the robot is postmodern conservativism's hope for salvation. Within resistant postmodernity, these two figures converge in the medial cyborg, who becomes a desire for a new order beyond modernity's specter. Together, these works suggest that the past's monstrosity, more than any retrospective imaginary, may have something to offer the future.