In Tokyo Cyberpunk, Steven Brown analyzes feature-length and serial anime and live-action films that engage with unsettling questions about what it means to be (post)human in a time and place not so distant from the present. Brown and the works upon which he directs his primary focus render everyday human experiences uncanny as they address questions of subjectivity, agency, and the possibility of resistance in hyperconnected worlds populated by robots, gynoids, ghosts, cyborgs, and disembodied humans running amok.
Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Brown reads these texts “rhizomatically.” That is, rather than offering a linear, hierarchical narrative analysis, Brown views these films and anime “tangentially through their rhizomatic connections with other anime, other films, other works of art, and other discursive formations” (p. 9). This approach seems particularly apt for many of the complicated works of Japanese film and anime engaging with the troubling implications of posthumanism. In the introduction, Brown offers Ōtomo Katsuhiro's highly complex and influential feature-length cyberpunk anime Akira (1988; based on a manga serialized in 1982–90) as one such example. Akira, he writes, “encourages rhizomatic reading by evoking the processes of nonhierarchical connections” through “diverse smaller narratives, codes, and memes, offering a horizontal image of thought where anything may be linked to anything else without requiring vertical notions of a metanarrative” (p. 9), an ascription that can be applied, more or less, to the five other works of anime and live-action film Brown goes on to explore. The result of his rhizomatic reading is a delightful excursion full of twists and turns, some inevitable, some surprising.
The book is divided into three parts, each centered around one or two Japanese works. In the first—and, to me, the richest—part, Brown peels apart layers of visual, aural, and narrative complexity in Oshii Mamoru's highly intertextual feature-length anime Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence (2004). In Innocence, Oshii contemplates how humans might relate to the various ningyō—“dolls, puppets, automata, androids, and cyborgs” (p. 13)—that increasingly populate the world. Innocence is richly citational, drawing on religious (the Buddha, Confucius, the Bible), literary (Milton, Zeami), scientific (Richard Dawkins), and other texts. Some of this citation is visual, including Japanese automata and a disturbingly erotic series of photographs of dolls created by German surrealist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s. The latter inspired the murderous gynoids at the heart of the narrative.
Part 2 focuses on Tsukamoto Shin'ya's live-action film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), which Brown reads in the context of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), and the tentacle-ridden erotic horror anime Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (1987), among other works. Brown parses the film to show how Tsukamoto “deconstructs the essentializing identification of masculinity with phallic dominance and violence” (p. 56) in a text that explores the eroticization of male cyborgs/androids and loss of identity.
In part 3, Brown looks at Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Kairo (2001; released in English as Pulse) and Oshii Mamoru's Avalon (2001), two live-action films that reflect on the implications of being haunted by “electronic presence,” that is, the “liveness” (p. 112) of communication technology from telegraphs to cyberspace to virtual reality. Kurosawa's horror film meditates on social withdrawal (hikikomori) and the dehumanizing implications of technology through parallel narratives wherein ghosts are increasingly populating the world and a virus is spreading over the Internet, infecting individuals with the desire to withdraw from society and then to kill themselves. Shot in Poland, Oshii's Avalon engages with issues of authoritarian surveillance and oppression, virtual reality, disaffected youth, and individual agency, “offer[ing] an implicit critique of the society of the spectacle by showing the isolation and alienation produced by the totalitarianism of spectatorship” (p. 140).
Finally, in the conclusion Brown uses Nakamura Ryūtarō's thirteen-part anime series Serial Experiments Lain (1989) to revisit and rethink through the issues of posthumanism considered in the preceding chapters. Nakamura's series tarries with the tension between embodiment in the real world and disembodiment in the “Wired” and a simultaneous desire for both. Lain's ultimate realization “that her everyday life includes aspects that are both embodied and virtual” (p. 183) opens up space for resistance.
In sum, Brown has deftly—and rhizomatically—woven together films and anime by Oshii Mamoru, Ōtomo Katsuhiro, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Nakamura Ryūtarō, and Tsukamoto Shin'ya with major and obscure works of European, American, and Japanese cinema and anime; iconic photography and other graphic art; and film and literary criticism and theory. Given the vastness of this textual and theoretical archive, however, it is surprising that so few of the critical and theoretical texts upon which Brown draws come from Japan itself. While “posthumanism is profoundly transnational” and there is, thus, “no Japanese posthumanism per se,” as Brown points out, it does “come to be inflected in certain ways by the cultural forms and practices specific to Japanese visual culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (p. 159). It seems a shame, then, that Brown engages so briefly with the fertile body of criticism and theory written from the context of Japan. Nevertheless, in his own critical and genealogical examination of these works of film and anime, Brown makes a highly important contribution to Japanese visual studies as a whole. The result is an enjoyable and eminently readable text, which, in spite of Brown's extensive engagement with critical and cultural theory, is written in language accessible to undergraduate students. It will be very much at home in Japanese studies courses focused on film, anime, and popular culture, as well as film and cultural studies courses focused on science fiction, technology, and posthumanism.
