Full Metal
Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk
Japan and Avant-Pop America
by Takayuki TatsumI
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2006
272 pp., illus.15 b/w. Trade, $79.95;
paper, $22.95
ISBN 0-8223-3762-2; ISBN: 0-8223-3774-6.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
Takayuki Tatsumi teaches in the Department
of Literature at Keio University, the
same institution where the conceptualizer
of hypertext Ted Nelson held a position
for several years in the 1990s. Among
a wealth of other genres and cultural
phenomena, Tatsumi studies science fiction
and takes it seriously. He writes of his
cozy familiarity "chatting" with US science
fiction writers Bruce Sterling, William
Gibson, and especially Larry McCaffrey,
author of the book's Introduction. McCaffrey
appreciatively calls the object of Tatsumi's
interest "Japanoids", multicultural mixmasters
adapting Bartok and Poe to local imagery,
passions and obsessions and coming up
with results as peculiar as a Hummer stretch
limousine. Tatsumi shares McCaffrey's
appreciation of the Avant-Pop, the realm
where distinctions are collapsed between
the avant-garde and popular culture. Tatsumi
dates the beginning of such postmodern
fiction to works written in the US after
the JFK assassination, to include the
Cyberpunk wave of the early 1980s, Ridley
Scott's movie, Blade Runner and
Mark Jacobson snappy novel, Gojiro.
The year Tatsumi was 18, 1973 "turns out
to be the year when Anglo-American writers'
discursive ravishing of Americans coincided
with Japanese writers' creative reappropriation
of Jewishness, and ended up accelerating
imaginary internationalism and protoglobalism."
As this rich premise is left unpacked,
the reader is left to presume that Tatsumi
sees parallels between Japanese interfaces
with influences from outside the Land
of the Rising Sun with the generation
of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow,
Budd Schulberg, and Irwin Shaw in the
United States, negotiating in big novels
between multicultural urban America and
their parents' circumscribed lives and
culture. Yet Tatsumi can be quite insightful
in his examination of exchanges between
"oriental" and "occidental" tropes. He
notes how playwright Shuji Terayama, stalwart
of his clown-faced Tenjo-Sajki Theater
in Tokyo, was influenced by Edgar Allan
Poe and adapted Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Bela Bartok for a young, experimental
Japanese audience.
Tatsumis Japan embodies an ideology
of technoconsumerism. It is found in a
tourist campaign to discover "exotic Japan"
by railroads, and in the 1980s and 1990s
phenomena of western actors and celebrities
selling consumer products (Warhol did,
and the fad was the basis for Sofia Coppola's
movie, Lost in Translation, with
Bill Murray as the actor). He calls the
dying Showa Emperor a cyborg, whose last
days played out the "creative masochism"
of Japan's postwar era.
Tatsumi calls a media saturated reality
rooted in Japanese fiction "mikadophilia",
seeing it as a mimcry of the west, its
folktales based on shapes provided by
immigrant Lafcadio Hearn to serve a Pax
Americana, He finds a model "postoccidentalist"
in Hearn, a.k.a. Koisumi Yakumo in Japan,
whose book Kwaidan (1904) presented
Japanese stories as similar to African
American ones of voodoo and zombies the
author had learned in New Orleans. Hearn
in turn influenced Kunio Yanagita, whose
book Legends of Toro evoked the
"deep north Gothic" of Americas
Washington Irving; the collection included
one about a farm girl married to a horse,
which Tatsumi compares to Peter Schaffer's
play "Equus". Tatsumi also offers an insightful
"postorientalist" reading of late nineteenth
century novels predicting of wars with
Asians, including one by of H.G. Wells
published in 1898. Among anti-Chinese
novels published in the US in the 1880s,
one featured inventor Thomas Edison as
its hero.
Tatsumi gives a "cyborg feminist" reading
of Donna Haraways study of sexual
indeterminate characters, human, android
and things in between, the "gynoids" that
inhabit these subterranean metafictions
rumbling beneath our feet. Shozo Numa's
strange, illustrated, frequently reworked
(unfinishable?) novel Yapoo, the Human
Cattle, appearing in installments
and different forms between 1956 and 1991,
presents the story of men morphing into
furniture and utensils for the benefit
of their mistresses.
He locates the "metallocentric imagination"
of Haraway's cyborgs and celibate machines
in the "Astro Boy" robot cartoons that
have appeared in Japan since 1952. He
reads the history of Japanese industrialism
in the 1980s popularity of transformer
robots. The reader is introduced to "Japanese
Apaches", the urban Osaka scrap metal
thieves and scavengers in the 1950s, influenced
by John Ford's 1948 western movie "Fort
Apache" and subject of a 1964 science
fiction story. "Tetsuo the Iron Man" (1989)
and its 1992 sequel "Tetsuo: Body Hammer",
both films directed by Shinya Tsukamoto,
present Japanese literally turning into
metal.
Tatsumi continually hammers language into
ad hoc, adaptive shapes, much as he praises
William Gibson's Japanese slang signifiers,
written without the author ever having
visited Japan, as charmingly "Japanesque".
In discussion of Gibson's Idoru,
Tatsumi posits Warholian celebrity and
cyberpunk celebrity as two different kinds
of image management. He cites Gibson's
self-destroying electronic book Agrippa,
and the character Chevette the bike messenger
in Gibson's Virtual Light, who
encounters "Mark Paulinian" machines,
as if all readers will recognize an allusion
to the San Franciscan leader of Survival
Research, purveyor of noisy self-destructive
robot performances. He oddly refers to
the "Birth of a Nation" director as "David
Griffith", more commonly D.W. Griffith
to US readers. In analyses of Idoru,
Tatsumi writes of "queer tribes" of Otaku
who relish the virtual female Yui Haga,
enjoying a cybersex "interspecies marriage
of human pop star with artificial idol".
Reading Ballard's Empire of the Sun
prompts Tatsumi to confesses his boyhood
lust for "imaginary hyperqueer Americanism".
What? Tatsumi offers a "queer reading"
of J.G. Ballard's Crash, yet neglects
any mention of the male narrator's climactic
coupling with his automobile-erotics initiator
Vaughan. It appears Tatsumi uses "queer"
to mean any untraditional, not even necessarily
transgressive, sexuality, yet studiously
avoids references to homosexuality.
Many artists, appreciative of theoretical
stances to decipher the multiple colored
lights, synapses, cartilage and threads
of twenty-first century culture, lament
the tendency of continental savants to
imbed a dozen pages of good ideas in a
hundred pages of impenetrable erudition.
Turning to literary and cultural criticism
from Japan, it is enjoyable to read Takayuki
Tatsumi's thoughtful, quirky, often breezy
work, gleaming under the reading lamp,
whirring and clanking with a motorized
hum. Samurai sword and sexy robot. Metallic,
man, metallic.