Japanese Futurity in Neuromancer and the Science Fiction of Masaki Goro

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Disenchanting Japan: Japanese Futurity in Neuromancer and the Science Fiction of Masaki Goro

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DISENCHANTING JAPAN: JAPANESE FUTURITY IN NEUROMANCER AND THE SCIENCE FICTION OF MASAKI GORŌ

James Michael Garza

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2010

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: __James Michael Garza__

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:

_ 3-30-10 _ Dr. Philip Gabriel Date Professor of East Asian Studies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the following people for their encouragement and assistance: Dr. Maggie Camp, Dr. Yuka

Matsugu, Hiromi Onishi, Michael Ignatov, Lindsey Curé.

The members of my thesis committee deserve special recognition: Professor Philip Gabriel, Professor Noel

Pinnington, Professor Brian McVeigh.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….6

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Disenchanting Japan……………………………………………………………………7

Calculation and Magic………………………………………………………………….9

Overview………………………………………………………………………………13

Premises of Progress…………………………………………………………………..16

Spaces of Science Fiction……………………………………………………………..29

Cyberpunk Revisited…………………………………………………………………..32

CHAPTER TWO: MARKET AND MODERNITY

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………36

The Mantle of East Asian Modernity………………………………………………….37

Temporality and Modernity…………………………………………………………...40

Time and Utility……………………………………………………………………….46

Rationalization, Disenchantment, (Re)enchantment…………………………………..52

Masaki Gorō and Disenchantment…………………………………………………….56

William Gibson and (Re)enchantment………………………………………………...67

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….78

CHAPTER THREE: HISTORICITY AND GENRE

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………81

Historicity……………………………………………………………………………..82 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS – Continued

Nation and Nostalgia…………………………………………………………………..88

Interpreting the Hard-Boiled…………………………………………………………..96

The Value of Dystopia……………………………………………………………….106

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...115

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION……………………………………………………118

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………122

ABSTRACT

I apply enchantment theory to William Gibson‘s Neuromancer and several works by the Japanese SF author Masaki Gorō to reveal shared assumptions about Japan as the locus of an emergent techno-social hybridity. Both Gibson and Masaki register signs of widespread disenchantment stemming from an increasingly technologically advanced society with a ruthlessly efficient take on capitalism. However, they mobilize their portrayals to different ends. I demonstrate that the authors diverge in their assessments of a technologically-mediated reenchantment. I also argue that the authors‘ use of conventions from hard-boiled fiction performs several functions. First, it ironically highlights the impossibility of nostalgia in such a future world, where the concept of home is divested of stability. Second, it evinces an anxiety over the transition from individualistic subjectivity to decentered posthumanity. Third, it reinforces the theme of the supplantation of the traditional nation-state by hyper-capitalist forms.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Once, in the age of the Pax Americana, Japanese SF took as its model British and American SF, both hardcore and New Wave alike, and endeavored to construct an SF land[scape] unique to Japan, but when soon we entered the Pax Japonica period of the ‗80s, we discovered that ―Japan,‖ defined in part by Japanese SF, was itself being seen as […] an unduly science fictional SF land: Science Fictional Japan. A group of North American authors began publishing computer stories that envisioned ―SF‖ within the symbol of ―Japan.‖ That was the moment of a head-on collision between Japanese SF, which carried a tradition of Occidentalism, and cyberpunk, which we may also call hyper-Orientalism.

Tatsumi Takayuki,1 Japanoido Sengen (1993)

Disenchanting Japan

This thesis interprets the meaning of Japanese futurity in William Gibson‘s

Neuromancer (1984) and in several works by the Japanese SF2 author Masaki Gorō. The debut novel by Gibson is among the most celebrated in contemporary SF, and it has occasioned a substantial amount of academic criticism. If Gibson is known outside of SF and academic circles these days, it is probably for coining the term ―cyberspace.‖ Masaki, on the other hand, is a much lesser-known figure. And yet, in his own words, he found himself beset with ―the puzzling fame of being a Japanese Gibson‖3 after debuting with

1 When referring to the Japanese publications of this author, I preserve the Japanese name order of surname-given name. 2 According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls (1993), ―sf‖ is the ―preferred abbreviation of ‗science fiction‘ within the community of sf writers and readers, as opposed to the journalistic sci fi.‖ John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1993), 1062. I prefer to capitalize this abbreviation, following the Japanese convention and other precedents. 3 Masaki Gorō, ―Not Just a Gibson Clone: An Interview with Goro Masaki,‖ interview by Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 2 (2002), 81. 8 the novella ―Jagan‖ [Evil Eyes] in Hayakawa SF Magazine in December 1987.4 In addition to this novella, I discuss his short story ―Sakete-shimai-tai‖ [I Want to Burst]

(1988) and his novel Venus City (1992), which won the 14th Nihon SF Taishō Award.

By futurity I mean the sense that certain material culture, social behaviors or institutions manifest the future. This could mean that an emergent phenomenon—say, a new invention—satisfies some old prediction for the course of science. Or it might mean that some familiar phenomenon, for instance, urbanization, assumes a new immediacy in the futurological imagination. In any case, I recognize in both authors‘ portrayals of a futuristic Japan qualities which the sociologist Max Weber first ascribed to modernity: namely, rationalization and disenchantment. I discuss these concepts in a moment. The main problem I consider is the role of technology and capitalism in the authors‘ dystopian portrayals of a futuristic Japan. In both of their work rationalized structures such as corporations and bureaucracies deterministically and conspiratorially shape the social landscape—in a word, they disenchant it. In order to counteract these forces, characters turn to advanced technologies whose efficacy is nearly magical. For the protagonist of

Neuromancer, the attempt at a technological reenchantment is largely successful. In

Masaki‘s works, the results of this kind of attempt are more dire. I explain why.

In addition to this, I address several questions about the relationship between Japan, technology and the future in the popular imagination. Is it really true, as Tatsumi

Takayuki (1996) has remarked, that the ―future that America once imagined now

4 My citations of this story refer to the collection in which it was later published: Masaki Gorō, ―Jagan‖ [Evil Eyes], in Jagan [Evil Eyes] (Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1988), 11-80. 9 overlaps with the Japan of today‖?5 For some this may be a tempting proposition to accept, inasmuch as it satisfies a particular vision of the Japanese as preternaturally industrious and efficient. It alternately makes it easier both to ―Other‖ Japan and to single it out as ―unique.‖ I should make it clear that I do not believe Tatsumi falls into either category. Nevertheless, I do believe this position is symptomatic of an effort to validate

SF on the basis of its predictive ability; in its enthusiasm for finding instances of SF come true, it does not pay enough attention to the social contexts in which such futuristic visions were originally formulated. Another question I wish to pose is this: do we recognize certain aspects of Japanese society as futuristic because of their repeated portrayal in SF contexts? Or does their futurity precede their appropriation by SF? In examining these questions we may uncover Gibson‘s and Masaki‘s assumptions about progress, technology and capitalism.

Calculation and Magic

Before I develop these themes further, I would like to discuss the concepts of rationalization and disenchantment which are central to my analysis. Max Weber distinguished between several kinds of rationality, but the kind that concerns us most involves the application of rules, often scientific, to activities and institutions in order to achieve optimal results. Weber‘s description of modern ―economic life‖ in The Protestant

Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905) illustrates this process:

As Sombart has said in his highly felicitous and effective writings, the basic

5 Tatsumi Takayuki, introduction to Kono fushigi-na chikyū-de: seiki-matsu SF kessaku- sen, ed. Tatsumi Takayuki (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1996), 12. 10

motive of economic life can be termed ―economic rationalism.‖ And this is undoubtedly true, if one understands by this the increase in the productivity of labor, which by structuring the production process along scientific lines has eliminated labor‘s links with the naturally existing ―organic‖ limitations of the human being. This rationalization process in the field of technology and economics undoubtedly also determines a significant proportion of the ―ideals‖ of modern civil […] society: in the minds of the representatives of the ―spirit of capitalism,‖ labor in the service of a rational structuring of the provision of the material needs of humanity has always been one of the guiding purposes of their life‘s work.6

While rationalizing a particular activity may yield some practical benefit, the effect of rationalized structures on society is less certain. In Weber‘s conception, the effect is ultimately negative. As George Ritzer (2005) neatly summarizes, Weber‘s ―argument is that the modern process of rationalization in the Occident, as exemplified in capitalism and in the bureaucracy, has served to undermine what was once an enchanted (i.e., magical, mysterious, mystical) world.‖7 In other words, the result is disenchantment.

Before we discuss this concept, however, it would do to take a closer look at the concept of enchantment.

While Ritzer (2005) takes a Weberian perspective on modern consumerism, he seems to use the term ―enchantment‖ in a broader sense than most. For a more rigorous account, we may turn to Mark A. Schneider (1993). As Schneider (1993) writes:

[…] the many uses of this term all have their origin in certain experiences occasioned by the world around us. We become enchanted, it can be argued, when we are confronted by circumstances or occurrences so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that, were they to be understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed. To be enchanted is thus different from being ―deeply delighted‖ or ―charmed‖—

6 Max Weber, 1905, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 26. Emphasis in original. 7 George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2005), 54. 11

dictionary synonyms for the word—since we are faced with something both real and at the same time uncanny, weird, mysterious, or awesome.8

We might append the word ―wondrous‖ to the above list, since that would certainly characterize the high technologies featured in the SF works analyzed here.

In 1918 Weber delivered a lecture at Munich University entitled ―Science as a

Vocation,‖ in which he links rationalization to the ―disenchantment of the world.‖9 At a pivotal point in the speech, he argues that the ―intellectualist rationalization‖10 embodied by science does not necessarily lead to an ―increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.‖11 For instance, Weber (1918) argues, ―Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may ‗count‘ on the behavior of the streetcar […].‖12 We encounter this orientation to technology in both

Neuromancer and Masaki‘s work. Though the characters in these works may be technologically proficient, they often know no more of the ―how‖ of technologies than is strictly necessary; they simply count on them to work. This is perhaps the first sign that techno-scientific progress as the authors portray it does not lead to an ―increased and general knowledge‖ of the kind discussed by Weber (1918).13 This is also, crucially, what allows one to be enchanted by technology.

8 Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2-3. 9 Max Weber, 1918, ―Science as a Vocation,‖ trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Daedalus 87, no. 1 (1958): 133. 10 Ibid., 116. 11 Ibid., 117. 12 Ibid., 116-117. 13 Ibid., 117. 12

In Weber‘s (1918) conception, rationalization contributes to the ―knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn‖ about the scientific or economic principles at work in daily life.14 Here is Weber (1918) again:

Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.15

But we must not think that magic is the only casualty of rationalization. Older forms of social relations also suffer. As Weber (1946) tells us of bureaucracy, ―The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly ‗objective‘ expert, in lieu of the master of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude.‖16 In other words, rationalized structures strive to purge ―all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.‖17

These are precisely the conditions of Japanese futurity in Neuromancer and Masaki‘s works. These conditions strongly suggest a certain set of assumptions about progress. I discuss these assumptions momentarily, along with Robert Nisbet‘s account of progress in History of the Idea of Progress (1980). First, however, I would like to offer a more complete overview of this thesis.

14 Weber, ―Science as a Vocation,‖ 117. Emphasis in original. 15 Ibid. 16 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 216. Emphasis in original. 17 Ibid. 13

Overview

My main goal has been to identify the sociological and economic extrapolations that have taken place to enable the dystopian configuration of society and technology in these works. It is my argument that both Gibson‘s and Masaki‘s depictions derive from a conventionalized discourse on East Asian modernity, a discourse that emphasizes the techno-social rationalization of institutions and power structures to play up the aspect of disenchantment. In other words, both Gibson and Masaki look for signs of disenchantment stemming from the condition of a technologically advanced society with a ruthlessly efficient take on capitalism. However, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, the cyberpunk fiction epitomized by Gibson and the Japanese SF represented by Masaki mobilize their dystopian portrayals of Japan to different ends.

Gibson‘s approach attributes the disenchantment of high-tech capitalism to an indigenous mode of collectivism which engenders ―hive‖-like organizations such as the yakuza;18 the image of the hive provokes a visceral anxiety in the protagonist Case.

Through Case‘s observations of such institutions as the zaibatsu, Gibson‘s novel seems to reflect an anxiety over an increasingly Japanized future. I argue, after Wendy Hui Kyong

Chun (2006), that Gibson thereby establishes cyberspace as a realm where the reconquest of a Japanese-dominated market can be accomplished.19 As such, cyberspace is a reenchanting, re-empowering technology for Case, who is portrayed as an ―emasculated

18 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 203. 19 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 190. 14 cowboy.‖20 Despite the novel‘s misgivings about Japanese capitalism, cyberspace represents the world on an essentialized plane—the world as a system of rational exchange. It promises inordinate profit to those like Case who can acutely perceive its patterns.

Masaki also addresses the disenchantment of a ruthlessly efficient Japanese capitalism. He even seems to embrace, as Ichikawa Torahiko (1997) points out, the perspective of the group of Japan scholars known as the ―revisionists,‖ who criticized

Japan for not playing fair by Western models of capitalism. However, Masaki‘s approach does not posit Japanese capitalism as the result of some indigenous collective mode or tendency. Rather, the collectivism so intolerable to the protagonist of ―Evil Eyes,‖ and seen in multiple incarnations in the world of the story, is itself the product of capitalistic rationalization. For instance, the uniform personality produced by the ―Holy Empathy‖ institution is a ―by-product of a highly refined bureaucracy.‖21 Graduates of this institution act as the mediating ―glia‖ between the ―neurons‖ of the bureaucratic system.22

As in Neuromancer, technology in Masaki‘s works is sought as a palliative for the disenchantment and alienation wrought by oppressive bureaucracy. Unlike in

Neuromancer, however, technology ultimately hastens a downward spiral of self- estrangement and loss of subjectivity, as witnessed in Nana‘s transformation in ―I Want to Burst.‖ By subjectivity I mean the condition of being a ―bounded‖ and ―unitary entity,‖

20 Chun, Control and Freedom, 191. 21 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 50. 22 Ibid., 51. 15 to borrow from Brubaker and Cooper (2000).23

I discuss disenchantment, rationalization and (re)enchantment in greater detail in

Chapter 2, expanding my scope to include the work of George Ritzer (2005). This discussion establishes the socio-economic perspective from which I approach the fiction of Gibson and Masaki. I then employ the theories of Guy Debord (1967) to examine the consumption of leisure time in consumer society, and I show that the portrayal of

Japanese society as either particularly leisured or particularly work-obsessed deviates somewhat from historical trends. I apply these ideas to Gibson‘s and Masaki‘s work to examine their attitudes toward technological reenchantment, or the restoration of the enchanted to human relations.

In Chapter 3, I discuss the relationship of the works to history in general and to nostalgic literary forms in particular. I argue, contrary to Jameson (1988), that recourse to nostalgic elements does not necessarily signify an inability to aesthetically render the present. I demonstrate how both Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ invoke the hard-boiled form to define dystopia as a techno-social configuration in which the concept of home has been divested of stability and in which nostalgia has become impossible, owing to the ascendancy of hyper-capitalist forms that have supplanted the traditional nation-state and which breed disenchantment and alienation.

In Chapter 4, I revisit my conclusions from the previous chapters. I conclude that both Masaki and Gibson employ sexual tropes to convey the enchantment of various technologies. In effect, sexuality becomes a shorthand for the magical. Masaki establishes

23 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ―Beyond ‗Identity,‘‖ Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000), 17. 16 techno-fetishism as an enchanted form of consumption only to reject it as a viable response to disenchantment. Gibson, on the other hand, sticks by cyberspace as a re- empowering force for his protagonist. Where nostalgia is concerned, I conclude that in both authors‘ works, the world has been disenchanted so long that no one can remember an ―enchanted world‖ whose disappearance they can mourn, a la Svetlana Boym‘s (2001) definition of nostalgia.24

At this point in the introduction, however, I would like to address the larger context in which I approach these works. First I discuss the particular ideas of progress that the authors employ in their portrayals of Japan.

Premises of Progress

It is with some trepidation that I discuss Robert Nisbet‘s work on progress in History of the Idea of Progress (1980). For one, it takes a monolithic view of the West, and when it (infrequently) recognizes other parts of the world, it treats modernization as a process of Westernization. This overlooks an important goal of nationalism in such places, which has been to ―fashion a ‗modern‘ national culture that is nevertheless not Western,‖ as

Partha Chatterjee (1993) has observed.25 Nevertheless, this account of modernity—of the impossibility of modernity without Westernization—is generally in keeping with the positivist tone of Nisbet‘s (1980) text. For instance, he decries the contemporary plurality of competing accounts of the past; apparently, one ―common, understood, and accepted‖

24 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 8. 25 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 17 past is what is required.26 I will discuss the issue of the past in a moment.

The second objection to Nisbet‘s (1980) text is its general incredulity that anyone could be disillusioned with progress. The blame seems to lie largely with intellectuals.

For instance, as Nisbet (1980) writes, ―For perhaps the first time in more than two millennia there are enough intellectuals convinced of the hopelessness of our population- consumer resources problems to communicate to an even larger number of people the futility of hopes for human progress.‖27 This is a curious statement to make in light of his diagnosis of a precipitous decline in the West of respect for authority figures.28 This loss of esteem for the ―scholar, scientist, historian, philosopher, technologist, and others whose primary function is that of advancing our knowledge about the cosmos, society, and man‖29 would seem to belie the influence Nisbet (1980) accords them over the general population.

Nevertheless, Nisbet (1980) helpfully identifies ―five major premises‖ in the history of the idea of progress ―from the Greeks to our day […].‖30 We may instructively compare these premises with the portrayals of Japanese futurity in Gibson and Masaki.

The premises Nisbet (1980) identifies are: ―belief in the value of the past; conviction of the nobility, even superiority, of Western civilization; acceptance of the worth of economic and technological growth; faith in reason and in the kind of scientific and scholarly knowledge that can come from reason alone; and, finally, belief in the intrinsic

26 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 327- 328. 27 Ibid., 339. 28 Ibid., 333-334. 29 Ibid., 340. 30 Ibid., 317. 18 importance, the ineffaceable worth of life on this earth.‖31

Let us examine the first premise. Nisbet (1980) argues that ―[w]ithout the past as represented by ritual, tradition, and memory, there can be no roots; and without roots, human beings are condemned to a form of isolation in time that easily becomes self- destructive.‖32 It is difficult to argue with the first assertion. Meanwhile, the ―isolation in time‖33 that Nisbet (1980) mentions calls to mind Guy Debord‘s (1967) pronouncements about temporality in consumer capitalism. Debord‘s (1967) notion of the ―spectacle‖ is crucial here. Essentially, the spectacle refers to the mechanism of a passivizing

―commodity fetishism,‖ whereby ―being‖ is reduced to ―having,‖ and ―having‖ is reduced to mere ―appearance.‖34 This pervasive phenomenon attempts to ―bury history.‖35 This is because history threatens the ―immobility‖ instated by the ―class of owners of the economy.‖36 In other words, the spectacle strives to keep the spectator isolated in time. As Sean Cubitt (2001) summarizes, ―once the present has been isolated from history, it can stop changing: the status quo can replenish itself endlessly.‖37 For

Debord (1967), this is a bad thing.

But for Nisbet (1980), preserving an endangered status quo is crucial. For him the past is a fount of values that are disappearing from the world. So how do Gibson and

31 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 317. Emphasis in original. 32 Ibid., 323. 33 Ibid. 34 R.D. Crano, ―Guy Debord and the Aesthetics of Cine-Sabotage,‖ Senses of Cinema 42 (2007), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/07/debord.html (accessed October 3, 2009), n.p. Emphasis in original. 35 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 137. 36 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 106. 37 Sean Cubitt, Simulation and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2001), 55. 19

Masaki see it? Gibson creates a sufficiently rootless protagonist in Case, for whom precious little back-story is provided. No mention is made of a home per se, only that the

―landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case.‖38

The youngest we see him is at fifteen: ―He‘d spent a month, his fifteenth summer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene.‖39 Where were his parents? We get no information on this front. Family and tradition seem to have little meaning in

Case‘s life. Ditto recent history, as a character chides Case for his lack of knowledge on

―[t]he war,‖40 which may or may not be responsible for the current state of the Sprawl, with its ―blasted industrial moonscape.‖41 The line in question is spoken by one of Case‘s connections in Chiba, Julius Deane: ―Don‘t they teach you history these days?‖42

Gibson does not pass judgment on Case‘s lack of historical awareness. He simply uses it to propel the plot forward, with Case seeking out Deane for information on the character Armitage. The historical past is just another thing that must be investigated in the detective story plot, which Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2006) writes is characterized by an ―epistemophilia,‖ a ―desire to seek out and understand.‖43 Earl G. Ingersoll (2007) elaborates on this concept: ―Epistemophilia names this desire for the end, that death of narrative, or ending, where readers as detectives find out what ‗really‘ happened.‖44 As in many detective novels, ―what really happened‖ can be traced back to a traumatic event.

38 Gibson, Neuromancer, 85. 39 Ibid., 125. 40 Ibid., 35. 41 Ibid., 85. 42 Ibid., 35. 43 Chun, Control and Freedom, 195. 44 Earl G. Ingersoll, Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 42. 20

In this case the traumatic event is in the life of Willis Corto, who would later become

Armitage. Corto had led a disastrous military operation during the war. As it turns out, the mission had been doomed from the start. His higher-ups had ―[w]asted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology,‖45 as Deane puts it. This trauma is embedded not just in personal time but in historical time, as well—the treachery of Armitage‘s superiors creates a ―great scandal‖ and is ―[w]atergated all to hell and back.‖46 Thus, what we see in Neuromancer is a peculiar kind of ―belief in the value of the past.‖47 That is, there seems to be a belief in the psychoanalytic value of the past as the site of traumas wrought by history.

Insofar as the testing of new technologies is part of a process of ―technological growth,‖48 the government‘s military operation reflects one of Nisbet‘s (1980) premises of progress. At the same time, the expendability of Corto and his men marks an obvious turn away from belief in any ―intrinsic importance‖49 of human life, which was another of Nisbet‘s (1980) premises. This sense of moral regression in the midst of technological advancement pervades the novel. Above all, it calls to mind what Nisbet (1980) describes as an ―old and recurrent‖50 belief in the ―inverse relationship‖ between knowledge and virtue.51 This refers to the idea that ―[t]o know is to sin, or lay the foundations of sin.‖52

This leads to one of the novel‘s most interesting contradictions. Despite the fact that

45 Gibson, Neuromancer, 35. 46 Ibid. 47 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 317. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 6. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 Ibid., 6 21 cyberspace is constantly being used for morally dubious activities, Case is able to attain a nearly ―spiritual bliss‖53 through it by the end of the novel. I refer to the climactic scene in which Case‘s virus program overcomes the Tessier-Ashpool defenses: ―In the instant before he drove the Kuang‘s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he‘d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him […].‖54 The experience resembles what has been described as gnosis, or a ―union with divinity that is characterized by a state of intuitive all-knowingness.‖55 However, instead of unity with a divinity, this is unity with a computer program.

This scene serves as a prototype for the more explicitly religious ―unions‖ depicted in Count Zero (1986), the first sequel to Neuromancer. In that novel, Bobby Newmark struggles to understand the strange cyberspatial entities that seem to possess or ―ride‖ certain users. One faction in the novel interprets these entities as voodoo loa, and explains their possession of users as a ―ritual tradition of communal manifestation.‖56

Another cyberspace jockey explains that he ―knew this Tibetan guy did hardware mod for jockeys, he said they were tulpas.‖57 He goes on: ―A tulpa‘s a thought form, kind of.

Superstition. Really heavy people can split off a kind of ghost, made of negative energy.‖58 We can trace the progression in these novels of an increasingly religious-

53 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 5. 54 Gibson, Neuromancer, 262. 55 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 276. 56 William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1986), 76-77. 57 Ibid., 169. 58 Ibid. 22 minded explanation of cyberspace, culminating in the following scene from Mona Lisa

Overdrive (1988). In this scene, an AI named Continuity explains the ―mythform‖ of cyberspace to Angie Mitchell:

The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a ―hidden people.‖ The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself.59

On the one hand, this religious interpretation of technology seems to suggest a reconciliation between knowledge and ―spiritual bliss,‖60 bringing the novels into line with an older notion of progress that ―salvation lay in the increase of knowledge.‖61

Before we come to this conclusion, however, we should consider the fact that religious experiences in these novels occur in the absence of any moral criteria. Margaret

Wertheim has noted in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999) that in ―cyberspatial fantasies of reincarnation and immortality, the soul‘s eternity entails no ethical demands, no moral responsibilities. One gets the immortality payoff of a religion, but without any of the obligations.‖62 Though she refers to reincarnation and immortality, we can easily extend her argument to the states of spiritual ecstasy engendered by cyberspace in

Neuromancer. This raises two questions: first, can we call these experiences religious in the absence of moral criteria? And second, if we cannot call them religious, why are they given a religious gloss?

In response to the first question, it will have to do so say this: the novel does

59 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988), 129. 60 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 5. 61 Ibid., 6. Emphasis in original. 62 Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 271. 23 everything it can to build a framework in which to interpret these experiences as religious, even in the absence of moral criteria. For one, it enacts a dualistic vision of space that is predicated upon the division of mind and body, material and immaterial realms. As

Wertheim (1999) argues, the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions have ―always associated immateriality with spirituality.‖63 However, in the ―mechanistic world picture‖ that emerged in the mid-1700s, there was ―in fact no place left for any kind of spiritual space to be.‖64 The result was a ―desanctified and purely physicalist vision of reality.‖65

The novel posits cyberspace as a space that accommodates what does not fit into this materialist vision, namely, the concept of ―mind.‖ If cyberspace is not quite a space where ―‗psyches‘ and ‗souls‘ are embedded,‖66 it at least ―helps to make explicit once more some of the nonphysical extensions of human beingness, suggesting again the inherent limitations of a strictly reductionist, materialist conception of reality.‖67

In response to the second question, we may say this: the religious gloss that Gibson gives these experiences is more than just a convenient metaphor. In Neuromancer, at least, this techno-religiosity highlights the absence of more conventional forms of religion. The differences here are instructive. A conventional deity, for example, may make some moral demands of the worshipper. The AIs of cyberspace, however, casually manipulate the user into doing their bidding. In any case, Gibson‘s religious gloss on cyberspace points up the seeming inevitability of religious explanations of

63 Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 256. Emphasis in original. 64 Ibid., 37. Emphasis in original. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 31. 67 Ibid., 252. Emphasis in original. 24 incomprehensible phenomena, even if those phenomena, like the matrix, are essentially man-made.

In this way Gibson seems pessimistic about Nisbet‘s (1980) fourth premise of progress, which concerns ―faith in reason and in the kind of scientific and scholarly knowledge that can come from reason alone.‖68 Gibson seems to concur with Nisbet‘s

(1980) diagnosis of a contemporary ―loss of confidence in knowledge itself.‖69 The detective story plot may be ―epistemophilic,‖ but the knowledge of what is ―really‖ happening is constantly under threat by the next plot twist, orchestrated by an unthinkably complex AI who can alter human perceptions of reality. Gibson thus depicts a technological singularity in the unlocking of Wintermute‘s artificial limitations. Beyond that point, the meaning of progress is uncertain—humanity is destined to be outpaced by self-replicating technologies whose motives are unfathomable. Following the historian

David Noble, Wertheim (1999) writes that ―[e]ver since the sixteenth century champions of technology have been touting it as a key to the creation of more ‗heavenly‘ communities.‖70 However, this perception of technology was based on the assumption that technology would always serve man, and not the other way around. Gibson‘s interrogation of progress leaves us to ponder this unsettling point.

Now let us turn our attention to Masaki Gorō. Masaki addresses his fiction more explicitly than Gibson to the notion of progress. We may chalk this up to the difference in their rhetorical styles. As Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) writes, ―When it comes down to it,

68 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 317. 69 Ibid., 348. 70 Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 285. 25

Gibson‘s language is about the power of persuasion [settoku-no chikara]. He describes

[byōsha], and as a result he somehow drives his point home. Masaki‘s language, on the other hand, is about the power of explication [setsumei-no chikara]. He theorizes, and as a result he highlights his points with the utmost clarity.‖71 Consequently, his writing is marked by frequent theoretical digressions.

Masaki mentions one of his theoretical influences in the text of ―Evil Eyes.‖ In that story he has the protagonist tell his boss that ―thanks to a vulgar Wilsonism, a software designer‘s genes can fetch a pretty penny.‖72 The Wilson in question is the sociobiologist

E.O. Wilson. We know this because Masaki cites him in an introduction he wrote for that story‘s original publication in SF Magazine. Masaki writes that the basis of the story was

Wilson‘s theory of gene-culture coevolution.73

What is gene-culture coevolution? Essentially, it is a theory that holds that culture is influenced by ―biological imperatives‖ at the same time that genes evolve ―in response to cultural innovation.‖74 Laland and Brown (2002) offer a more detailed but still accessible explanation:

Gene-culture coevolution is like a hybrid cross between memetics and evolutionary psychology, with a little mathematical rigor thrown into the pot. Like memeticists, gene-culture coevolution enthusiasts treat culture as an evolving pool of ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge that is learned and socially transmitted between individuals. Like evolutionary psychologists, these researchers believe that the cultural knowledge an individual adopts may sometimes, although certainly not always, depend on his or her genetic

71 Tatsumi Takayuki, Japanoido Sengen [English Title: A Manifesto For Japanoids] (Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1993), 92-93. Emphasis in original. 72 Masaki, ―Jagan,‖ 18. 73 Masaki Gorō, ―Sakusha aisatsu,‖ SF Magazine (December 1987), 54. 74 Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1. 26

constitution. For instance, if Fred lacks the genes for alcohol tolerance he is unlikely to develop a taste for single-malt whiskey.75

Laland and Brown (2002) additionally discuss the example of milk consumption. They cite the fact that most ―adults that can consume dairy products typically belong to cultures with a long tradition of dairy farming.‖76 In response to this, they ask whether the tradition of dairy farming could have ―created the selection pressures that led some adult humans to be able to drink milk […].‖77 To answer this question, they cite a research model showing that the frequency of the allele allowing milk consumption depended largely on whether the children of milk consumers became milk consumers themselves.78 The authors explain that ―[i]f this probability was very high then a significant fitness advantage to the genetic capacity for lactose absorption resulted in the selection of the absorption allele to high frequency within 300 generations. […] In other words, differences in the strength of cultural transmission between cultures may account for genetic variability in lactose consumption.‖79

In ―Evil Eyes,‖ Masaki appropriates the gene-culture coevolution theory to speculate on the adaptability of human beings to large-scale bureaucracy. In the story he posits an institute known as ―Holy Empathy‖ that ―mass produces a particular type of personality‖ specially equipped to thrive in high-functioning positions.80 Students of this institute undergo special training known as ―empathic breeding‖ [kyōkan sodachi] from childhood

75 Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 242-243. 76 Ibid., 25. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 261. 79 Ibid. 80 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 49. 27 onward, so that by graduation they have ―three things in common‖: ―a keen-witted poise, a perfect control over emotions, and the ability to accurately read other people‘s mental states.‖81 This makes ―empathic breeding‖ ―the object of a vague fear as well as a fairly explicit envy.‖82

We recall Weber‘s (1946) description of bureaucracy as a system in which ―all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements‖ have been purged.83 These, then, are the people from whom those elements have been purged. That they engender both envy and fear is quite understandable. For who knows what such a person, no longer beholden to normal expectations of human behavior, could be capable of? Perhaps they would be capable of the utmost efficiency at their job, but also a cruel and inhuman coldness. With regards to the latter, the protagonist inadvertently compares these people to a technology that pervades the world of the story: ―If mindsoft regulates personal tension, then empathic breeding regulates institutional tension.‖84 Then there is the possibility that the personal element has not really been purged at all, but merely repressed, awaiting a potentially dangerous outlet. The narrator favors this last possibility, relating an anecdote about an empathically trained secretary who surreptitiously injures her boss. The narrator‘s conclusion? ―For this reason, nobody seriously tangles with empathic breeding.‖85

Again we encounter the theme of moral regression in the midst of supposed progress.

81 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 49. 82 Ibid., 49-50. 83 Weber, From Max Weber, 216. 84 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 51. 85 Ibid., 50. 28

This time it is attributed to a class of people from whom all precapitalist values have been eliminated. In regards to Nisbet‘s (1980) third premise, about the ―acceptance of the worth of economic and technological growth,‖86 Nisbet (1980) laments the deterioration in contemporary times of the ―social and moral supports‖ that originally accompanied capitalism.87 He argues that the ―long-run effect of our celebration of not these vital moral supports but rather the individual and his supposedly enlightened self-interest has been to weaken and at last virtually destroy the necessary moral values.‖88 Masaki, on the other hand, makes it very clear that empathic breeding is ―the by-product of a highly refined bureaucratic society.‖89 In other words, Masaki attempts to show that the bureaucratic system is itself responsible for the erosion of the above-mentioned values.

Clearly this is a society with too much faith in economic growth.

In the final analysis, the evolutionary perspective presents a unique challenge to the conventional notions of progress outlined by Nisbet (1980). This is because it offers an account of change that is not teleological, or goal-directed. As Kenneth D. Pimple (1996) writes, ―Evolution is not progress. […] Evolution selects only for characteristics that are adaptive in a specific environment.‖90 Masaki applies this idea to the older social evolutionary assumption that capitalism and bureaucracy represent an improvement on past social systems. Furthermore, in a move that definitely marks this as a science fiction story, the narrator speculates that bureaucratic society engages in a feedback loop with

86 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, 317. 87 Ibid., 336. 88 Ibid., 337. 89 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 50. 90 Kenneth D. Pimple, ―The Meme-ing of Folklore,‖ Journal of Folklore Research 33, no. 3 (September 1996), 237. Emphasis in original. 29 genetics to ensure the future predominance of ―empathically bred‖ people.91 And this in turn results in the further refinement of the bureaucratic system.92 Thus Masaki allegorizes the adaptability of certain people to bureaucracy as a eugenic conspiracy.

In keeping with the theme of the wider context of these works, I would now like to situate Masaki Gorō in terms of other Japanese SF writers.

Spaces of Science Fiction

Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) offers a sketch of the different periods of modern Japanese

SF in the beginning of his Japanoido Sengen. It begins in the post-war period and reads like something of a cross-cultural begats, setting up certain European and American authors as the literary progenitors of Japanese writers. He also characterizes each period as being concerned with a different type of ―space‖ [uchū].93 For instance, Asimov, Clark and Heinlein were concerned with ―outer space‖ and inspired a long list of Japanese SF authors in the ‗60s, including Hoshi Shin‘ichi, Komatsu Sakyō and Tsutsui Yasutaka.94

Then Ballard, Dick and Lem shifted the focus to ―inner space‖ [naiuchū] and inspired another long list of Japanese writers in the ‗70s, including Hori Akira, Kajio Shinji and

Kawamata Chiaki.95

From here, however, the question of influence becomes more complex and individuated. According to Tatsumi‘s introduction to his 1996 anthology Kono fushigi-na

91 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 78. 92 Ibid. 93 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 4. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 30 chikyū-de: seiki-matsu SF kessaku-sen, the next generation of SF authors included Ursula

K. Leguin and James Tiptree, Jr., who investigated ―gender space‖ [seisa-uchū].96

Tatsumi (1993) does not mention them in his sketch in Japanoido Sengen. Rather, he simply posits a third generation of Japanese SF writers who emerged from the late ‗70s to the early ‗80s, including Arai Motoko, Noa Azusa, Kanbayashi Chōhei and Ōhara

Mariko, among others. For these authors, ―doing SF‖ [SF-suru-koto] was already a common thing in the ‗80s.97 Furthermore, to ―take it upon oneself to be an SF writer in the midst of this [situation] was tantamount to ‗writing SF about SF.‘‖98 Tatsumi (1993) observes that consequently writers such as Ōhara Mariko ―increasingly honed a literary style that happened to synchronize with the cyberpunk works of Gibson and others.‖99

Presumably, this means that Japanese and American authors were for the first time writing SF about the same SF. That is, they could claim the same influences. In any case, the latest ―space‖ to be explored, at least according to Tatsumi (1996), is ―cyberspace.‖100

Tatsumi (1993) identifies a fourth generation of Japanese SF writers who emerged in the second half of the ‗80s, including Nakai Norio, Ōba Waku and Masaki Gorō.101 He observes that for these writers, ―‗writing about Japan‘ under hyper-capitalism had itself become SF […].‖102 He goes on to write that the ―age in which America had represented a science fictional future has ended, and now it is typical to envision a science fictional

96 Tatsumi, Kono fushigi-na chikyū-de, 7. 97 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 4. 98 Ibid., 4-5. 99 Ibid., 5. 100 Tatsumi, Kono fushigi-na chikyū-de, 7. 101 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 5. 102 Ibid. 31 present precisely within the symbol of ‗Japan,‘ as Gibson did.‖103 Tatsumi (1993) thus seems to take the science fictionality of Japan for granted. Given the genre‘s historical preoccupation with depicting aliens and alien worlds, this is an interesting position to take. It furthermore contributes to the sense that cyberpunk is somehow more representationally valid than foregoing forms of SF, that somehow less fiction inheres in the cyberpunk conceptualization of a futuristic Japan. Nevertheless, this seems characteristic in general of the Japanese reception of cyberpunk, which I discuss in the next section.

At this point I would like to provide some biographical information on Masaki Gorō.

First of all, this name is a pseudonym, and the author behind it seems to appreciate his privacy, for little personal information has been published. According to the jacket of

Venus City, he was born in Kanagawa in 1957. In an interview with Sinda Gregory and

Larry McCaffery, Masaki reveals that he was the son of a hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivor.104 Only two pieces of his fiction have been published in English. The first, a story entitled ―With Love, to My Eldest Brother,‖ appeared in Fiction International 24 in

1993, translated by Masaki and fellow SF author Lewis Shiner.105 This post-apocalyptic story concerns the fate of ―cattlen,‖ or offspring afflicted by the ―demons from the black dust.‖106 Not surprisingly, it was ―strongly inspired‖ by accounts of the effects of the

103 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 5. 104 Masaki, ―Not Just a Gibson Clone,‖ 81. 105 Masaki Gorō, ―With Love, to My Eldest Brother,‖ trans. Masaki Gorō and Lewis Shiner, Fiction International 24 (1993): 30-35. 106 Ibid., 34. 32

Hiroshima bomb.107 The second story, an excerpt from ―Evil Eyes,‖ appeared in The

Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 2 in 2002, translated by K. Odani and Steven

Ayres.108 The contributor biography in Fiction International 24 claims that Masaki‘s real name is Masayuki Goto and that he works as a sociology professor in Tokyo. I have tried to substantiate this claim, but have met with some resistance. Nevertheless, this does not play a significant role in my arguments.

Cyberpunk Revisited

As Ōmori Nozomi (1988) remarked in Asahi Journal a couple of years into the cyberpunk fad in Japan, ―once something has a name, what was hidden and invisible suddenly becomes visible.‖109 Apparently, it was a new techno-social mode of living peculiar to Japan that cyberpunk brought to light. Ōmori (1988) goes on to make the following claims: ―Cyberpunk is more popular now in this country than in its birthplace

America. Or rather, I am even tempted to say that the reality of ‗80s Japan demanded the arrival of the word cyberpunk. In fact, it would be hard to find a more appropriate setting than Japan for cyberpunk, which is about the dramatic marriage of lifestyle [fūzoku] and high technology.‖110

Herein we encounter our first sign that ―cyberpunk‖ may not signify the same thing

107 Masaki, ―Not Just a Gibson Clone,‖ 81. 108 Masaki Gorō, ―The Human Factor (from Evil Eyes),‖ trans. K. Odani and Steven Ayres, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 2 (2002): 82-90. 109 Ōmori Nozomi, ―Jidai-wo aruku tanoshiku ikinuku senryaku: dennō bunka fūzoku genshō-wo yomu,‖ Asahi Journal 17 July 1988, 86. 110 Ibid. 33 in Japan. It is telling that the loan translation of ―cyberpunk‖ as it appears in the article‘s heading is ―dennō bunka fūzoku‖ [computer culture lifestyle], which twenty years later captures none of the sense of contradiction between high technology and the punk ethos in the original term. In fact, it seems downright prosaic, an impression reinforced by the image Ōmori (1988) argues exemplifies cyberpunk: ―a laptop on tatami.‖111 Then there is the puzzling choice of the main illustration for the article, a publicity shot for the Clive

Barker movie Hellraiser (1987) depicting the character Pinhead, a demon in S&M gear with pins in his head. S&M fashion would later play a role in Masaki‘s (1992) novel

Venus City, but it was hardly a defining feature of early cyberpunk.

Granted, it is not that easy to formulate a satisfying definition of cyberpunk. In his

Saibāpanku Amerika (1988), Tatsumi Takayuki explains that the term was coined by

Bruce Bethke in 1980 as the title of a short story about a group of young hackers who get caught by their parents after hacking into bank accounts and an airline company.112 The story was originally rejected by Asimov’s Science Fiction and finally published in 1983 in

Amazing Stories.113 ―It was after this that [SF editor Gardner] Dozois brought out the term to describe a group of authors‖ including Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Lewis

Shiner, Pat Cadigan and Greg Bear.114 SF author John Kessel (1988) has sensibly described cyberpunk as ―a fusion of high-tech ambience (thus the prefix cyber-) with a countercultural, third world, or even cheerfully nihilistic denial of middle-class American

111 Ōmori, ―Jidai-wo aruku tanoshiku ikinuku senryaku,‖ 87. 112 Tatsumi Takayuki, Saibāpanku Amerika (Tokyo: Keisō, 1988), 22. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 22-23. 34 values (hence the suffix -punk).‖115

In any case, the attempt to turn ―cyberpunk‖ into a signifier for a Japanese techno- social ―reality‖ seems natural, since cyberpunk (at least in its Gibsonian expression) seems to want to pack so much into the word ―Japan.‖ However, it sidesteps the possibility of cyberpunk‘s misrecognition of Japan, a possibility which Tatsumi (2006) has addressed in Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-

Pop America.116 In the following passage he describes the effect of this misrecognition:

Of course, while American representations of Japan become attractive precisely because of their distortions of Japanese culture, they often give rise to heated controversy on the part of the Japanese audience. I remember one of my friends from Chiba City reacting angrily when he read the first chapter of William Gibson‘s Neuromancer, ‗Chiba City Blues‘; which seemed to him to represent the Chiba people very pejoratively.117

By his own admission, Gibson, an American expatriate living in Vancouver who had not yet visited Japan, seemed to have ―got lucky‖ with a few of the details.118 As he revealed in a 1986 interview with Larry McCaffery, ―I got the street names from a Japan Air Lines calendar. And I got lucky with the geography. I didn‘t even know where Chiba was when

I wrote Neuromancer—all that stuff about it being on a peninsula and across a bay came

115 John Kessel, ―Cyberpunk,‖ in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn (New York: Viking, 1988), 116. 116 Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 111. 117 Ibid., 173-174. 118 William Gibson, ―An Interview with William Gibson,‖ interview by Larry McCaffery, in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 285. This interview is a longer version of one originally published in Mississippi Review 16, nos. 2 & 3 (1988), 217-236. 35 out of my head—so I was really sweating when the book came out.‖119 Gibson‘s depiction was also apparently based in part on hearsay from his wife, who worked as an

ESL teacher and had Japanese students.120 All in all, a picture emerges of Gibson‘s Japan as more imaginary than painstakingly researched. This is not to say, however, that his depiction is not nuanced or evocative. Gibson is able to make thought-provoking extrapolations based on the ambivalent role of Japan in the popular imagination of the early 1980s. This is precisely how I approach his work. If Gibson tends to employ stereotypes in Neuromancer, it is partly to help chart a new global system in which Japan has been integrated. As Fredric Jameson (2005) writes, ―cyberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographical-cultural light spectrum and band-widths of the new system are registered. It is a literature of the new stereotypes thrown up by a system in full expansion […].‖121 However, I do not know if I agree that the stereotypes in cyberpunk ―can often […] function as affectionate forms of inclusion and of solidarity.‖122 In Neuromancer, at least, Japan is still very much an alien land. And as I argue later, Chiba metonymically emphasizes the ―prison‖-like123 aspect of Case‘s initial banishment from cyberspace; it is a place he yearns to leave. Thus, in the following pages

I hope to present a reading that engages with the ambivalence and contradiction in

Gibson‘s portrayal of Japan, and I hope to show where Gibson and Masaki differ and concur in their conceptualizations of Japanese futurity.

119 Gibson, ―An Interview with William Gibson,‖ 285. 120 Ibid., 284. 121 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 385. 122 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 385. 123 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6. 36

CHAPTER TWO: MARKET AND MODERNITY

Introduction

This chapter critically engages what I refer to as a conventionalized discourse on

East Asian (and ultimately, Japanese) modernity. By modernity I mean the situation of post-industrial consumer society. My use of the term does not exclude elements of the postmodern. Employing the theories of Guy Debord (1967), I argue that the future as a model of increasing reward is tempered by the demands of a market system in which

―inactivity‖ (leisure time and consumption) actually performs the work of sustaining the market system‘s domination of the way we consume time. I demonstrate the predominance of the ―income effect‖ in America and Japan over time, which explains the increase of leisure time as real wages rise. The resultant consumer society is a testament to the rationalization that characterizes modernity. The conventionalized discourse on

East Asian modernity emphasizes this rationalization as a quality that differentiates East

Asia from North America. The reason is to highlight two qualities of East Asian societies.

The first is disenchantment, which the German sociologist Max Weber argued is the inevitable result of rationalization. The second is reenchantment, the restoration of enchanted elements to human relations.

Next, I apply these ideas to Neuromancer and several works by Masaki Gorō. I argue that both authors portray East Asian futurity as a protracted and disenchanted modernity.

This modernity is replete with the advanced technologies upon which modernization theory predicates economic advancement, and it is furthermore characterized by an 37 extreme rationalization of the market system. These conditions lead to an intolerable disenchantment. I demonstrate how technology is sought as a palliative and even reenchanting force in these works, employing the theories of George Ritzer. I conclude that Neuromancer and the works by Masaki Gorō diverge in their assessments of the possibility of technological reenchantment.

The Mantle of East Asian Modernity

Watching NBC‘s broadcast of the opening ceremony to the 29th Olympiad in Beijing,

I was struck by the commentary that accompanied an elaborate set piece of hundreds of piston-like blocks (―Chinese moveable printing blocks‖124) that rose and fell in choreographed waves. They depicted wind, ripples in a pond, the word ―harmony‖ [hé] in several Chinese script styles and the Great Wall, before finally sprouting cherry blossoms from invisible holes in their tops. When at last the routine was over, the tops of the blocks unexpectedly flipped open, and out popped the bare-armed performers who had been toiling inside. They smiled big and waved vigorously to the crowd. It was an impressive flourish. Then the commentators, who had evidently known the trick all along, reenacted their astonishment that the blocks had been operated not by ―computers‖ or ―hydraulics‖ but by people,125 as if people could not possibly have done what had just transpired on-

124 Beijing Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, first broadcast August 8, 2008 by NBC, 0:59 (approximately 59 minutes into the broadcast). 125 Ibid., 1:04 (approximately one hour and four minutes into the broadcast). 38 screen. It was indeed a spectacle of ―massive scope‖ and ―minute precision,‖126 as the commentators had just enthused.

Certainly, it was a testament to the astronomical budget of the production that computers and hydraulics seemed at all a likely explanation. It is doubtful, in other words, that anyone would have been surprised if the printing blocks really had been computer- operated, considering the vast resources mobilized for the ceremony. It seemed like that was part of the conceit in the first place, to allow viewers to think they were watching something computerized and artificial instead of human-powered and painstakingly enacted. A few days before the big event, Reuters Japan reported that the opening and closing ceremonies alone were estimated to have cost $100 million (10.7 billion yen) to produce, which was an Olympic record in itself, at more than twice the amount spent on the ceremonies for the Athens games.127 But it was not just the massive amount of capital that put mechanization in the realm of discursive possibility. Nor was it simply money and the skill of the performers that had encouraged the misrecognition above. They played an important role, to be sure, but the precise effect was more than the sum of these parts.

The misrecognition existed as a possibility and a likelihood before the routine even began, before the inaugural fireworks of the night exploded over Bird‘s Nest Stadium. It existed in what has become a conventionalized discourse on East Asian modernity, once

126 Beijing Opening Ceremony, 1:01. The routine is not to be confused with the display of ―fierce precision‖ and ―minute detail‖ that came earlier in the broadcast (Beijing Opening Ceremony, 0:33). 127 Reuters, “Teisei: gorin = pekin taikai-no kaikaishiki-ha shijōsaidai kibo-ni, nidome-no rihāsaru kaisai,‖ Roitā.co.jp, August 4, 2008, http://jp.reuters.com/article/Olympics/idJPJ APAN-33047420080804 (accessed April 8, 2009). 39 focused predominantly on Japan as the epicenter of a supposedly new techno-social hybridity, but more recently trained on China in the wake of its heightened media exposure. This discourse operates on the same ―conventional and market-driven sense of newness‖128 as the genre to which it is partly indebted: science fiction, whose vocabulary it has used to trope the experience of living in East Asia since the 1980s, when the main works discussed in this thesis debuted.

This discourse on East Asian modernity arises from a formidable set of interpretations surrounding technology and time, some of them centuries old. These interpretations have in turn found their most vigorous expression in modernization theory, the body of theory that calls for the industrial-capitalist transformation of ―traditional‖129 economies and societies. Modernization theory operates on the ―long-standing assumption that technological innovation [is] essential to progressive social development.‖130 In such an ideology, modernity has been ―associated with rationality, empiricism, efficiency, and change,‖ as Michael Adas (1989) writes.131 Of course, these notions are themselves not straightforward matters. Each carries its own historical baggage. From the perspective of a Marxist theorist such as Guy Debord (1967), the most troublesome of these notions is perhaps that of change or progress, especially as it is mobilized within consumer society in order to dictate our allocation and consumption of time and to perpetuate that very system against the better interests of the majority of its

128 Inge E. Boer, Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images, ed. Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 17. 129 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 7. 130 Ibid., 410. 131 Ibid., 413. 40 constituents. Debord‘s (1967) ideas will have a significant bearing on how we interpret the meaning of ―the future‖ in such a discourse, and thus how we interpret representations of futurity, whether they be in science fiction or in media portrayals of

East Asia.

Temporality and Modernity

If modernization had an ―ideal terminus,‖ at least for the American social scientists who dreamt it up, it was in ―an abstract version of what postwar American liberals wished their country to be,‖132 as Nils Gilman (2003) writes. And yet, as American anxiety surrounding Japan‘s economic ascendancy in the 1980s attests,133 American economic interests had better be protected. America had better stay on top of this modernity game. And so it is that a chief tenet of the ―modernization paradigm‖134 persists today, that ―[t]o be advanced economically means to have an economy based on modern technology,‖ to quote the sociologist Edward Shils (1960).135 Except in this case the doctrine is self-directed. For to continue to grow economically, America must continue to advance technologically, lest it be overtaken and its hegemony challenged. In the realm of consumerism, the notion of constant improvement facilitates the illusion of a

132 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 3. 133 Cf. David Morley and Kevin Robins, ―Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic,‖ in Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 147-173. 134 Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men, 411. 135 Edward Shils, ―Political Development in the New States,‖ Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 3 (1960): 266, quoted in Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2. 41 progressive, futuristic orientation to our consumption of time, holding out the promise of both increased general wealth and increased consumable time, or leisure time, in the future. This outcome would of course be the result of automation and technological innovation to help us be more efficient, both at the workplace and at home.

However, Fredric Jameson (1982) has written that ―we no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly ‗S-F‘ futures of technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated—streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals […].‖136 If he means that no one dreams of a fully automated, Art Deco future anymore, he is probably right. But Jetsons kitsch is one thing, and the undeniable demand for new and improved technologies is another. Many people dream of a near future where technology can work wonders in the operating room, for instance. Indeed, I contend this is what already captivates us most about new technology—the possibility for it to work wonders. Why would we buy a new gadget if we did not believe, at some level, that it was as good, if not better, than what came before it? With many products, of course, improvement is hard to measure. Do hamburgers taste better today than they did ten years ago? But the increasing complexity of technologies is demonstrable. Increasing

CPU speed is demonstrable. The proliferation of technology throughout the household, workplace and public space is demonstrable.

Nevertheless, such an orderly and idealized program for the future is very nearly demolished by Debord‘s (1967) notion of a ―consumable pseudo-cyclical time.‖137 This

136 Fredric Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia: Or, Can We Imagine the Future?‖ Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982): 151. 137 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 112. 42 refers to the time we live in the age of production. It is a function of the particular mechanisms and conditions of production in our day and age, especially what Debord

(1967) theorizes as ―the spectacle,‖ a kind of passivizing phenomenon that characterizes

(and indeed ensures the continuity of) modern consumer society, actively inhibiting further progress toward such an efficient future. This temporality is ―pseudo-cyclical,‖ instead of just plain ―cyclical,‖ because it trades on artificial periods of successive return, such as the work week,138 which is of course not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

According to Debord (1967), the source of the earlier cyclical temporality was ―the agrarian mode of production in general, governed by the rhythm of the seasons,‖ whereby time was viewed ―not as something passing, but as something returning.‖139 Not unpredictably, Debord (1967) locates society‘s departure from a properly cyclical temporality in the creation of ―social labor‖ and the division of society into classes.140 He relates the inauguration of this new temporality in the following passage:

The power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the society of cyclical time—the power, in other words, of the class which organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to be extracted, also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from its organization of social time; this class thus had sole possession of the irreversible time of the living.141

In Marxian economics ―surplus value‖ is the ―difference between the value of the product and the value of the capital involved in the production process.‖142 In other words, it is the profit the capitalist makes from unpaid labor. Likewise, ―temporal surplus value‖

138 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 111. 139 Ibid., 93. 140 Ibid., 93-94. 141 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 142 Tom Bottomore and others, eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 529. 43 is a profit in terms of time. It is thus with the division of society into classes, and what he calls the ―violent expropriation‖ of the workers‘ time,143 that we see the beginnings of a new linear temporality, created and possessed by those who controlled the means of production.144 Debord (1967) refers to this new development alternately as ―irreversible time‖ and ―historical time.‖145 This new temporality privileged certain developments as distinct from the mundane, recurring phenomena of ―cyclical time.‖146 I think Mike Gane

(1991) explains it best when he writes that ―[w]ith social differentiation, elites become masters of cyclical time and attempt to establish ‗events‘ in another dimension, an irreversible time for those who rule.‖147 R.D. Crano (2007) has furthermore explained this irreversible time as the ―irreversible, linear temporality necessary to capitalist accumulation.‖148 Without irreversible time, and its consciousness of the possibility of progressive and consistent accumulation, capitalism could not take place.

But the story does not end there. In modern times ―the society of the commodity‖ has learned that it ―must reinstate the passivity which it had to shake to its foundations in order to inaugurate its own unchallenged rule.‖149 So it has instated another temporality, concomitant with the ―irreversible time‖ I have attempted to explain above. This second temporality has arisen specifically to maintain ―the docility of the spectacular

143 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 114. Emphasis in original. 144 Ibid., 94. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 94-96. 147 Mike Gane, Baudrillard: Critical and Fatal Theory (London: Routledge, 1991), 33. 148 R.D. Crano, ―Guy Debord and the Aesthetics of Cine-Sabotage,‖ n.p. 149 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 106. 44 subject,‖150 that is, the subject in the thrall of Debord‘s (1967) ubiquitous ―spectacle.‖

This second, complementary temporality is what Debord (1967) has called ―consumable pseudo-cyclical time.‖151

Simply put, this is a ―time appropriate to the consumption of images,‖ an activity that

Debord (1967) argues is characteristic of leisure time in modern society.152 In the following passage he emphasizes the tantalizing ―distance‖ that such images take. Here is

Debord (1967) on the subject:

The social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations—moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition. This particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. Yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle […].153

As I have mentioned above, consumer society imparts the illusion of a progressive, futuristic orientation to what we have called ―consumable pseudo-cyclical time,‖ holding out the promise of increased wealth and increased consumable time, or leisure time, in the future. Insofar as this would be the result of technological innovation and automation, we come to look favorably upon technology and science as valuable accomplices in our quest to maximize the value of our time. In a sense, this is the pseudo-utopian dream of society perfected without revolution. It is perfected by ever more faithful adherence to the very system that demands we consume time in a particular mode. Thus, the notion of ―the future‖ here is a model of increasing reward that interprets ―pseudo-cyclical time‖ for us

150 Crano, ―Guy Debord and the Aesthetics of Cine-Sabotage,‖ n.p. 151 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 112. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. Emphases in original. 45 in a positive light. It holds that at some point in the future everyone will be able to enjoy the extra time saved by increasingly streamlined production, and that in fact we are constantly progressing toward that point. However, as Debord (1967) observes, there are limits to the time to be saved: if technological advancement is ―to be prevented from reducing socially necessary labor-time to an unacceptably low level, new forms of employment have to be created.‖154 Thus, even if we enjoy more and more consumable time, we are in effect stuck in a system that will not allow us too much free time, and which furthermore structures our consumption activities to remain in ―worshipful subjection to production‘s needs and results,‖155 at least in Debord‘s (1967) theory. All activity, even what seems to be inactivity, ―has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle,‖ or more relevantly for us, the construction of a demanding market system that implicates us in its survival. Of course this theory has its complications. For instance, as George Ritzer (2005) writes, ―[m]ost consumers do not see themselves as being controlled and exploited and would vehemently reject the idea that this is what is taking place.‖156 Indeed, to accept Debord‘s (1967) ultimate position is an ideological choice I cannot expect the reader to make. However, we may employ some of his ideas without necessarily coming to the same conclusions. There may be room, for instance, for the consumer to find true fulfillment within this structure.

To summarize my argument thus far, although the word ―future‖ carries a positive valuation in this discourse and suggests a transcendence, it merely denotes the refinement

154 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 31. 155 Ibid., 21. 156 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 69. 46 of an existing system, an existing mode of time consumption. That is, it merely points to the successive return of ―pseudo-cyclical time,‖ which is forever a function of the ―time- as-commodity of the production system.‖157 The mode of existence—the way time is consumed—is in no way transcended, even if time is ultimately saved. Paradoxically, it is because people have to work that the benefits of mechanization are artificially circumscribed. More important, however, is the fact that consumption itself emerges as a kind of ―work‖ that we perform in our free time, a work that sustains the domination of the spectacle and the market system‘s domination of the way we use time. Debord (1967) says it best when he writes that ―what is referred to as ‗liberation from work,‘ that is, increased leisure time, is a liberation neither within labor itself nor from the world labor has brought into being.‖158 Again, we do not have to rule out the possibility of true fulfillment in such a world.

It should be noted that we do enjoy a relatively large amount of free time. Americans and Japanese alike have demonstrated a marked increase in leisure time as wealth has risen over the last hundred years or so. This is what I would like to discuss next, as it relates to the misrecognition of Japan as both particularly leisured and particularly work- obsessed. To demonstrate this, I will need to discuss the role of time as a resource and commodity, as well as the concept of ―utility,‖ which I do in the following section.

Time and Utility

157 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 110. 158 Ibid., 22. 47

According to Chavas, Stoll and Sellar (1989), time as a resource ―has an opportunity cost or scarcity value for each individual. If time is discretionary free time and its alternative use is for employment, then its opportunity cost is the wage rate.‖159 An increase in the wage rate (a raise, basically) thus equals an increase in the opportunity cost of leisure, and furthermore represents a dilemma of ―time allocation.‖160 For instance, one might predict that a worker who has earned a raise will work longer hours because his ―incentive to work has increased.‖161 This is known as the ―substitution effect.‖ It can be described by the following situation: ―When the price of a good increases, an individual will normally consume less of that good and more of other goods.‖162 In other words, if the cost of leisure time rises, the ―substitution effect‖ predicts that a worker will choose less leisure time and more work. But one could also predict that a worker who has earned a raise will work less because, on the other hand, ―he doesn‘t need to work as many hours to generate the income to pay for the goods that he wants.‖163 This situation describes the ―income effect.‖ Since higher wages increase one‘s purchasing power, when leisure becomes more affordable one might choose more leisure and less work.164

So what happens when the general wealth of a society increases? According to

Krugman, Wells and Olney (2007), if the ―income effect‖ dominates, we will notice a shift in the ―labor supply curve‖ to indicate fewer hours worked as the wage rate

159 Jean-Paul Chavas, John Stoll and Christine Sellar, ―On the Opportunity Cost of Travel Time in Recreational Activities,‖ Applied Economics 21, no. 6 (1989), 711. 160 Paul Krugman, Robin Wells and Martha L. Olney, Essentials of Economics (New York: Worth Publishers, 2007), 230. 161 Ibid., 231. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid., 232. 164 Ibid., 231-232. 48 increases.165 And there is reason to believe that the income effect does in fact dominate.

As Krugman, Wells and Olney (2007) write, ―many labor economists believe that income effects on the supply of labor may be somewhat stronger than substitution effects. The most compelling piece of evidence for this belief comes from Americans‘ increasing consumption of leisure over the past century.‖166 The authors proceed to cite the following statistics for America: ―At the end of the nineteenth century, wages adjusted for inflation were only about one-eighth what they are today; the typical work week was

70 hours, and very few workers retired at 65. Today the typical work week is less than 40 hours, and most people retire at 65 or earlier.‖167 We may supplement these statistics with some from The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, by Angus Maddison (2001).

According to an appendix entitled ―Annual Hours Worked Per Person Employed, 1870-

1998,‖ average annual hours worked by Americans decreased from 2964 to 1610, a decline of about 46%.168

Now we will look at corresponding statistics for Japan. According to the Nippon

Research Institute (2004-2009), over a similar period of time, from 1898 to 1998 real wages, that is, wages adjusted for inflation, increased by approximately 14 times.169

Consulting The World Economy again, we see that meanwhile, from 1870 to 1998, average annual hours worked by Japanese fell from 2945 to 1758, a decline of about 40%.

165 Krugman, Wells and Olney, Essentials of Economics, 234. 166 Ibid., 232. 167 Ibid. 168 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millenial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 347. 169 Nippon Research Institute, ―Jisshitsu-chingin shisū,‖ Nijū-seiki-ni-okeru nihonjin-no seikatsu-henka no shosō, 2004-2007, http://www.researchsoken.or.jp/reports/digit_arch/l abor01.html (accessed December 8, 2009). 49

So, while the income effect on leisure time in Japan is less than the income effect on

American leisure, it is still evident and quite considerable. Thus we must be sensitive to portrayals of Japan as being particularly leisured, especially if those portrayals also emphasize a preternatural ability of Japanese workers to consistently work extraordinarily long hours. Characterizations of that nature seem internally inconsistent, mapping the market forces of different segments of the population to the whole of society. At the very least, these characterizations do not reflect historical trends and figures across cultures.

As a commodity, time is ―combined with market goods to produce utility for the consumer […].‖170 The notion of ―utility‖ is important here, for it seems to be the principle reason we engage the market in consumer society. Utility can be defined as the

―pleasure or satisfaction derived by an individual from being in a particular situation or from consuming goods or services.‖171 To see how time-as-commodity functions, we will consider the following example. As Chavas, Stoll and Sellar (1989) write, ―For recreational activities, the enjoyment of nature is one of the sources of consumer utility.

Since it is not possible for a person to enjoy nature without spending time on some form of recreation, time can be seen to be a direct source of utility, and therefore to have a direct value.‖172

Where portrayals of East Asia as futuristic are concerned, capitalism is portrayed such that utility is produced not from interaction with already-purchased market goods

170 Chavas, Stoll and Sellar, ―On the Opportunity Cost of Travel Time in Recreational Activities,‖ 712. 171 Graham Bannock, R.E. Baxter and Evan Davis, eds., Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. (Princeton: Bloomberg Press, 2003), 395. 172 Chavas, Stoll and Sellar, ―On the Opportunity Cost of Travel Time in Recreational Activities,‖ 712. 50 but from interaction with the market itself. A good example of this comes from the expository introduction to the Olympics ceremony, in which a veteran anchorman summarizes China‘s recent history and actually calls Beijing a ―city of tomorrow.‖ 173

The city‘s futurity is signified by the following images: sped-up footage of consumers, blurred into waves, thronging along an endless, neon-splashed promenade as if caught up in a frenzy, an insatiable appetite for material goods, while in the next scene time-lapse photography reveals indelible glowing veins of night-time traffic, transporting potential consumers. And of course, the camera lingers over Chinese store names on neon signs, that most stalwart and media-ready signifier of East Asian modernity, so often contrasted with images of rural temples and other founts of tradition in order to confront us with the supposedly anachronistic (and exaggeratedly consumer-oriented) nature of East Asian modernity.

Even after the dramatic disclosure of the human physicality behind the routine described in the beginning of this chapter, it still seemed a result of all ―that technology and engineering‖174 the commentators had lauded earlier in the broadcast, that newly ascendant Chinese technical prowess that was responsible for the ceremony, and indeed responsible in the lead-up to the Olympics for transforming Beijing into the aforementioned ―city of tomorrow.‖ 175 This is a name that sounds like it might have been splashed across the cover of a science fiction magazine in the 1930s, heyday of Art Deco futurism. This happens to coincide with an era in American science fiction and fantasy

173 Beijing Opening Ceremony, 0:09. 174 Ibid., 0:42, 0:54. 175 Ibid., 0:09. 51 film that was arguably the first and last to unabashedly celebrate what Vivian Sobchack

(2004) refers to as ―aspiration towards the future‖ and poetic ―transcendence in the present.‖176 According to Sobchack (2004), films like Just Imagine (1930), King Kong

(1933) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) ―construct ‗modernity‘ in an architecture of

‗aspiration‘ that has commerce with the ‗transcendent.‘ These images emphasize the vertical, lofty and aerial quality of the city rather than its pedestrian and base horizontality. Indeed, equating ‗height‘ with the active reach of human aspiration, the

‗loftiness‘ of the city stands concretely as its most aesthetically significant social value.‖177 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Olympics broadcast remodeled ―human aspiration‖ in the image of a hyper-consumerism, revealing that it is the degree to which architecture facilitates commerce that is the futuristic city‘s ―most aesthetically significant social value.‖178

Such consumer activity, as Debord (1967) argues, is a ―product of the rationality of production.‖179 The idea of rationality or rationalization is central to my argument insofar as it characterizes the futures we see in both Neuromancer and Masaki Gorō‘s works.

Furthermore, it represents the target of the social criticism of those works. In the end I show how the two authors diverge in their assessments of the possibility of escaping the negative effects of that rationalization. For now, it should be noted that the conventionalized discourse on East Asian modernity emphasizes an exaggerated

176 Sobchack, ―Cities on the Edge of Time,‖ 79. These phrases are italicized in the original. 177 Ibid., 80. 178 Ibid. 179 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 21. 52 rationalization as a quality that differentiates East Asia from North America. The reason is to highlight the possibility of both disenchantment and reenchantment. That is, it highlights the disenchantment of East Asian cultural forms to show the superiority of

North American cultural forms, and it identifies possible sources of reenchantment to assuage the disenchantment inherent to those North American forms. I discuss these concepts in the next section.

Rationalization, Disenchantment, (Re)enchantment

It would come as no surprise if Debord (1967) at the time of writing The Society of the Spectacle had been familiar with the theories of the German sociologist Max Weber, for it was Weber who most famously wrote about the rationalization of modern society.

Weber‘s argument is that the increasing rationalization of society, which has produced both capitalism and bureaucracy, ―has served to undermine what was once an enchanted

(i.e., magical, mysterious, mystical) world,‖ as George Ritzer (2005) writes.180

Rationalization, in other words, leads to disenchantment. Watanabe Takuya (2008) offers a succinct summary of this principle:

The disenchantment that Weber discusses is nearly synonymous with the tendency toward increasing rationalism [gōrishugi-ka] that drives [kudō-saseru] modernity. In keeping with scientific thinking, the process of rationalization in modern capitalism completely rejects any kind of superstition [meishin] or magic [jujutsu], and any kind of mystic intuition [shinpi-teki chokkan].181

180 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 54. 181 Watanabe Takuya, ―Gendai bunka-ni-okeru tōsui—saimajutsuka-ron-kara-no appurōchi,‖ Tagen Bunka 9 (2009), 5. 53

However, this is not the end of the story. For the British sociologist Colin Campbell, the ―spirit of modern consumerism leads to romantic, enchanted capitalism‖ in which fantasies play a major role.182 These fantasies, in short, lead us to consume. At least, this is the theory. George Ritzer (2005) demonstrates in the following passage how fantasy operates in a cycle of enchantment and disenchantment:

Each time they venture forth into the marketplace, people delude themselves into believing that this time it is going to be different; the material reality is going to live up to the fantasy. These fantasies, rather than material realities, are crucial to an understanding of modern consumerism because they can never be fulfilled and are continually generating new ‗needs,‘ especially for consumer goods and services.183

Clearly, Ritzer (2005) takes a contentious position. In short, there are needs, and then there are ―needs.‖ I believe Ritzer (2005) is referring to the demand for leisure-type consumption. The point is that for Ritzer (2005), capitalism can be both enchanting and disenchanting. Although rationalization tends to lead to disenchantment, for Ritzer (2005) rationalization is necessary to ―attract, control, and exploit consumers […] on a large scale.‖184 For instance, rationality can create several qualities that can be attractive to the consumer, among them a sense of ―efficiency‖ and ―predictability.‖185 An example of efficiency can be found in the ―huge Las Vegas casino-hotels‖ that Ritzer (2005) mentions.186 In this instance, a person who has come to Las Vegas to gamble ―can stay in a hotel room that is only an elevator ride away from the gaming tables and slot

182 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 60. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid., 71. 185 Ibid., 72-73, 78-79. 186 Ibid., 73. 54 machines.‖187 Likewise, McDonald‘s provides an example of predictability: ―In a rational society consumers want to know what to expect in all settings and at all times […] They want to know that the ‗Big Mac‘ they order today is going to be identical to the one they ate yesterday and to the one they will eat tomorrow.‖188

Rationalization can even have an air of the enchanted about it. As an example, Ritzer

(2005) cites the ostensibly ―disenchanted structure‖ of Sam‘s Club.189 He asks, ―What could be more disenchanting than stores built to look like warehouses—comparatively cold, spare, and inelegant?‖190 And yet Sam‘s Club enables the ―fantasy‖ of ―finding one‘s self set loose in a warehouse piled to the ceiling with goods that, if they are not free, are made out to be great bargains.‖191 When places such as this fail to appeal to consumers any more, that is, when they begin to disenchant consumers, then reenchantment is required, for consumers are ―increasingly jaded.‖192

Watanabe (2009) prefers to distinguish between enchantment and reenchantment along technological lines.193 Increasingly advanced technologies and the spectacles they produce are being used to draw consumers back to the market, as well as offering new ways to consume. The internet is perhaps the best example of this. ―It is probable,‖ Ritzer

(2005) writes, ―that technological change is the most important factor in why it is that we

187 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 73. 188 Ibid., 78. 189 Ibid., 90. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid., 113. 193 Watanabe, ―Gendai bunka-ni-okeru tōsui,‖ 8. 55 are now witnessing the ascendancy of the new means of consumption.‖194 The ―means of consumption‖ Ritzer (2005) discusses are ―the settings or structures that enable us to consume all sorts of things.‖195 According to Ritzer (2005), they are ―structured to lead and even coerce us into consumption.‖196 Watanabe (2009) outlines his hopes for a future approach toward the subject of contemporary intoxication, an approach I wish to take here when I consider Gibson‘s conception of an enchanting cyberspace. As Watanabe

(2009) writes:

On the one hand, traditional enchantment is concerned with the fundamental desires surrounding consumption. It is something magical that attends every act of consumption. If we take into account the work of [Colin] Campbell […] and [Rosalind] Williams […], then certainly we do not have to wait for the arrival of the consumer society of the latter half of the 20th century to observe that sense of magic attendant to consumption. On the other hand, contemporary reenchantment is concerned with the technological transformation [henkan] of that desire. Ritzer‘s description is a little vague, but what I would like to take out of this as a framework for a theory of reenchantment is that it should not just look at the rise of the magical in contemporary times, nor just point out inherent continuities with magic (enchantment), but that it should also suggest discontinuities at the same time. In our theory of contemporary intoxication we must keep an eye out for the distinctions we can draw between the sense of intoxication that necessarily attends acts of consumption in general and the sense of intoxication that is technologically designed to aggressively capitalize on [the former].197

In short, we must look at the role technology plays in reenchantment, with an eye toward both continuities and discontinuities in the kind of intoxication offered by acts of consumption. The works I examine in the following two sections provide ample opportunity to do just that.

194 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 29. 195 Ibid, 6. 196 Ibid., x. 197 Watanabe, ―Gendai bunka-ni-okeru tōsui,‖ 8. 56

Masaki Gorō and Disenchantment

We will begin with Masaki Gorō‘s story ―I Want to Burst.‖ This curiously-titled story is a companion piece of sorts to his debut novella ―Evil Eyes,‖ depicting some of the same settings and technologies, such as the New City Center and PFX. Both are set in the near future. More so than its predecessor, ―I Want to Burst‖ paints a picture of industrial carnage that reinterprets the conventional relationship between Japan, technology and the future. In its descriptions of steel, dilapidation, assembly lines and machinists (a job still relevant in the future, apparently), the story evokes the grubby oppressiveness and abysmal working conditions of less developed countries in previous centuries.

The ―hero‖ of the story is a self-described ―middle man‖ [assenya]198 who collects a kickback for every young woman he brings into Dr. Jōji‘s ―Plastic Organs,‖ an establishment no more perverse than it sounds. It is there that a variety of cosmetic procedures are performed, some of them more radical than others. The receptionist, for instance, has undergone a surgery to make her resemble a turtle; her head and limbs are retractable into a ―giant sea turtle shell that had been pieced together from mosaic shards of artificial gem.‖199 Inasmuch as she is attractive and seems ―happy like this,‖200 Masaki seems to be suggesting the possibility of a technologically-mediated reenchantment.

However, by the end of the story one comes away with a very different impression.

198 Masaki, ―Sakete-shimai-tai‖ [I Want to Burst], in Jagan [Evil Eyes] (Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1988), 94. 199 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 90. 200 Ibid. 57

For later the protagonist must watch as Nana, his latest ‗referral,‘ undergoes an outré procedure called ―press modification,‖201 which will essentially replace her body. The surgery is considered state-of-the-art but somewhat medieval in execution. Shun does not want to watch, and even the doctor seems nervous, but Nana insists that they witness the ordeal. It is revealed that the ―pressure machine‖202 required for the operation has its origins in factory assembly-line equipment.

Before the doctor throws the switch that commences the operation (a gothic touch that borrows that visual trope from numerous mad-scientist movies), Shun remembers a

―half-senile old machinist‖203 he once knew from a previous part-time job. In his youth the old man had survived an accident with the machine, and bears its disfiguring legacy.

As Shun recalls the accident, he describes several features that challenge conventional associations of Japan with high technology, especially electronic technologies of entertainment and simulation. First, he brings up an economic context in which ―[t]he outdated secondary industries were almost all supported by day labor.‖204 Naturally,

―[n]obody aspired to that sort of dirty work.‖205 Next he details the machine‘s brutal, noisy mechanism, which involves steel, steam and ―[t]wo thousand tons of pressure.‖206

Finally, there is the ―dangerous,‖207 physical nature of the work that contributed to the old man‘s mishap:

201 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 98. 202 Ibid., 100. 203 Ibid., 101. 204 Ibid., 100. 205 Ibid., 101. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid. 58

It was much more dangerous work in the past. A half-senile old machinist who muttered this would tell me his story over and over again on nights we had duty. The old man‘s left arm was severed clean at the elbow. It had got enclosed in the mold, he said, and a second later it had turned into vapor. He wouldn‘t wear a prosthesis. His old buddies would never have it, was the reason. He was a good guy. He was popular with everyone. It had happened just before he was to enter into a stable contractual relationship [keiyaku kankei] with a good-looking woman. His elation was his undoing. He didn‘t even scream. It got caught, there was a sizzling sound, and nothing was left but a vaporizing dusky red liquid. I don‘t think he even had time to notice that his arm had turned to flesh juice. I wonder if even now there aren‘t any molecules of him floating around in there, convinced they‘re still alive.208

Actually, this is not even the story‘s most memorable expression of disenchantment with technology. Once Nana‘s surgery commences and the grisly details of it unfold before his eyes, Shun turns away in disgust. This prompts Nana, who is pumped full of drugs but otherwise awake during the surgery, to reply, ―So, you don‘t want to look at me anymore?‖ This will later become the phrase she uses to taunt Shun as she hunts him down on the wasted edge of the city. Implicit in her taunt is a criticism of sexual objectification, but with more irony than the usual, insofar as her body has literally become an inorganic object. In the end, Nana has transferred her consciousness onto a

―Personality Information Clone,‖ a sort of electronic construct thought to preserve one‘s consciousness, but which in fact only ―faithfully mimics the former personality.‖209

Nevertheless, Nana apparently believes her physical self obsolete. This left-over Nana has the opportunity to kill the narrator but instead self-destructs before his eyes, filling him with an existential void and a death-wish of his own. Thus we get the sense that

Masaki is somewhat pessimistic about the possibility of technological reenchantment.

208 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 101. Emphasis in original. 209 Ibid., 110. 59

When unrealizable ideals are involved, the ―magic‖ of high technology can easily become compulsive, enabling us to indulge unhealthy obsessions. Thus, medical ethics must keep apace with advances in technology. The title of the story and its setting also suggest some parallels with the urban legend of Kuchi-sake Onna, the ―slit-mouth woman,‖ except here we have a case of a Karada-sake Onna, a ‗slit-body woman.‘

Nana‘s taunt is her way of asking if she is beautiful, as the woman in the legend does.210

Masaki mobilizes an intriguing explanation for the body modification craze gripping

Japan in the story. Like Debord (1967), Masaki is concerned with the predominance of the unreal in contemporary society. The following passage details the rise of illusion over reality:

It all started at the end of the last century with its preoccupation with disembodiment [datsu-nikutai]. It was something traceable back to pop culture, a craving not for meaning [imi] but for difference [sai], not for the duration [jizoku] but for the instant [shunkan], not for the medium [baitai] but for the information [jōhō], and nothing more. It captivated young hearts, who turned ideals [risō] into a real-life craze [genjitsu-no ryūkō].211

Masaki seems to be arguing that as modernity and consumer culture have progressed, we have increasingly lost sight of where true substance resides. We may compare this to

210 According to Michael Dylan Foster (2003), the urban legend of the Kuchi-sake Onna ―has come to be considered the quintessential rumor or contemporary legend of late industrial Japan, and the slit-mouthed woman herself has become the quintessential ‗modern yōkai,‘‖ or ghostly creature. Though several versions of the legend exist, ―[o]ne of the more commonly distributed explanation motifs for the slit mouth was that she was the victim of a horrible mistake incurred during cosmetic surgery […].‖ She wears a surgical mask and asks her intended victim ―Am I pretty?‖ If the response is ―yes,‖ she removes her mask and asks ―Even like this?‖ She is then said to chase after the respondent. She also chases after the respondent if the answer to her question is ―no.‖ Michael Dylan Foster, ―Morphologies of Mystery: Yokai and Discourses of the Supernatural in Japan, 1666-1999‖ (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003), 269-272. 211 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 95. 60 a quotation from Debord (1967): ―The loss of quality so obvious at every level of the language of the spectacle, from the objects it lauds to the behavior it regulates, merely echoes the basic traits of a real production process that shuns reality.‖212 Technology, like

Debord‘s spectacle, may be initially appealing, but insofar as it only furthers illusion, it is bound to be disenchanting, as the end of Masaki‘s story demonstrates.

Directly after the above quotation, Masaki extrapolates the issue sociologically, positing a market for the young organs replaced in body-replacement surgery (or

―disorganization‖213 in the parlance of the story). This is an excellent example of the rationalization that attends technological advancement—the opening of a new market that could not have existed before. As Masaki writes, somewhat gruesomely, ―Young guts

[zōmotsu] prolonged the lives of the aged. It was a world in which the generational shift had stagnated. The leaders at the top were always full of youthful vigor, while those underneath purchased short-lived, fashionable organs with their daily pay.‖214 Thus, the well-publicized ―aging society‖ of Japan is reinterpreted as a somewhat exploitative system that literally consumes youth.

In the very next paragraph, Masaki brings up a particular Southeast Asian cultural practice that prefigures the body modification craze:

It was like the ancient culture of Southeast Asia. Body modification that elongated the neck bones with rings of precious metal worn from infancy onward. By the time distinguished young women reached adulthood, their necks would be abnormally elongated, their length a symbol of their social status. The neck adornments were a chastity belt. The necklaces of an unchaste woman would be

212 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 26. 213 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 86. This is the katakana gloss he uses for the kanji ―datsu- yūki-ka.‖ 214 Ibid., 95. 61

removed. The atrophied muscles could not support her head. The woman would either have to spend the rest of her life lying down, or else couldn‘t stand up without supporting her head with both hands. The moral? The combination of heavy heads and long necks is dangerous.215

By invoking this gender-specific practice, Masaki implies that it is females in the main who are undergoing body modification. Furthermore, the mention of social status reinforces the notion of body modification as a status symbol. Needless to say, the moral the narrator posits is dubious at best. But the result, perhaps inadvertent, of juxtaposing the premodern and the modern is to expose how the cultural practice from an enchanted age ill suits an increasingly rationalized society.

There is more to be said about Southeast Asia. To revisit the protagonist‘s anecdote for a moment, the story is a little unclear about whether the manufacturing plant was located in Japan or in Southeast Asia, for the narrator mentions the following in connection with it: ―No information is free from a medium. But parts manufactured in

Southeast Asian plants were unique in their precision and turnaround time.‖216

Nevertheless, this remark suggests that Japan probably plays a dominant role in its economic relationship with the region.

In fact, it is this situation that provides the premise for Masaki‘s first proper novel,

Venus City (1992), which won the 14th Nihon SF Taishō Award. In this novel, Japan utterly dominates the rest of East Asia economically; it is the challenge Japan poses to

American cultural and economic hegemony that provides a major source of conflict in the

215 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 95. 216 Ibid., 100. 62 novel.217 Tatsumi Takayuki (1993) neatly summarizes the premise of the novel:

The setting is a twenty-first century Pax Japonica society in which a huge information network has been implemented. Japan has shifted the setting of its industrial manufacturing outside its borders to other Asian nations, and the Japanese archipelago itself no longer serves as anything but a headquarters. While changing internally as little as possible, Japan has exported its technology, capital and methodology [hōhōron] throughout the world, has subordinated factories in various countries, and wields the right to use [manufacturing] plants all over the world. Isolationism and foreign domination [kaigai shihai] constitute the heart of Japanese politics in the era of a Pax Japonica. Thus, in a near-future Tokyo, where foreign guest workers are steadily arriving from the New and Old Worlds which are in the midst of a recession, it stands to reason that there should come to be many people who are afflicted, like the heroine Moriguchi Sakiko, with an almost allergic xenophobia, all the more so if one has a white male boss as she does […].218

The plot of the novel involves a conspiracy to control the users of a virtual reality construct known as ―Venus City,‖219 which Sakiko visits ―night after night in order to relieve the frustration‖ that comes from being a xenophobe with a white boss.220 By interfering with the brain function by which humans tell dreams from reality, this conspiracy could in effect ―wipe Japan informatically off the map.‖221 If that seems grandiose, it is actually a step down from the conspiracy depicted in ―Evil Eyes.‖ In that story, the megalomaniacal leader of a New Religious Movement (NRM) attempts to hijack the worldwide satellite broadcast of a concert to deliver mind-controlling content that literally erodes a section of the brain. This is to be accomplished by exploiting a popular biotech enhancement known as PFX, which has millions of users. PFX is a sort of ―audio tranquilizer‖ that stimulates the nervous system and acts as a ―shock absorber

217 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 217-218. 218 Ibid., 216-217. 219 Ibid., 217. 220 Ibid. 221 Ibid., 218. 63 between the outside world and the mind.‖222 The narrator attributes its prevalence in the world of the story to the oppressiveness of rationalized structures:

From the end of the last century onward, people started becoming hypersensitive to the extrinsic pressures [gaiatsu] of their environment. The reason was unknown. The least objectionable explanation out of all the claptrap the academics repeated was that it was an underlying chronic anxiety attributable to the regimentation [kanri-ka] and bureaucratization [kanryōsei-ka] of society.223

The most obvious continuity between ―Evil Eyes,‖ ―I Want to Burst‖ and Venus City is that they all depict technology being sought as a palliative for widespread disenchantment, while at the same time pointing out the dangers of relying solely on these technologies to provide reenchantment. In ―Evil Eyes,‖ for instance, there is a

―Healthy Spirits‖-brand gin that encourages the protagonist to drink too much: ―A high protein, low calorie, vitamin- and mineral-fortified compound of dry gin. Brand name

‗Healthy Spirits.‘ You could live healthily on alcohol alone until your tongue went numb.‖224 In ―I Want to Burst,‖ the danger is becoming addicted to technology, either physiologically or psychologically. For instance, there is Nana‘s physiological reaction when Shun cruelly severs her PFX connection. Shun narrates the scene: ―[…] your mind fell from the prop that had been holding it up. Like a heavy coat falling off a hook in the wall. You lost your shape and collapsed limp to the floor. The classic reaction of addiction.‖225 Then there is the story Shun tells of a woman who compulsively ―ordered the same-cut-and-stitch procedure until she had lost most of the skin and muscle on her

222 Masaki Gorō, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 22. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid., 17. 225 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 93. 64 face.‖226

While ―Evil Eyes‖ and Venus City both evince a fear of technology being used to manipulate the user, Venus City allegorizes the situation of being so enchanted with technology that the user comes to enjoy that manipulation. Indeed, Tatsumi (1993) wonders whether the novel does not actually depict a kind of ―masochism.‖227 He links the novel to a tradition of works in this vein:

Having read [the novel] all in one go, I couldn‘t help but worry about Japanese SF‘s history of continually nurturing a will toward the annihilation of Japan. From Godzilla to Yapoo, the Human Cattle [Kachikujin Yapū], from Japan Sinks [Nippon Chinbotsu] to Venus City, the Japanese SF canon [seitō] has untiringly conventionalized a spirit of hyper-consumerist masochism that has come from an aesthetics of destruction.228

He concludes this rumination by positing a ―thematic correlation‖ between the ―high tech info networks and ‗Skin Two‘ S&M fashions‖ that both feature in the novel.229 (―Skin

Two‖ is a name Masaki has borrowed from the real world; it is the name of a fetish magazine.) This opens an interesting avenue for discussion. The relationship between sexual fetishism and enchantment is implicit in the metaphor that produced the sexual sense of the word ―fetish.‖ As Krafft-Ebing wrote in his influential Psychopathia

Sexualis (1886), ―This preference for certain particular physical characteristics […] I have called ‗fetichism‘ [sic] because this enthusiasm for certain portions of the body (or even articles of attire) and the worship of them, in obedience to sexual impulses,

226 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 94. 227 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 218. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid. 65 frequently call to mind the reverence for relics, holy objects, etc., in religious cults.‖230

S&M fashion, however, with its ―rubber and gasmasks,‖231 insinuations of the industrial, and favoring of constriction, evinces a fascination with rationalized and oppressive modes.

Kotani Mari (1994) writes that S&M fashion would not be possible without the ―high polymer compounds that began to be produced in the 1930s‖ and ―the political science that gave birth to them.‖232 I am willing to accept the first part of this statement but not necessarily the second. It is Kotani‘s (1994) argument that S&M fashion‘s invocation of the oppressive and industrial points up the true origins of a material we do not look at twice today, and that the S&M culture ―demonstrates that the spectacle of slaughter once perpetrated in the most execrable factories actually pervades everyday life and furthermore permeates our bodies.‖233 Whether or not one accepts this argument seems to depend on the degree of self-reflexivity and ideological coordination one grants the S&M

―community,‖ if practitioners can be described as such. Nevertheless, according to Kotani

(1994), ―[a]t the same time that the paradigm shift in the 1980s discovered its own history, it produced subcultures that were self-referential with regard to the very technology that had enabled the paradigm shift.‖234 Kotani (1994) goes on to cite a chemistry book to show that this history includes the fact that ―every time there was a war and there were

230 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. F.J. Rebman (New York: Medical Art Agency, 1922), 219. 231 Kotani Mari, ―Porimā beradonna: Eva Hesse-no ninshin-kikai,‖ Gendai Shisō 22, no. 8 (1994): 325. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 66 importation problems, great advances were made in synthetic rubber.‖235 While I agree that S&M fashion seems enchanted with the industrial, and even with wartime accoutrements such as gasmasks, I am just not convinced that the main reason S&M fashion utilizes rubber is that synthetic rubber was born during wartime.

In any case, the fact remains that sado-masochism precedes the fashions we associate with it today. In the past, ―shoes, furs, and whips‖ seemed sufficient for the masochist‘s purposes, as Simone de Beauvoir (1966) illustrates in her essay ―Must We Burn

Sade?‖236 De Beauvoir (1966) affirms an inherent connection between masochism and fetishism. As she writes, ―[t]he world of the masochist is a magical one, and that is why he is almost always a fetishist. Objects such as shoes, furs, and whips, are charged with emanations which have the power to change him into a thing, and that is precisely what he wants: to remove himself by becoming an inert object.‖237 We have seen Nana in ―I

Want to Burst‖ willingly transform her body into an object, and in her repeated taunt she even interpellates Shun as her torturer. This behavior conforms to de Beauvoir‘s (1966) description of the masochistic act: ―In demanding that his partner mistreat him, he tyrannizes him; his humiliating exhibitions and the tortures he undergoes humiliate and torture the other as well.‖238 However, whereas de Beauvoir (1966) argues that this ―leads

235 Kōbunshigakkai, eds., Kōbunshi-kagaku-no kiso (Tokyo: Tōkyō Kagaku Dōjin, 1978), 16, quoted in Kotani, ―Porimā beradonna: Eva Hesse-no ninshin-kikai,‖ Gendai Shisō 22, no. 8 (1994): 325. 236 Simone de Beauvoir, ―Must We Burn Sade?‖ in The 120 Days of Sodom, comp. and trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 27. 237 De Beauvoir, ―Must We Burn Sade?‖ 26-27. 238 Ibid., 27. 67

[the masochist] back to his subjectivity,‖239 Nana is destined to exist forevermore as an object, having transferred her personality onto an electronic construct before killing herself. Thus, Nana‘s techno-fetishistic masochism, while enchanted with technology, is a product of disillusionment and can only lead to self-destruction.

In contrast, if there is techno-fetishism in Neuromancer, its goal is the transcendence—not mortification—of the flesh. In Venus City, users experience ―another world through another self.‖240 For instance, the Japanese heroine Moriguchi appears as a man, ―Saki,‖ while her detested white male boss takes the form of a ―shōjo‖ with the features of a Japanese doll.241 Gibson‘s cyberspace, however, merely turns loose an outlaw subjectivity (the protagonist Case) to experience this world on an essentialized plane—the world as exchange. No transformation on his part is necessary. Like Venus

City, however, Neuromancer both sexualizes and allegorizes its virtual reality world. As I discuss in the next section, Neuromancer ostensibly figures cyberspace in terms of a sexual release within a dialectic of masculine West and feminine East.

William Gibson and (Re)enchantment

In Neuromancer, Case‘s use of time as a commodity seems to be characterized by a sensitivity to the hyperactive movements of the market. His delirious and ecstatic reaction to the market is wrapped up in the word ―biz‖:

239 De Beauvoir, ―Must We Burn Sade?‖ 27. 240 Ichikawa Torahiko, ―Pakkusu japonika-to shūsei-shugi: Venus City-ron,‖ Matsuyama Daigaku Ronshū 9, no. 3 (1997), 142. 241 Ibid., 149. 68

Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a high speed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market….242

Ninsei refers to the (imaginary) street in Chiba that divides ―port and city,‖243 and which serves as the main Japanese setting. Here, it is a combination of drugs and desperation that allows the protagonist Case to apprehend the market in all its frenzied complexity. Tellingly, he perceives it in terms of cyberspace, which is itself already drug- like, famously described in the beginning of the novel as a ―consensual hallucination.‖244

Cyberspace even has its own withdrawal symptoms: ―[…] the dreams came on in the

Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he‘d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn‘t there.‖245 In a certain sense, we might say that Case‘s ingestion of drugs is less disorienting than orienting for him—that is, his drug consumption helps him recover the clarity and mastery he experiences in cyberspace. In the following passage, for instance, after taking ―dex‖ (amphetamines) in a bar, Case begins to perceive even the scratched surface of a table as a rationalized structure: ―The brown laminate of the tabletop was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his spine he saw the

242 Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 16. 243 Ibid., 6 244 Ibid., 5. 245 Ibid. 69 countless random impacts required to create a surface like that.‖246 In Gibson‘s conception, it seems that it is drugs that prefigure cyberspace. I am definitely not the first to make such an observation—as Hirose Michitaka (1994) writes in his afterword to

Venus City, ―Some people have likened today‘s network society to the drug culture of the

1970s. They say they see in today‘s network culture the same philosophy behind the movement that dreamt of a free-spirited, ideal world through drugs.‖247 The subculture of cyberspace ‗cowboys‘ seems to constitute its own counter-culture, possessed of its own slang and dedicated to ―penetrat[ing] the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data‖248 and stealing what is found. With its emphasis on the intoxicating experience of having one‘s ―disembodied consciousness‖249 projected into another realm, cyberspace is just as much an ‗altered state‘ as it is ‗state of the art.‘ I will discuss the implications of this in a moment.

In his excellent essay entitled ―Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch,

Blade Runner, and Neuromancer,‖ Timothy Yu (2008) shows how ―the alienation and anxiety generated by the structures of global capitalism‖ are ―articulated as a racialized fear of the Orient‖ in the ―dystopian fantasies‖ listed in the title of his essay.250 Where

Neuromancer is concerned, Yu (2008) quite accurately observes that ―[b]efore cyberspace appears in the book, Chiba is constantly being compared to it, serving as a

246 Gibson, Neuromancer, 9. 247 Hirose Michitaka, afterword to Venus City, by Masaki Gorō (Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1992) 311-312. 248 Gibson, Neuromancer, 5. 249 Ibid. 250 Timothy Yu, ―Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer,‖ MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 47. 70 gateway for our understanding.‖251 Indeed, both Chiba City and cyberspace are places of

―freewheeling and lawless exchange, [where] the competitive market [is] reduced to its most brutal form.‖252 However, while I agree with Timothy Yu‘s (2008) assertion that

Gibson‘s ―vision of Chiba City becomes a prototype of the postmodern landscape of cyberspace,‖253 I believe Yu‘s (2008) conclusion could go a bit further. Yu (2008) concludes that ―Case‘s return to […] cyberspace, while allowing virtual transnational movement, reterritorializes the subject, allowing the American Case to go home,‖ back to the Sprawl, where he was previously useless as a ‗cowboy‘ because of the damage inflicted on his nervous system by the former employers he tried to cheat. Moreover, Yu

(2008) continues, ―Postmodern cyberspace serves here as a reactionary force enabling the reconstruction of modern national boundaries and identities.‖254 In Yu‘s (2008) words, his ―reading of Gibson builds upon and diverges from other readings of what has been called ‗techno-orientalism‘ or ‗high-tech orientalism‘ […].‖255 This includes the work of

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2008) in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the

Age of Fiber Optics. Chun (2008) argues that ―[e]ntering cyberspace allows one to conquer a vaguely threatening Oriental landscape,‖256 citing the following passage in which cyberspace is orientalized:

And [it] flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard expanding to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard

251 Yu, ―Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures,‖ 62. 252 Ibid., 61. 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid., 62. 255 Ibid., 60. 256 Chun, Control and Freedom, 190. 71

Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing his deck, tears of release streaking his face.257

In this passage‘s reference to Case‘s ―home‖ and ―country,‖ we can clearly see how

Yu (2008) comes to his conclusion that cyberspace represents a homecoming and a reterritorialization for Case.

One need not go so far as Chun (2008), who cites this passage alongside the text from a pornographic ‗Asian‘ website, in order to play up the relationship between cyberspace and sexuality. It is there in the novel, in the passage where Molly says to Case,

―I saw you stroking that Sendai; man it was pornographic,‖258 a passage also cited in

Chun (2008). Paradoxically, however, cyberspace is also treated as a quasi-spiritualized realm that transcends the exigencies of the flesh: ―In the bars he‘d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.‖259 Moreover, there is the following passage about ―simstim,‖ another popular VR technology in the novel:

―Cowboys didn‘t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy.‖260

The spiritual nature of cyberspace becomes explicit in the next two volumes of the

‗Sprawl trilogy,‘ where it comes to be inhabited by Voodoo loas. So how do we reconcile

257 Gibson, Neuromancer, 52, quoted in Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 189. 258 Gibson, Neuromancer, 47, quoted in Chun, Control and Freedom,189. 259 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6. 260 Ibid., 55. 72 the ―bodiless exultation‖261 of cyberspace (a quasi-spiritual aspect) with the capacity to provide sexual release that Chun (2008) imparts it (a decidedly physical quality)? We can frame the question yet another way: since the ―release‖ provided by cyberspace is attributed to the temporary annihilation of the body, why is that release figured in sexual

(bodily) terms?

On the one hand, the sexual figuration of that release seems to be the natural result of thinking about the waning economic influence of America in terms of a threatened masculinity, or an impotence. Here, one concludes after a reading of Chun (2008)262 that

‗jacking into‘ (penetrating) cyberspace is an already sexualized metaphor for the reconquest of the market, which is dominated by the Japanese. Cyberspace is, after all, a place ―filled with Asian trademarks and corporations.‖ 263 Tellingly, it is never accessed in the novel ―without Japanese equipment.‖264 Thus, Neuromancer depicts a world in which what is Oriental cannot in actuality be dominated or overcome, so it must be sufficient for it to be feminized, placed in a dialectic relationship that defines it as always already dominated. At first glance, this does not seem to be a criticism of Orientalism at all. It is not until we notice that Case himself falls into the dominated category that

Gibson‘s depiction takes on a complexity with regards to Orientalism. According to Chun

(2008), Case is ―an emasculated cowboy,‖ and is ―often described as passive, as navigated.‖265 Insofar as Case cannot penetrate cyberspace ―without Japanese

261 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6. 262 Chun, Control and Freedom, 188-191. 263 Ibid., 188. 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid., 191. 73 equipment,‖266 his sexuality is in some sense ―Japanoid,‖ a term used by Tatsumi

Takayuki (2002) to describe the ―post-eighties hyper-Creole subjectivity transgressing the boundaries between the Japanese and the non-Japanese […].‖267 Simply put, a component of his sexuality is Japanese, mediated by Japanese technology. The dialectic of ‗masculine West‘ and ‗feminine East‘ thus breaks down in Case‘s split subjectivity.

This conforms to a description of the Japanoid subjectivity from earlier in Tatsumi‘s

(1992) career:

This is an age in which the very slippage [zure] between Anglo-American and Japanese SF discourses has produced a hair-raising spectacle. A fissure [kiretsu] has materialized between Western identity and Japanese subjectivity [shutai], between Western logic [rojikku] and Japanese reasoning [ronri], between Orientalism and Occidentalism, between Western narcissism and Japanese masochism, and above all between ‗Japanese SF‘ and a ‗science fictional Japan‘ [SF-teki nihon]; and it is from this chasm that a ‗Japanoid‘ subjectivity has appeared, virtual and hybrid [kasō konsei], specific to a virtual fin-de-siècle and a virtual Japan.268

In summary, then, the paradox of a bodiless sexuality illustrates the technologically- enabled splitting apart of two previously dialectically defined terms: body and sex.

Furthermore, the technology of cyberspace also enables a split subjectivity based on a subtextual reading of Case‘s sexuality. The resultant Japanoid subjectivity undermines the dialectic of masculine West and feminine East in the figure of Case, at least as far as his cyberspace activities are concerned. This reading builds upon aspects of Chun‘s

(2008) interpretation, and to a certain degree it contradicts Yu‘s (2008) conclusion that the ―displacement of hybridity outside the US allows Gibson to maintain US national

266 Chun, Control and Freedom, 188. 267 Takayuki Tatsumi, ―The Japanoid Manifesto: Toward a New Poetics of Invisible Culture,‖ The Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 2 (2002), 16. 268 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 225. 74 integrity […].‖269 Case‘s cyberspace activities complicate the notion of hybridity, but beyond that Yu‘s (2008) conclusion still generally holds.

Whether or not one considers Gibson‘s depiction to be an indictment of traditional

Orientalism, Gibson undeniably portrays cyberspace as having an immense utility (in the sense of an enjoyable activity or commodity). Its figuration in terms of a sexual release is a testament to that. When Yu (2008) suggests that Gibson‘s ―displacement of late capitalist agency‖ onto the artificial intelligence Wintermute has an ―ideological function‖ which is to ―re-enchant late capitalism itself,‖270 he hits upon a great idea perhaps equally applicable to the role of cyberspace as an intoxicating and quasi-spiritual activity. As

Watanabe (2009) writes in his essay on reenchantment in contemporary society, ―An intense proclivity toward intoxicating experiences [tōsui taiken] and the magical [jujutsu- teki-na mono] can be seen again and again in the countercultural movements of the developed nations since the 1960s, and in the cultural practices that have derived from them. Such proclivities often entailed the guise of the ‗Eastern‘ [tōyō] and the ‗premodern‘

[zenkindai] […].‖271 Although a computerized primer to cyberspace in the novel declares that ―[t]he matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games […], in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks,‖272 Gibson‘s conception of it seems to be more firmly rooted in 1960s countercultural movements, as I have discussed before. In that sense, perhaps the apparent Orientalization of cyberspace is a holdover from the conceptualization of those earlier countercultural movements concerned with the

269 Yu, ―Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures,‖ 63. 270 Ibid., 64. 271 Watanabe, ―Gendai bunka-ni-okeru tōsui,‖ 1. 272 Gibson, Neuromancer, 51. 75

―Eastern‖ and the ―premodern.‖ In mobilizing aspects of a stereotypical ‗East,‘ Gibson‘s treatment of cyberspace endeavors to reenchant Case‘s disenchanted experience of Japan.

After all, Chiba City can quite easily be called disenchanted, if not downright dystopian, and Case can charitably be called jaded: ―In the first month, he‘d killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn‘t known he carried.‖273 Metonymically, Chiba emphasizes the ―prison‖-like274 aspect of Case‘s banishment from cyberspace. He sleeps, for instance, in ―coffin‖ hotels,275 and his home, the Sprawl, is far beyond his reach: ―The Sprawl was a long, strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.‖276 Chiba is furthermore a largely colorless place, ―where you couldn‘t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam.‖277

Cyberspace, on the other hand, epitomizes freedom of mobility. Case merely punches in commands and he is off and away. The fact that cyberspace is a global system, a ―graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system,‖278 enhances this sense of freedom. Part of its enchantment comes from its boundlessness; unlike the internet of today, which is limited in its ―capacity to create

273 Gibson, Neuromancer, 7. 274 Ibid., 6. 275 Ibid. 276 Ibid., 5. 277 Ibid., 6. 278 Ibid., 51. 76 a spectacular sense of space‖ insofar as it is glimpsed through small screens,279 Gibson‘s cyberspace seems to commandeer one‘s sensorium, positing one in the midst of an

―infinite datascape.‖280 Furthermore, it appears to Case in brilliant color, as evidenced in the following passage where Case observes the progress of his Chinese virus program:

―The Flatline punched them up through shifting rainbow strata […] The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point.‖281 As a setting of consumption, cyberspace tantalizes with access to far larger amounts of capital than Case can hope to access in the ‗real‘ world. Finally, we must not forget that cyberspace is an example of the commodification of intoxication, or what Watanabe (2008) refers to as

―intoxication as a consumer good.‖282 As such, it offers the consumer an enjoyable altered state that can only be approximated by the ingestion of drugs, as discussed earlier, with the main difference being that the intoxication of cyberspace is instant and more enjoyable. When we consider all of the above, cyberspace seems a rather successful reenchantment of consumer activity, verging on the ―collective dream of the commodity phantasmagoria,‖283 to borrow a phrase from Susan Buck-Morss (1993). In the Marxian sense, phantasmagoria refers to ―the deceptive appearance of commodities as ‗fetishes‘ in

279 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 140. 280 Gibson, Neuromancer, 261. 281 Ibid., 180-181. 282 Watanabe, ―Gendai bunka-ni-okeru tōsui,‖ 4. 283 Susan Buck-Morss, ―Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin‘s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing,‖ in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 324. 77 the market-place.‖284 As Buck-Morss (1993) discusses, this is the state from which the theorist Walter Benjamin wanted society to awake.285

This is because, as Ritzer (2005) writes, ―phantasmagoria also implies a negative side of enchantment—a nightmare world filled with specters, ghosts, and a profusion of things that seem simultaneously to be within one‘s grasp and impossible to obtain.‖286 This perfectly describes the situation Case faces when the AI Neuromancer traps him in a virtual construct with a virtual Linda Lee, his former lover, who was killed earlier in the novel. An agonized Case rails against the AI: ―I know, see? I know who you are. […]

Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remembered her before….‖287 This brings up another disenchanting aspect of Gibson‘s cyberspace— the existence of security programs that can ‗flatline‘ the user, that is, kill him. Finally, for all the interconnectedness promised by cyberspace, it seems a solitary and even lonely activity to be there; as Chun (2008) observes, ―In cyberspace, Case runs into no other people,‖ just ―codes‖ and ―mimics.‖288

And yet, by the end of the novel, everything seems right in the matrix, now that

Wintermute and Neuromancer have merged and taken over. And even though Molly leaves Case, there is a separate reality in which Case and Linda live happily ever after, together. Case encounters his and Linda‘s computerized selves, standing next to the embodied form of Neuromancer, who appears as a boy: ―Small as they were, he could

284 Buck-Morss, ―Dream World of Mass Culture,‖ 311. 285 Ibid., 324. 286 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 64. 287 Gibson, Neuromancer, 235-236. 288 Chun, Control and Freedom, 191. 78 make out the boy‘s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been

Riviera‘s. Linda still wore his jacket; she waved as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.‖289 We get quite a different sense from the ―Personality Information Clones‖ that feature at the end of ―I Want to Burst‖:

They raised their sorrowful voices. Voices grieving a self that has already been lost. The whispering, murmuring, sorrowful voices leaked as electromagnetic waves from the network and scattered in the gray night. Senses implanted with PFX or other auxiliary organs would occasionally pick them up. In the cold season when the air is perfectly clear they streamed into the ears whether you liked it or not. Voices that lured the living flesh to the same miserable fate.290

Thus, while in Gibson‘s work the reenchantment that cyberspace offers is tempered by some disenchanting qualities, overall we may say that it comprises a more optimistic technological vision than we see in Masaki‘s fiction.

Conclusion

When I first approached this chapter, it was with an eye toward the ways in which I perceived Neuromancer to be Orientalist and expected Masaki Gorō‘s works to manifest a kind of ―counter-orientalism,‖291 to borrow a term from Takayuki Tatsumi‘s (2007) analysis of the SF author Richard Calder‘s ―nanotech‖ fiction.292 However, after applying enchantment theory to reveal shared assumptions about Japan as the locus of an emergent techno-social hybridity, I must conclude that, Orientalist or counter-orientalist tendencies

289 Gibson, Neuromancer, 271. 290 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 110. 291 Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache, 98. 292 Ibid., 94. 79 notwithstanding, both Neuromancer and Masaki Gorō‘s works share a base in what I have termed a conventionalized discourse on East Asian modernity. At the time these works were written, this discourse looked to Japan for signs of disenchantment stemming from the condition of an increasingly technologically advanced society, for which the concept of ‗futurity‘ or ‗science fictionality‘ emerged as a metaphorical vehicle, owing to the need to preserve Otherness. This resulted in the temporal Othering of Japan— banishment to a disenchanted future deemed unacceptable for North America. Indeed, locating science fictionality or the future in the signifier ―Japan‖ was a practice that characterized the program of cyberpunk, as Tatsumi (1988) writes in Japanoido

Sengen.293

However, whereas we can say that the effect of this representational strategy on the part of North American authors was to emphasize essential cultural difference between

North America and Japan, we will have to come up with a different explanation for

Masaki Gorō‘s works, especially the ones in which America is not mentioned. Inasmuch as Masaki Gorō locates the future in ―Japan‖ and appropriates a similar hard-boiled idiom, we may describe his works as cyberpunk. However, his works do not essentialize

Japanese culture, at least not like Neuromancer does. In Neuromancer, for instance, we may read cyberspace as enchanted in part because it is Orientalized. But in Masaki‘s emphasis on technological disenchantment, he criticizes the perspective of a consumer society bent on blindly acquiring the latest technologies. So, while he does not disavow the futurity of Japan implied by the conventionalized discourse on Japan, he does not

293 Tatsumi, Japanoido Sengen, 5, 224. 80 endorse the course that futurity seems to be taking. He even seems to suggest that Japan has benefited unfairly by its futurity. For instance, where Venus City is concerned, he seems to adopt the perspective of the group of Japan scholars known as the ―revisionists.‖

Duncan McCargo (2004) provides a succinct overview of the revisionist position.

According to him, revisionist scholars ―view Japan as operating according to distinctive principles of its own: typically, they regard it as undemocratic, and as characterized by a deeply flawed political system that features a considerable degree of structural corruption.‖294 Ichikawa Torahiko (1997) has written that the world of that novel represents a ―revisionist‘s nightmare.‖295 Ichikawa cites as revisionists such people as

Chalmers Johnson, Karel van Wolferen, James Fallows and Clyde Prestowitz.296

According to Ichikawa (1997), in accounting for Japan‘s economic dominance the revisionists argued that Japan was a place ―where the rules of Western-style free trade were not followed.‖297 To summarize my conclusion, both Neuromancer and Masaki

Gorō‘s works seem to hew to the conventionalized discourse of Japanese modernity.

However, while the effect of Neuromancer‘s representation is to emphasize essential cultural difference, Masaki Gorō‘s approach emphasizes revisionist criticisms of Japan‘s strategic economic difference.

294 Duncan McCargo, Contemporary Japan, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 4. 295 Ichikawa, ―Pakkusu japonika-to shūsei-shugi,‖ 143. 296 Ibid. 297 Ibid. 81

CHAPTER THREE: HISTORICITY AND GENRE

Capitalism […] demands a memory of qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect to find completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some future terminus which we sometimes call ―progress.‖

Fredric Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?‖ (1982)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I discussed the emergence of a passivizing temporality attendant to the rise of consumer society. Debord (1967) speaks of a ―paralyzed memory‖ that results from this new organization of time.298 In Jameson (1982), this phenomenon takes the form of a ―disappearance of historicity‖299 from contemporary society. What has taken the place of the historical, Jameson (1982) argues, is the nostalgic.300 In

Neuromancer, the nostalgic takes two forms. One is Case‘s longing for the Sprawl (i.e.

America) of his youth. The other, and more significant form, is Gibson‘s adoption of the hard-boiled style of fiction, a nostalgic American genre. Interestingly, Masaki also makes significant use of this style in his novella ―Evil Eyes.‖ I argue that the adoption of this style by works dealing with the transnational reinforces the theme of the supplantation of the traditional nation-state by hyper-capitalist forms.

298 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 114. 299 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 300 Ibid. 82

After that, I review the traditional hard-boiled protagonist‘s relationship to home, the truth and the grotesque, as discussed by Honda Shin (2001). Then I explore affinities between hard-boiled fiction and urban dystopia, demonstrating how the disenchantment discussed in the previous chapter leads to the alienation characteristic of the hard-boiled protagonist. Finally, I conclude that Gibson and Masaki each employ the hard-boiled style to portray a particular kind of alienation.

Historicity

Fredric Jameson (1982) once wrote that American SF tended toward dystopia,301 and that SF in general had taken the place of the historical novel in structuring our political consciousness of the present moment. The present moment is no longer the fait accompli once demanded and justified by the historical past, a ―construction‖ that assures us of the inevitability and naturalness of our own institutions.302 Rather, it is re-presented to us by

SF as ―the determinate past of something yet to come,‖ or as ―some future world‘s remote past.‖303 It is given back to us not as some inert object, but an object in motion, with a direction and a velocity, the sense of moving ―steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable ‗real‘ future.‖304

To accomplish this, Jameson (1982) argues, SF employs a ―strategy of

301 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 153. 302 Ibid., 152. 303 Ibid. 304 Ibid., 153. 83 indirection.‖305 For Jameson (1982), the present is ―inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect.‖306 Before we register our misgivings with this model of epistemology, let us carry through with his argument. Since the present is inaccessible to us except through the filters of ―our private fantasies‖ and the ―proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence,‖307 some artifice is required to help us ―break through our monadic insulation and to ‗experience,‘ for some first and real time, this ‗present,‘ which is after all all we have.‖308

There are several objections to be raised. First, the premise that the present is not directly knowable implies the impossibility of phenomenology, denying among other things the ability of the subject to ―delineate carefully [his] own affective, emotional, and imaginative life […].‖309 It suggests the complete and utter interpellation of a passive subject by ideologies which cannot be contested. Second, there are undeniably moments of life that reveal themselves, without the aid of artifice, in a terrifying immediacy that is the opposite of the numb habituation Jameson (1982) mentions. I am thinking of a passage from The Maltese Falcon (1929), quoted to good effect in Maitland McDonagh‘s

(1991) study of the Italian horror director Dario Argento:

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. […] ―Here‘s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office- building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn‘t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and

305 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 152. 306 Ibid., 151. 307 Ibid., 152. 308 Ibid., 151. 309 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. 84

flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff, of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.‖ […] It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.310

The point here is that artifice is not always required to prepare us for an understanding of a ―habituated‖311 present. The third objection is that, while the ideological operation

Jameson (1982) describes may certainly apply to some works, it is still an ideological operation, which means that it should be subject to the intentions of the particular author.

Furthermore, the success or failure of the effect of indirection should also depend on the sophistication and skill of the author.

Nevertheless, Jameson‘s (1982) theory of strategic indirection is an interesting hypothesis to adopt. It may still be productive to the present discussion. For instance, under Jameson‘s (1982) rubric SF avows the impending historicity of our lived experience of the present. If we do not acknowledge the historicity of our own institutions, it is impossible to see how radical disjunctures may have taken place in what are presumed to be inevitable and natural social and political configurations. Moreover, it seems that considerable dystopian potential is generated in this disparity. This is an issue succinctly and provocatively addressed in the following passage from Philip K. Dick‘s

(1962) alternate-history novel The Man in the High Castle:

310 Dashiell Hammett, 1929, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1992), 62-64, quoted in Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1991), 7. 311 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 151. 85

―Don‘t you feel it?‖ he kidded her. ―The historicity?‖ She said, ―What is ‗historicity‘?‖ ―When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn‘t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?‖ He nudged her. ―You can‘t. You can‘t tell which is which. There‘s no ‗mystical plasmic presence,‘ no ‗aura‘ around it.‖312

Of course, historicity is more than just ―[w]hen a thing has history in it.‖313 As George

Slusser (1988) explains, ―historicity designates a theoretical interrogation of the historical act. It asks the question: What does it mean, for a given event, to be in history?‖314 In the above passage, Dick (1962) seems to suggest that history is ―a function of our desire to fix, to infuse fixity in things‖ that are otherwise ―identical.‖315 Furthermore, I would add that whether or not history and value are ‗fixed‘ in an object depends on the phenomenological gestalt of the object itself—the fantasy of what something like the hypothetical lighter could be worth in monetary terms. For if historicity were simply the quality of proximity to an event deemed historically important, then a button from the assassinated president‘s blood-stained garment could be said to retain the same historicity as the lighter, and yet one can hardly imagine the collectors in Dick‘s novel expressing equal interest in the button. The garment itself, however, would be another matter. This is because the garment would lend itself more easily to the imagination. It seems that it is in the object‘s ability to fix our imagination, to evoke the event in our imagination, that value is placed.

312 Philip K. Dick, 1962, The Man in the High Castle (New York: Vintage, 1992), 63-64. 313 Ibid., 63. 314 George Slusser, ―History, Historicity, Story,‖ Science Fiction Studies 15, no. 2 (1988), 190. 315 Ibid., 193. 86

Thus, the ―loss of historicity‖ from consumer society316 is perhaps better understood as a situation where such objects no longer fix or call out to our imagination, owing in part to the proliferation of simulacra and the inability to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic. But this loss may also simply arise from a decrease in the number of historical events we can access in our imaginations, or for that matter, consider important.

It may also be due to a change in our relationship to that history. I would like to discuss the notion that, as the epigraph to this chapter proclaims, capitalism itself conditions our relationship to the past. If this is so, that conditioning must be a function of the temporality which capitalism has brought into being—the ―irreversible, linear temporality necessary to capitalist accumulation.‖317 It is, in other words, a time whose passing we measure in terms of the notion of ‗progress.‘ And yet this very temporality, which inculcates the sense that the present is an improvement on the past, often engenders a kind of resistance we may call nostalgia—a response to the loss of some value or quality that abounded (or was thought to abound) in the past.

Jameson (1982) has argued that historicity has nowadays been replaced by nostalgia, for instance for 1930s and 1950s American cultural forms.318 Some of these forms, such as the hard-boiled crime novel and the film noir, have informed the main works discussed here, as a kind of substratum, so to speak, to the dominant superstratum of SF. Such nostalgic forms may as well be put to good use, for as Jameson (1982) tells us, they have

316 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 377. 317 Crano, ―Guy Debord and the Aesthetics of Cine-Sabotage,‖ n.p. 318 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 87 been ―emptied of their necessity‖319 to our narratives of the present day.

In other words, there seems to be little need for these forms to continue into the present day—which is quite different from saying, of course, that we no longer need to read Dashiell Hammett novels or watch the films noirs of Fritz Lang. Rather, Hammett and Lang, Chandler and Tourneur seem to have done a good enough job in their time, to have demonstrated and fulfilled the potential of their respective forms, so that contemporary iterations that aspire to more than parody seem unnecessary and belated addenda to an already closed moment in time—that is, if they are not simply read as acts of retro-kitsch, admissible in some circles as ironic cool. If anything, we almost require the plots and tropes and images of hard-boiled fiction and film noir to belong to a bygone era, one that is even discontinuous with the present, in order to disavow the relevance of some of their more embarrassing aspects to the present day, such as the often undisguised sexism that was their generic inheritance, or the racism that crept in from time to time. In any case, the present-day result is a peculiar ―devitalization of form.‖320

Where nostalgia in film is concerned, Jameson (1988) comes to a rather hard-line conclusion, linking the prevalence of nostalgic elements in contemporary film to an inability to aesthetically render the present, and positing this as a result of consumer society:

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible

319 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 320 Ibid. 88

indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.321

However, I believe it is possible for authors to mobilize nostalgic elements to a different, strategic effect. As I argue below, nostalgic elements take on a different character in

Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes.‖ These stories invoke nostalgic forms in order to comment on changing conceptions of the nation and state, as well as the nature of subjectivity.

Nation and Nostalgia

To examine the relationship between nation and nostalgia, we may consult Jameson

(1982) once again. He has written lucidly of the process of a form becoming inadequate to its content, singling out the historical novel as an example. He speaks of ―the profound historicity of the genre itself,‖ and the way that it ―becomes emptied of its vitality and survives as a dead form, […] as ‗archaeological‘ as its own raw materials […].‖322 This process is perhaps just as well born out by the comparative dearth of contemporary noir, and the sense that such works are self-consciously posturing if they are not simply read as homages or parodies. In Jameson (1982), the ―replacement of the historical by the nostalgic‖ is furthermore equated with the ―volatilization of what was once a national past,‖323 the sudden disaggregation of powerful narratives whose content we may see other genres of discourse take up and treat more palatably, directly or meaningfully. If

321 Fredric Jameson, 1988, ―Postmodernism and Consumer Society,‖ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1988 (London: Verso, 1998), 9-10. 322 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 323 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 89

Jameson (1982) is correct, this process coincides with ―the moment of emergence of the nation-states and of nationalism itself […].‖324 Thus, we may posit nationalism as a reaction to just such an encroachment of other discourses into a previously inviolate content, staked off and protected by an appointed genre of discourse. It is a notion that is especially apropos to our discussion, since the works in this thesis tend to posit, to a greater or lesser degree, the supplantation of the traditional nation-state by hyper- capitalist forms that have altered the organization and power structures of society. Thus, the space once reserved for a national past in our political consciousness must now compete with innumerable re-ordered narratives enabled by the vicissitudes of global capitalism. Its transnational character makes new relationships with the nation possible.

In a recent interview with Bungakukai, Karatani Kōjin (2006) has defined nation as a problem of emotional reciprocity, likened to a parent-child relationship:

For example, a parent fends for her child, and that is gifting [zōyo]. This does not mean that the child will specifically return the favor, but he will have feelings of indebtedness [saimu-kanjō]. These kinds of emotions mean that the parent-child relationship, while not a commodity exchange, is rooted in another kind of exchange. In that sense, I believe it is more correct to view nation as a problem of emotion. A nation is something that imaginatively restores the sense of mutually beneficial reciprocity [sōgofujo-teki-na goshūsei] after various communities [kyōdōtai] have fragmented [hōkai-shita]. Unlike the state, it has its basis in emotional identity.325

We sometimes think of nostalgia as a yearning for something unrecoverable and external, such as the hometown of one‘s youth, but in this case it may be defined as a residual longing for one‘s own past mastery of discontinued or discredited narratives, a mastery

324 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 325 Karatani Kōjin, ―Gurōbaru shihon-shugi-kara sekai kyōwakoku-he,‖ interview by the editorial department of Bungakukai, Bungakukai 60, no. 8 (2006), 119. 90 that previously constituted the subject and affirmed him as a member of a nation, or imagined community. Thus nostalgia may be defined as a function of this loss of an imagined emotional reciprocity.

In Neuromancer, the object of Case‘s nostalgia is his home of the past, but we are never quite sure exactly where that ‗home‘ is. Throughout the novel it is simply ―BAMA,‖ an acronym for ―the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis,‖326 or the ―Sprawl.‖327 On one occasion, it is the ―landscape of the northern Sprawl‖ that brings back ―confused memories of childhood for Case […].‖328 In all, there are perhaps two other references to regional variation in the Sprawl. The first is in the passage that mentions Linda‘s accent, which ―put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta,‖329 and the second is in the scene where Molly leads Case through unfamiliar places to the man known as the Finn: ―Her

Sprawl wasn‘t his Sprawl, he decided.‖330 The lack of a more localized expression of longing is interesting from the perspective of ―modern nostalgia,‖ which Svetlana Boym

(2001) defines as a ―mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values […].‖331 It is the ―clear borders‖332 that concern us here. While nostalgia avers the disenchantment of the present, a condition we have already established in terms of the world of the novel, it also seems to require a definite localization if it is to express a longing for an ―edenic unity of time and space

326 Gibson, Neuromancer, 43. 327 Ibid. 328 Ibid., 85. 329 Ibid., 9. 330 Ibid., 47. 331 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 8. 332 Ibid. 91 before entry into history.‖333 It seems that the twin factors of extensive urbanization and relative ease of travel334 in the world of the novel have broken down the sense of localized attachment we usually associate with nostalgia. Perhaps Case‘s childhood memories are ―confused‖335 because they are dislocated. Case is thus somewhat of a cipher, in that his thwarted nostalgia only confirms him as an American—a resident of the entire Sprawl.

There is a more significant form of nostalgia, however, in Neuromancer and ―Evil

Eyes,‖ at least as far as the present discussion is concerned. It is these works‘ adoption of the hard-boiled style, a nostalgic American form. I discuss the specific manifestations of this style in the next section. However, I would like to address here the significance of a

Japanese work adopting a nostalgic American form. It seems that one may take either of two positions to explain the significance of ―Western symbolic capital‖336 in Japan.

I will borrow the terms ―context-free‖ and ―context-bound‖ from Mary Yoko

Brannen (1992) for these two positions.337 In her original article, they refer to the meaning of Disneyland in a Japanese context. In the ―context-free‖ account, ―Disneyland, as a product of cultureless world capitalism, means the same thing in Japan as in the

333 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 8. 334 I came upon the notion of ease of travel as a spatial factor in nostalgia in Mizukoshi Kosuke, ―Nosutarujia-shōhi-ni-kansuru riron-teki kenkyū,‖ Shōhin Kenkyū 55, nos. 1 & 2 (2007), 18. 335 Gibson, Neuromancer, 85. 336 Mary Yoko Brannen, ―Bwana Mickey: Constructing Cultural Consumption at Tokyo Disneyland,‖ in Remade in Japan: Everyday Life and Consumer Tastes in a Changing Society, ed. Joseph J. Tobin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 218. 337 Ibid., 217. 92

United States.‖338 This is a position we may associate with Fredric Jameson, for it assumes the aforementioned ―loss of historicity‖ from consumer society.339 Specific cultural forms can maintain a constant value regardless of cultural context precisely because historicity has been lost. They are in a sense free-floating. This position holds that once such images as the hard-drinking, laconic hero and the mysterious femme fatale have been ―emptied of their necessity‖340 to their native literary milieu, they can attain a universal value as signs in a Japanese SF work, just as ninja, origami and other stereotypical images of Japan can appear in Neuromancer. They are all ―rigorously equivalent‖ as images in a kind of pluralistic ―Imaginary Museum.‖341 Hence one of the most oft-quoted passages from Jameson (1988): ―in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.‖342

In contrast, in the ―context-bound‖ view the ―symbolism of Disneyland works only within the greater context of its relationship with American society.‖343 If we take this argument to its extreme, ―Disney cultural simulacra consequently are meaningless in

Japan because Tokyo Disneyland is decontextualized, surrounded by people whose cultural logic is different from that of the originally intended audience.‖344 This position obviously precludes a transnational nostalgia altogether, and so is not useful to us.

338 Brannen, ―Bwana Mickey,‖ 218. 339 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 377. 340 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 341 Ibid. 342 Jameson, ―Postmodernism and Consumer Society,‖ 7. 343 Brannen, ―Bwana Mickey,‖ 218. 344 Ibid. 93

As Brannen (1992) writes, ―The problem with these two accounts is their assumption that exported cultural artifacts retain their original cultural symbolism.‖345 Indeed, as I discuss later, Gibson‘s conception of the hard-boiled is quite different from Masaki‘s, though this may just be a personal, and not cultural, difference. Nevertheless, though it is not without problems, the ―context-free‖ view enables us to posit a transnationalism wherein members of different nations have access to one and the same ―Imaginary

Museum,‖346 sharing the same wealth of images and tropes and styles with which to come to terms with the present.

Transnationalism also forces us to reconsider the function of the state. Traditionally, the state may be said to delimit and circumscribe such an imaginary global community by encouraging an emotional identity that supports the inherently adversarial and competitive goals of the state, and the culture it promotes. For instance, Karatani (2006) has observed after the fashion of Hobbes that a ―state is first of all a state in opposition to other states (rival states [tekikoku]). […] States are naturally adversarial toward other states, and each infuses an antagonism [tekitaisei] into its citizenry [kokumin].‖347

According to Karatani (2006), the state is another ―form of exchange‖ that is ―distinct from commodity exchange.‖348 His account of the rise of the state stresses a belief fundamental to the constructions of the utopias we will see later, a belief that the ―state survives because usurpation [gōdatsu] exists at the root of human relations.‖349 This is a

345 Brannen, ―Bwana Mickey,‖ 218. 346 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 150. 347 Karatani, ―Gurōbaru Shihon-Shugi-kara,‖ 119. 348 Ibid. 349 Karatani, ―Gurōbaru Shihon-Shugi-kara,‖ 119-120. 94 fundamentally Hobbesian view of humanity.

In Karatani‘s words (2006), ―Just as capitalism begins in the exchange of commodities between communities [kyōdōtai], so too does the state begin between communities. Or rather, usurpation comes first between communities. ‗Exchange‘ is possible, in fact, precisely because there is a state that exists behind it to prohibit usurpation and breaches of contract. Moreover, the state is a system that continually usurps.‖350 In this way, we may say that the state‘s interest is in cultivating national narratives that corroborate and justify its activities, particularly on the global scale. Thus, we may say that it is antithetical to the establishment of an unlegislated transnationalism, which after all would have an enervating effect on the existing nationalism, for transnationalism is inclusive, while nationalism is exclusive.

In Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ the disappearance of the protection emblemized by the state produces, in my view, a kind of anxiety over the possibility of manipulation at the hands of entities more powerful than the state. As Lee Horsley (2001) writes in The

Noir Thriller, the ―sources of anxiety‖ in noir-influenced SF stories are ―most often to do with external control (socio-political fatality) rather than inescapable inner demons

(psychological fatality).‖351 In such novels, Horsley (2001) argues, the ―metamorphosis into the ‗posthuman‘ foregrounds the issue of agency, bringing protagonists to wonder, not without cause, whether they retain free will and individual autonomy.‖352 For example, he writes that ―[f]or Gibson‘s Case, when he is trapped in the matrix by

350 Karatani, ―Gurōbaru Shihon-Shugi-kara,‖ 119. 351 Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 231. 352 Ibid. 95

Neuromancer, the question is whether he has simply become a second-order electronic construct manipulated as an image by more powerful entities.‖353 But let us backtrack for a moment. What exactly is the ―posthuman‖? Working from Horsley‘s (2001) quotation, we may surmise it is an entity for whom free will and autonomy no longer form the ground of existence, as these concepts did for the ―liberal humanist‖ subject.354 Indeed, free will and autonomy play an integral part in one of the best definitions of the posthuman condition, formulated by N. Katherine Hayles (1999):

The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction. Consider the six-million-dollar man, a paradigmatic citizen of the posthuman regime. As his name implies, the parts of the self are indeed owned, but they are owned precisely because they were purchased, not because ownership is a natural condition preexisting market relations. Similarly, the presumption that there is an agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from the ―wills of others‖ is undercut in the posthuman, for the posthuman‘s collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another.355

The notion of ―distributed cognition‖ becomes explicit at the end of the novel, when Case witnesses a digital version of himself living on in cyberspace. ―Version,‖ however, is the wrong word for this entity who is also Case—the Case who remains on in cyberspace after the first Case jacks out of Neuromancer‘s trap.

To return to my main argument, the positioning of characters in familiar hard-boiled roles serves the purpose of emphasizing, in a highly emblematic form, the transition from individualistic subjectivity to decentered posthumanity. In ―Evil Eyes,‖ this decentered

353 Horsley, The Noir Thriller, 231. 354 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286-287. 355 Ibid., 3-4. 96 existence is represented by the figure of Mugen, a grotesque and manipulative entity in the shape of a doll who describes himself as ―mind without flesh‖356 and has absorbed the brain tissue of ―fifteen or sixteen‖ people.357 Mugen threatens the protagonist with assimilation into an intolerable collective mode of existence.

Putting stereotypically hard-boiled characters in technological contexts that threaten their archetypically individualistic subjectivities, both Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ demonstrate that the utilization of nostalgic forms in science fiction can have a motivated purpose. In other words, it does not have to be a symptom of an inability to aesthetically render the present, as Jameson (1988) has argued of the infiltration of nostalgia into contemporary film.358 Rather, in Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ these nostalgic forms serve to highlight the question of how, in Tatsumi‘s (1966) words, ―what was previously thought of as inalienable individual subjectivity [jōtofukanō-kojinteki-shutai] has been formed through certain media-technological manipulation [sōsa] […].‖359

Interpreting the Hard-Boiled

In a 1986 interview with William Gibson, Larry McCaffery (1988) remarks on the likeness of the world depicted in Neuromancer to ―the underworld you find in Chandler and Hammett—sleazy, intensely vivid, full of colorful details and exotic lingoes that have

356 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 36. 357 Ibid., 38. 358 Jameson, ―Postmodernism and Consumer Society,‖ 9-10. 359 Tatsumi, Kono fushigi-na chikyū-de, 7. 97 somehow seemed both realistic and totally artificial.‖360 Gibson thereupon acknowledges the possibility that he may have been influenced by Hammett, but says that he was always turned off by Chandler:

Hammett may have been the guy who turned me on to the idea of super- specificity, which is something largely lacking in most SF description. SF authors tend to use generics, so you‘ll often get something like, ―Then he got into his space suit.‖ That sort of refusal to specify is almost an unspoken tradition in SF; writers know they can get away with having a character arrive on some unimaginably strange and distant planet and say, ―I looked out the window and saw the air plant.‖ It doesn‘t seem to matter that the reader doesn‘t know what the hell the plant looks like, or even what it is. Hammett may have given me the idea that you didn‘t have to write like that, even in a popular form. But I never really have read much Chandler, never really enjoyed what I did read because I always got this creepy Puritanical feeling from his books. Although his surface gloss is very brilliant, his underlying meaning is off-putting to me.361

Gibson‘s dislike of the ―[p]uritanical‖ tone of Chandler‘s work may help explain the difference Masaki has perceived between his own hard-boiled-influenced work and

Gibson‘s. For Masaki‘s take on the hard-boiled, we turn to his introduction to ―Evil Eyes‖ that accompanied that story‘s publication in the December 1987 issue of SF Magazine.

Here he gives a stylistic as well as moralistic interpretation of hard-boiled literature:

I intentionally employed a hard-boiled literary style [hādoboirudo-fū-no buntai]. In particular, the omission of the subject [of the sentence]. Series of short phrases. The heavy use of periods. A sarcastic viewpoint [hiniku-na shiten] with dry humor, and a particular sense of rhythm. But the intention behind so-called cyberpunk seems to be different. Cyberpunk seems to have its basis in the negation [hitei] of traditional human worth. In short, it holds existing morals [kison-no moraru] in doubt. Incidentally, the essence of hardboiled [literature] lies in the fact that no matter how individualistic a thing [kojin-teki-na mono] it is, some kind of moral is accomplished. This is why I think that cyberpunk and hard-boiled [literature] are dissimilar in the first place. It seems that the moralism [morarizumu] that can be felt in the works of Tiptree, [Cordwainer] Smith,

360 William Gibson, ―An Interview with William Gibson,‖ interview by Larry McCaffery, Mississippi Review 16, nos. 2 & 3 (1988), 222. 361 Ibid., 222-223. Emphasis in original. 98

Chandler and [Gavin] Lyall does not particularly exist in Gibson. I think the main novelty of Gibson is his disregard for an ethical sensibility.362

The SF reviewer Fukumoto Naomi has also commented on Neuromancer‘s supposed lack of morality in the October 1986 issue of Starlog Japan. Instead of the morality of

Chandler‘s hard-boiled fiction, however, the novel is apparently lacking the morality of the fin-de-siècle novels that came before it:

The development of the second half is all the more disappointing since the first half is ambitious [iyoku-teki]. This is a kind of quote-unquote fin-de-siècle novel [seikimatsu shōsetsu], but in the fin-de-siècle novels of old (for instance Baudelaire or Wilde), a moral was inexorably lurking. However, in this book there is no moral. In that it is new and frightening [senritsu-teki].363

Perhaps what contributes to the impression that the book lacks a moral center is the fact that the main characters are criminals with limited reservations about killing. For example, there is this revelation about Case in the beginning of the novel: ―In the first month, he‘d killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous.‖364 Then there is the characters‘ assault on Sense/Net which results in the loss of ―fourteen innocent lives,‖365 an act that ultimately goes unpunished. But the fact that Case and Molly get away with it all in the end, and are moreover rewarded for their complicity, is not at all inconsistent with the anti-heroic strain of hard-boiled literature. So it appears that for Masaki and Fukumoto (1986), to write in a particular style, whether that be hard-boiled or fin-de-siècle, means to mobilize not just a specific set of formal attributes but a set of moral attitudes, as well. Thus, when the ‗correct‘

362 Masaki, ―Sakusha aisatsu,‖ 54. 363 Fukumoto Naomi, review of the Japanese translation of Neuromancer, trans. Kuroma Hisashi, Starlog Japan (October 1986), 83. 364 Gibson, Neuromancer, 7. 365 Ibid., 162. 99 moral attitude is not adopted, there seems to be something amiss in the recreation of the style. Gibson‘s version of cyberpunk seems to exist within this differential.

Plotwise, however, Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ seem equally concerned with what

Chun (2008) refers to as the ―epistemophilia‖366 of the detective story. Addressing the themes of ―navigation and understanding‖367 in Neuromancer, she writes:

The strains of Dashiell Hammett and a traditional detective story plot reinforce this navigability, this epistemophilia, this desire to seek out and understand. The narrative lures the reader along through the promise of learning: we are given more and more clues as the novel progresses so that we too can figure out the ―mystery‖ (although not enough to figure out Neuromancer‘s ―true name‖).368

In ―Evil Eyes‖ the intensity of this ―epistemophilia‖369 is nowhere more perceptible than in the sequence where the protagonist enters the ―Holy Empathy‖ compound under false pretenses, looking for information on Maria, the story‘s femme fatale, who was a graduate of the institution. When the building comes into view, the narrator seems to acknowledge his role as detective, remarking that a ―part of the mystery [nazo] emanated from here.‖370 Presenting himself as a ―gofer‖371 sent to look into enrollment for his boss‘s daughter, he gets an administrator to show him around, whereupon he requests something from the records room in order to get inside:

It looked like my timid behavior had caused her to drop her guard. She took her ID card out of her clothing somewhere and opened the door. Inside was just one technician. The monitor of the database computer glowed green. […] I slipped into the room after the woman and hit her in the neck from behind. The spine of

366 Chun, Control and Freedom, 194. 367 Ibid. 368 Ibid., 193-194. 369 Ibid., 194. 370 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 49. 371 Ibid., 53. 100

my thick binder was ceramic. Hopping over the fallen woman, I gave the technician a hit. I closed the door at once. […]372

However, the protagonist does not kill his two hapless victims. He merely introduces into their PFX units some gloomy ‗mindsoft‘ influenced by Erik Satie and Louis Malle to keep them under.

So far we have talked about the hard-boiled stylistics and the ―epistemophilia‖373 of

Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes.‖ It may serve now to review some thematic characteristics of the hard-boiled genre, so that we may later see how they admit of the goals of the SF narratives under analysis. This discussion will form the basis of my subsequent argument, which is that there are affinities between hard-boiled thematics and urban dystopia which make them an evocative combination.

Luckily for us, Honda (2001) has written lucidly on the origins of the hard-boiled detective narrative. Rather than trace the inception of the genre back to the usual suspects, such as early practitioner Carroll John Daly, Honda (2001) explores an intriguing and productive affinity between hard-boiled detective fiction and the roughly contemporaneous works of the Lost Generation, works that are concerned with the ongoing search for a mythologized place called ―home.‖ These works include John Dos

Passos‘ U.S.A. trilogy (1930-1938), Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Sherwood

Anderson‘s Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

Honda (2001) first examines the figure of the young man who appears in the prologue to Dos Passos‘ U.S.A., a young man who ―takes various jobs as he wanders

372 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 56. 373 Chun, Control and Freedom, 194. 101 across North America, roaming the streets at night.‖374 Here is a man with ―[n]o job, no woman, no house, no city.‖375 He is a figure of loneliness and searching, his ―head swimming with wants.‖376 According to Honda (2001), he is a quintessentially American figure:

As a descendant [matsuei] of the puritans who sought a ‗city upon a hill,‘ and of the pioneers [kaitakusha] who set out west, this young man is spurred on by a desire to travel and by the ‗American dream,‘ with an emphasis on ‗labor [kinrō], self-reliance [dokuritsudokkō] and independence [jiritsusei]‘; nevertheless, he is presented as the symbol of American wandering [hōrō], pulled backward at every moment by a nostalgia [kyōshū] that is difficult to face. Just as with the puritans and the pioneers, the thing that pulls the young man backward, the thing he will not stop searching for, is that place where words, blood ties and memories merge: home.377

The young man‘s dilemma is clear enough: ―While he is reluctant to leave the home where he was born and raised, he continues to wander, with a home of his own as his ultimate goal.‖378

The element of blood ties, especially the mother-son relationship, looms large behind this dilemma. Honda (2001) points to one of Nick Carraway‘s fantasies in The Great

Gatsby, wherein Nick ―pictures himself following women to their apartments, though he is unable to step through their doorways, and watches them vanish into the darkness.‖379

Honda (2001) contends that this is a fantasy ―reminiscent of the desire to return to the

374 Honda Shin, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ Geijutsu Bunka Kenkyū no. 5 (2001), 153. 375 John Dos Passos, 1930-1938, U.S.A., (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 2, quoted in Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 153. 376 Dos Passos, U.S.A., 2. 377 Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 154. 378 Ibid. 379 Ibid., 155. 102 womb [botai-kaiki-ganbō].‖380 That he never enters the apartments of these imaginary women speaks to the power of the nostalgia that also pulls Dos Passos‘ young man backwards, a nostalgia that keeps them from allowing their mothers to be supplanted by wives as the central female figure in the home. As Honda (2001) argues later, this ultimately thwarts their transition from sons (youths) to husbands and fathers (adults).

Where Nick is concerned, ―He cannot believe that home awaits him in that darkness which is unknown to him yet seems warm.‖381

As Honda (2001) would have it, this trepidation is symptomatic of a larger loss of faith in the concept of home: ―[…] what the many characters who filled the pages of the twentieth century American novel communicated is that modern times do not afford trust in ‗home.‘‖382 We see this sentiment expressed in John Steinbeck‘s essay ―Paradox and

Dream‖ (1966). He writes that ―[u]ntil very recently home was a real word,‖ and moreover ―the dream of home […] persists in a time when home is neither required nor wanted.‖383 This statement is paradoxical indeed. For how can a home be neither required nor wanted when we have seen characters in search of one of their own? This is because the home is so rarely a ―permanent seat, not rented but owned.‖384 Homes are bought, sold, foreclosed, relocated. People move from one to another for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps the ―house is not big enough, or in the proper neighborhood. Or perhaps suburban life palls, and the family moves to the city, where excitement and convenience

380 Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 155. 381 Ibid. 382 Ibid., 154. 383 John Steinbeck, 1966, ―Paradox and Dream,‖ in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction, ed. Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson (New York: Viking, 1992), 336. 384 Ibid., 333. 103 beckon.‖385 In any case, it is a nostalgic dream to which these pursuits are oriented, a dream that entertains the notion of a hardier, more rugged and elemental American experience: ―the log houses, even the sod houses, were havens of safety, of defense, warmth, food and comfort. Outside were hostile Indians, crippling cold and starvation.

Many houses, including the one where President Johnson was born, built only a few generations back, have thick walls and gunslits for defense […].‖386 Thus, the theme of the pursuit of home contains an element of the desire to return to a time in which the home was indeed required and wanted.

Honda (2001) has chosen an excellent quotation from Kanaseki Hisao (1982) to contextualize this impossible search and simultaneously invoke, for the first time, the figure of the hard-boiled detective. Kanaseki‘s (1982) quotation posits industrialism as the force behind the change in the social valuation of idealism, which may be said to inform both the thematized pursuit of home and the ethos of the hard-boiled detective. As he writes:

The heroes of American literature were always incorrigible idealists [doshigataki risō-tsuikyūsha], pursuers of the absolute [zettai]. They rejected the quotidian nature of life, searched for some kind of transcendent value beyond it, and forever tried to ‗leap high.‘ […] However, the sudden rise of industrialist society from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of this century turned the transcendent bearing of American literature into a falsehood [kyokō], so to speak. And the heroes in literature began to be frustrated and defeated as they collided with various new social and cultural obstacles. And those who did not give up their pursuit of ‗truth‘ [shinri] were ostracized and became ‗grotesque‘ [gurotesuku].‖387

385 John Steinbeck, ―Paradox and Dream,‖ 333. 386 Ibid., 336. 387 Kanaseki Hisao, ―Fittsujerarudo-to ‗tomi‘-no mondai,‖ in Fittsujerarudo-no Bungaku, ed. Karita Motoshi (Tokyo: Arechi Shuppansha, 1982), 174-177, quoted in Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 155-156. 104

The outsider status of the detective can thus be attributed to his relationship with home and his pursuit of truth where society demands it must be suppressed. Where home is concerned, he does not have one of his own. That is, he is not married and he has no children. Rather, he is constantly entering other people‘s homes as a generally unwelcome party to sensitive information. Where truth is concerned, he is constantly obliged, sometimes against his better interest, to expose the mundane truths of adultery, murder and other ―social pathologies‖ which compromise the family unit, as Ono

Shuntarō (1999) points out.388 The truth is his weapon against those who mistreat him, and he is invariably mistreated, affronted, lied to or otherwise impeded in his pursuit of the truth, an offense magnified by his sense of self-righteousness.

Honda (2001) turns to another Lost Generation author, Sherwood Anderson, to elaborate on the aforementioned notion of the grotesque. In the first chapter of Winesburg,

Ohio (1919), entitled ―The Book of the Grotesque,‖ Anderson describes an old writer who, drowsing, envisions a ―long procession‖ of every person he has ever known, except they are all changed.389 They have all become grotesques. The vision inspires him to write a book. The central thesis of the book is that ―when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.‖390 Anderson subsequently explains that it is through one‘s relationship with the truth that one becomes grotesque:

388 Ono Shuntarō, ―Otoko-rashisa”-no shinwa (Tokyo: Kodansha Sensho Mechie, 1999), 110, quoted in Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 156. 389 Sherwood Anderson, 1919, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Viking, 1977), 24. 390 Ibid., 25. 105

The old man listed hundreds of the truths in his book […]. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. […] It was [the old man‘s] notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.‖391 What keeps the old man from becoming a grotesque himself is a hidden youthfulness, for ―something inside him was altogether young.‖392 Likewise, Honda (2001) argues it is the detective‘s

―youthfulness‖ [shōnensei] that saves him from becoming a grotesque.393 By the same token, ―growing up‖ [seichō] would mean becoming like the men who are his clients.394

Thus, his profession is a means to postpone ‗growing up‘ and starting his own home.

In fact, the detective confirms the undesirability of ‗growing up‘ every time he solves a case: ―Uncovering his client‘s ‗family secret‘ is the hard-boiled detective‘s job, is part of

‗telling the truth.‘ Only through this cruel act does he reaffirm the fact that a safe and comfortable home no longer exists […].‖395 He can neither find a model father nor a model mother who makes him want to have a home of his own. As Honda (2001) writes:

Though the hard-boiled detective is searching for the existence of a father who is a leader [michibikite], he exposes the corrupt [fuhai-shita] side of all men through his youthful fastidiousness [kanpekisa]. Though he is searching for the existence of a mother who could catch him in her arms, he deems all women wicked insofar as they cloud the eyes [of those who] pursue the truth.396

391 Anderson, Wineseburg, Ohio, 25-26. The last sentence is quoted in Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 156. 392 Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 24. 393 Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-Shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 156. 394 Ibid. 395 Ibid. 396 Ibid. 106

The last passage that I will quote from Honda (2001) offers a definition of the hard- boiled detective story and speaks to one final, relevant attribute of the hard-boiled detective, the sense that he may be the last incorrupt person on earth:

We may say that the hard-boiled detective story is a narrative in which a private eye, who doesn‘t have a home of his own, and who behaves like a self-made man who started out as an orphan, gets a hold of the secrets of ‗careless people‘ who cause him distress, and by going on the offensive tries to restore order [chitsujo] and to postpone the ruination of the world a little bit.‖397

This last part about trying to postpone the ruination of the world speaks to the impossible position faced by the hard-boiled protagonist of dystopian fiction.

The Value of Dystopia

Another issue we face is how to define dystopia, since each of the works discussed here may be said to contain elements of dystopia. In a dialectical sense, dystopia may be said to contain the idea of utopia, and utopia to contain the idea of dystopia. It is even conceivable that both words may sometimes have the same referent, that is, refer to the same imaginary sociopolitical configuration. In this way, dystopia may act as another word for utopia, albeit a word that emphasizes the ―demolitions and removals‖398 that utopias enact in their constructions of the perfect society, the forcible erasure of ―all those lesser evils‖ of ―human nature‖ 399 by revolutionary mechanisms of control. Dystopia also contains the idea of utopia in the sense of checking or suppressing something undesirable.

397 Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-Shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 157. 398 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 12. 399 Ibid. 107

It is a term favored by those who hold a pessimistic view of the utopian project and wish to decry it, as M. Keith Booker (1994) writes.400 Indeed, readers who have learned to associate the utopian only with the positive may be surprised at some of the terms theorists employ to describe utopia, at their striking political significance. An additional question we may ask is whether dystopian representations can exist outside of the political project of criticizing utopia but can instead offer a ―critique of existing social conditions or political systems,‖401 even when these conditions and political systems are not stereotypically utopian. This would change the critical value of the term dystopian as it is applied to works of fiction. After all, an author could conceivably portray a dystopia that is not actually anti-utopian, but merely describes the status quo in dystopian fashion.

Indeed, from the point of view of the utopian thinker, the pre-revolutionary society that exists before utopia is accomplished may very well be described in terms usually reserved for dystopias. This is why I cannot accept M. Keith Booker‘s (1994) definition of dystopian literature as ―works that critically examine both existing conditions and the potential abuses that might result from the institution of supposedly utopian alternatives.‖402 For it may not be either Gibson‘s or Masaki‘s intention to criticize the disenchanted structures in their works as somehow utopian gone wrong. Rather, it seems more likely that these disenchanted structures are simply extreme versions of modern institutions and forms, and that Gibson and Masaki are portraying the consequences of the further rationalization of these structures.

400 M. Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 3. 401 Ibid. 402 Ibid. 108

Nevertheless, it may serve to review some characteristics of utopian literature, so that we can contrast utopia with dystopia. Critics trace the beginning of utopian literature back to Thomas More‘s Utopia (1516). Though of course, as Kondō Gō (2008) points out, works with utopian aims date back to antiquity, such as Plato‘s Republic.403 In

Utopia, More situates his perfect society on an island of the same name, an erstwhile peninsula settled by one King Utopus, who caused it to be separated from the continent.404 Eventually it became a republic consisting of fifty-four ―large and faire cities, or shiere towns, agreying all together in one tonge, in lyke manners, institucions and lawes.‖405 It is these institutions and laws that concern us. Kondō (2008) summarizes

More‘s Utopia as a ―communistic commonwealth [kyōsan-shugi teki-na kyōwakoku] where private property and currency have been abolished. Here, perfect equality has been realized and even people‘s daily time usage is thoroughly regulated. Offenders are promptly tried before a people‘s court. In terms of today‘s sensibilities, More‘s ideal is close to totalitarianism [zentai-shugi].‖406 Kondō (2008) goes on to write of Tommaso

Campanella‘s City of the Sun (1602), another early utopian work in which private ownership is completely abolished, and where sexual relations are furthermore strictly regulated, that the author‘s ―ideal city can only be described as a mad world [kyōki-jimita sekai]. The ideal worlds depicted in utopian literature are distorted [yugandeiru] in just

403 Kondō Gō, ―Disutopia bungaku-he-no sasoi: ningen-teki jiyū-no seisatsu,‖ Kōbe Kokusai Daigaku Kiyō no. 75 (2008), 20. 404 Sir Thomas More, 1516, Utopia, trans. Raphe Robynson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 68. 405 Ibid., 69. 406 Kondō Gō, ―Disutopia bungaku-he-no sasoi,‖ 20. 109 this way.‖407 Kondō‘s definition of dystopia is clearly informed by a politically anti- utopian position, one that nevertheless reflects the conventional, perceived historical reality behind the rise of dystopian literature in the 20th century:

That works of dystopian literature came to be written successively throughout the 20th century can probably be attributed to the sense of crisis regarding the fact that the communism, totalitarianism and bureaucracy [kanryō-shugi] inherent in utopian ideology had become historical reality. To put it in concrete terms, a fascist state rose to power at the beginning of the 20th century with the birth of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. The worldwide spread of communist ideology was also seen after WWII.408

Where More‘s Utopia is concerned, Kondō‘s staunchly anti-utopian stance seems to overlook the satirical potential Jameson (2005) credits that work—not as a satire on foolish and unrealizable utopian ideals, but on ―the wickedness and stupidity of human beings in the fallen world of the here and now.‖409 Needless to say, this has a significant bearing on how we interpret the representational modes of utopian literature. It seems that

More‘s utopian vision is less a serious model for society to follow than it is an imaginative framework to address the ills of society, chief among which is money: ―For who knoweth not, that fraud, theft, rauine, brauling, quarelling, brabling, striffe, chiding, contention, murder, treason, poisoning, which by daily punishments are rather revenged then refrained, do dye when money dieth?‖410 Jameson (2005) has argued that it is the

―enclave status‖ of money in More‘s time, that is, the ―relatively isolated and sporadic‖ use of money save in the London of More‘s time,411 that allows him to ―fantasize its

407 Kondō Gō, ―Disutopia bungaku-he-no sasoi,‖ 20. 408 Ibid., 21. 409 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 23. 410 More, Utopia, 163. 411 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 16. 110 removal from social life in his new Utopian vision.‖412 It is also what allows money to be

―fantasized as the very root of all evil.‖413 Insofar as money differentiates society, its elimination from the island of Utopia and the resultant egalitarianism represent a desire for ―dedifferentiation‖414 in an increasingly differentiated world.

Ironically, paper currency again attains an ―enclave status‖ in the world of

Neuromancer, where it is used primarily on the black market. We are told that after the protagonist Case cheated his former employers, ―His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world‘s black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.‖415 Here, paper currency is characterized, with a certain amount of irony, as a primitive medium of exchange fit perhaps for small communities. It is unnecessary, however, in a globalized economy where all purchases, no matter how small, are transacted with ‗bank chips‘ and ‗credit chips‘ through large banks such as the

‗Mitsubishi Bank of America.‘ It is a testament to the ascendency of institutions beside the state in regulating the lives of people in the novel. If one is to be a legitimate transactor, indeed if one is to purchase anything one needs to survive, one must have an account with one of these apparently transnational banks, or be dependent on someone who does.

412 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 17. 413 Ibid. 414 Ibid., 20. 415 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6. 111

The credit card, inasmuch as it is an efficient system that enables ―the spending of future income,‖416 is an example of the rationalization of the marketplace. However, there are much more explicit examples in Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ of rationalized and ultimately disenchanting structures that contribute to the sense of alienation experienced by the hard-boiled protagonists. In ―Evil Eyes,‖ the emphasis on the protagonist‘s disenchantment with capitalistic bureaucracy suggests that a Marxist conception of alienation is applicable here. According to Williamson and Cullingford (1997), the most important kind of alienation for Marx was ―the alienation of labor.‖417 ―Central to Marx‘s works,‖ they write, ―is the notion that capitalistic production leads to human objectification, a state in which the man or woman is removed from his/her work and product and therefore denied insight into their own creativity and ultimately true nature

(i.e. alienation).‖418

Bureaucracy is disparaged quite vigorously by the narrator of ―Evil Eyes,‖ who used to work in the New City Center, the heart of capitalist bureaucracy in both ―Evil Eyes‖ and ―I Want to Burst.‖ In the following passage, the protagonist‘s alienation is metonymically invoked by the too-clean, too-bright facilities he describes from a distance:

A cluster of immaculate government high-rises in the New City Center [shin- toshin]. The silver complex stood out in the grubby gray of night. An immaculate exterior that seemed to say it was the only pure [muku] place. Inside, it was the same thing, immaculate. A long time ago, before I was reduced to a ghost, I had

416 Ritzer, Enchanted a Disenchanted World, 136. 417 Iain Williamson and Cedric Cullingford, ―The Uses and Misuses of ‗Alienation‘ in the Social Sciences and Education,‖ British Journal of Educational Studies 45 no. 3 (1997), 266. 418 Ibid. 112

been one of the nameless, countless Atlases supporting the base of the complex. Not more than half a year went by before I got out of there. Even so, it was ample time to learn the core tenets [kihon-no genri]. Efficiency [kōritsu], results [gyōseki], impersonality [hi-ninshō]. Even now when I hear those words, I smell a clean stench. Bureaucracy [kanryōsei].419

The description of the government buildings wanting to appear ―the only pure place‖ imparts a sense of repudiated majesty to the story‘s capitalist bureaucratic complex, repudiated by the protagonist as well as the author, in a double-voiced utterance with both voices in agreement about the monologic nature of the New City Center.

The same New City Center shines like a quasi-spiritual beacon in ―I Want to Burst.‖

It is somehow always off in the distance in these two stories, a reminder of the squalid or degenerate situations in which the protagonists find themselves. In ―I Want to Burst,‖ the protagonist has been pursued to the edge of town by a vengeful client / victim, a walking plastic surgery disaster part-woman, part-machine:

I hushed my breathing in the gray night. In the darkest hiding place I could find. Far off in the distance, the skyscrapers of the New City Center threw off their beams of light. I ran my fingers along the wall behind me. The smooth surface of that wall, still under construction. It was a mirrored wall. About two hundred yards away, there was a street lamp on the blink. A polluted, muddy street was rising dimly from the darkness.420

Meanwhile, the woman stalks down the protagonist. It may well be by the light of the

New City Center that she finds him. Just when we think she is about to kill him, however, she intentionally self-destructs, splitting from an invisible seam that reveals the empty space inside her mechanical body, filling the protagonist with an existential void:

I stood up. The mirrored wall threw back my reflection. My expression. My eyes which were even more of a void than before […] I was cold. I saw the beams of

419 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 15. 420 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 109-110. 113

light from the New City Center off in the distance. I set out walking slowly. I walked through the wind. The whispering, murmuring, sorrowing voices were now singing with me. I want to burst.421

Jameson (1982) has written that in Chandler, the ―excitement of the mystery story plot is

[…] a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality quite trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally […].‖422 In the case of ―I Want to Burst,‖ the New City Center is the intolerable light that exposes what must not be seen—the emptiness of the technological fetishism that Masaki shows is at the heart of a protracted Japanese modernity.

In ―Evil Eyes,‖ the protagonist‘s dilapidated apartment, which he refers to as ―the graveyard,‖423 marks the most obvious contrast with the offensive cleanliness and purity of the New City Center: ―As I look around, dimly conscious, the graveyard looks just like a sea of waste. A dirty table. A damaged sofa. Stains on the ceiling. Strewn all around my business hardware, all kinds of documents and manuals.‖424 This is where the protagonist performs the creative work of programming mindsoft, work that should be more likely to allow him ―insight‖ into his ―creativity and ultimate true nature.‖425 And yet, far from betokening a restored sense of self, his distance from the New City Center is associated with immateriality (―ghost‖) and death (―graveyard‖). He is excluded from the state of grace offered by the New City Center, an irresistible locus of capital and power that nevertheless portends the obsolescence and irrelevance of the individual subject as a

421 Masaki, ―I Want to Burst,‖ 113. 422 Jameson, ―Progress Versus Utopia,‖ 152. 423 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 22. 424 Ibid. 425 Williamson and Cullingford, ―The Uses and Misuses of ‗Alienation‘ in the Social Sciences and Education,‖ 266. 114 mode of being. Though the self-applied label of ‗ghost‘ seems to be a defeatist admission of his own impossible position, the character‘s alienation represents a conflict between two modes of being: the perfect but impersonal collectivist mode, and the imperfect but subjective individualist mode. In order to affirm the validity of the individualistic mode, the protagonist must in some measure triumph at the end of the narrative. The collectivist system may be unassailable to a lowly ghost, but Mugen Daishi, as a particularly insidious embodiment of collectivism, is not.

Neuromancer also portrays a fear of the collectivist mode, a mode that is furthermore portrayed as Japanese. Zaibatsu, for instance, are figured as ―hives.‖426 Gibson‘s stance toward such a mode of existence is implied by a memory he gives Case. Case remembers a visceral experience in which he once burned a wasp‘s nest and felt disgust: ―In his mind‘s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.‖427 However, the main threat to individualist subjectivity is the possibility of existence as an electronic construct—simulacra, in other words. The unnaturalness of this mode of existence is played up in descriptions of the Dixie flatline, a construct who desires only to be erased after helping Case. His signature feature is his ―hideous approximation of laughter.‖428

Thus, it appears that a different kind of alienation is threatened in Neuromancer, an alienation we might call alienation from the self. Erich Fromm‘s (1955) description of alienation applies here: ―By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person

426 Gibson, Neuromancer, 203. 427 Ibid., 126. 428 Ibid., 201. 115 experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself.

He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters […].‖429 Except in this case, technologies of simulation have become the master of the subject, indeed produce the subject, who now experiences his actions and affect as approximations of some disappeared original.

Conclusion

In summary, Gibson and Masaki invoke the hard-boiled style in order to portray two kinds of alienation. Gibson‘s alienation is the technologically-mediated alienation of a person separated from himself. When this detachment is willed, such as when Case jacks into cyberspace, the result is a euphoric abandonment of self, but an abandonment nonetheless. In other words, the user exposes himself to manipulation by forces that can turn him into a mere simulation, can trap him in a virtual world. In contrast, Masaki‘s alienation is the hyper-capitalistic alienation of a person from his work. The protagonist‘s disenchantment with the New City Center is so severe that even his present, creative work cannot fulfill him—he is still a depressed alcoholic.

However, the effect of both kinds of alienation is to emphasize in science fictional terms the dread of an increasingly rationalized and conformist society. For Gibson, this seems to mean an increasingly Japanized society, in which employees work their entire

429 Erich Fromm, 1955, The Sane Society (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 120. 116 lives ―for one zaibatsu‖430 and live in crowded ―corporate arcologies.‖431 For Masaki this means an increasingly bureaucratic society. In this society, an institution like Holy

Empathy is sought for the way it ―mass produces a particular type of personality‖432 specially equipped to navigate the corporate world, a personality that is nevertheless dangerously lacking in compassion, as demonstrated in a scene where children at the school practice vivisection on cows, ostensibly to teach the children of the ―sanctity of life.‖433 In short, we may say that dystopia for these two works is a society that is capable of transforming the subject into a flat type. And yet for their protagonists, Gibson and Masaki have reached back in time for just such a fictional type, albeit a type whose subjectivity is naturally opposed to the techno-social forms that dominate the novels. The fact that Case‘s childhood memories are ―confused‖434 is a symptom of the character‘s type. We recall the quotation from Honda (2001) about the hard-boiled protagonist being an ―orphan.‖435 It is not coincidental that Case cannot remember his home.

The utilization of nostalgic forms in the two works ironically highlights the impossibility of nostalgia for the protagonists. Hyper-capitalist forms at the level of plot conspire with the orphaned background of the hard-boiled type to divest ‗home‘ of ontological stability, precluding the localized longing necessary to nostalgia. Furthermore, as in hard-boiled fiction, Neuromancer and ―Evil Eyes‖ render grotesque that which is antithetical to the protagonist—thus the horrible form of Mugen and the viscerally

430 Gibson, Neuromancer, 37. 431 Ibid., 6. 432 Masaki, ―Evil Eyes,‖ 49. 433 Ibid., 54. 434 Gibson, Neuromancer, 85. 435 Honda, ―Hādoboirudo tantei-shōsetsu-no tanjō,‖ 157. 117 upsetting hive-like quality of the Tessier-Ashpool clan. Finally, the quest for truth, the truth of the identity of key figures, is enacted in the works‘ ―epistemophilia.‖436

436 Chun, Control and Freedom, 194. 118

CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION

I have argued in Chapter 2 that hyper-consumerism, so integral to futuristic portrayals of East Asia, is a ―product of the rationality of production,‖ 437 and as such exemplifies the rationalization attendant to modernity. For Gibson and Masaki this rationalization breeds disenchantment in the context of Japan. Masaki posits an enchanted form of consumption in techno-fetishism, which imparts a transformative power to technology. However, in the end Masaki portrays techno-fetishism as perverse and harmful. He attributes the prevalence of this style of consumption to the rise of the virtual in society, an infatuation with technologically-mediated ‗realities‘ that distract from the sociological realities of technology. In ―I Want to Burst,‖ overreliance on immersive technology exposes the user to the danger of physiological addiction. In ―Evil Eyes‖ and

Venus City, the danger of immersive technologies is manipulation by external forces. The techno-fetishistic response to the pressures of society is to remove the subject from the stressful environment. With PFX and virtual reality, this is of course virtually simulated.

In techno-fetishism‘s masochistic form, however, the fetishist comes to enjoy his or her domination through a kind of objectification of self. With Personality Information Clones and press modification, the user can literally turn himself into an object, or something verging on an object. This kind of masochism is problematic because it does not return the subject to his subjectivity, contrary to de Beauvoir‘s conception of masochism.438

437 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 21. 438 De Beauvoir, ―Must We Burn Sade?‖ 27. 119

Gibson, on the other hand, establishes cyberspace for his protagonist as the reenchanting alternative to the disenchanting landscape of Chiba City. Both Chiba City and cyberspace are places of ―freewheeling and lawless exchange, [where] the competitive market [is] reduced to its most brutal form.‖439 But it is cyberspace that re- empowers Case. Where Chiba is cramped, gray and metonymically emphasizes Case‘s fall into the ―prison of his own flesh,‖440 cyberspace epitomizes freedom of mobility and the intoxication of the ―commodity phantasmagoria.‖441 Cyberspace is also enchanted in part because it is sexualized and Orientalized, as Chun (2008) has demonstrated.442 This seems to be the result of thinking about America‘s waning economic influence in terms of a threatened masculinity, or an impotence. At the same time, the ubiquity of Japanese forms in the world of the novel suggests that what is Oriental cannot in actuality be dominated or overcome, so it must be sufficient for it to be feminized, placed in a dialectic of masculine West versus feminine East. This reading, however, is complicated by a ‗Japanoid‘ reading of Case‘s sexuality as mediated by Japanese technology. I have furthermore shown how the ―phantasmagoria‖ of cyberspace has a ―negative side,‖443 in that whenever Case jacks in he exposes himself to manipulation by forces which can trap him in the virtual world and turn him into a simulation. However, in contrast to Masaki‘s miserable Personality Information Clones, the constructs that Case sees at the end of the novel live happily on in cyberspace.

439 Yu, ―Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures,‖ 61. 440 Gibson, Neuromancer, 6. 441 Susan Buck-Morss, ―Dream World of Mass Culture,‖ 324. 442 Chun, Control and Freedom, 188-191. 443 Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 64. 120

I have argued in Chapter 3 that both Gibson and Masaki invoke nostalgic forms to play individualistic ‗types‘ against oppressive collectivities. This nostalgia at the formal level highlights the impossibility of nostalgia for the characters of the stories. Nostalgia for the characters is precluded by a techno-social reality that breaks down the sense of localized attachment we normally associate with nostalgia. Moreover, the world has been disenchanted for so long that no one can remember an ―enchanted world‖ whose disappearance they can mourn, a la Svetlana Boym‘s (2001) definition of nostalgia. 444 In

Neuromancer, collectivism is portrayed as an indigenous Japanese mode, epitomized by the yakuza and zaibatsu, although it has also been adopted by the Tessier-Ashpool clan. It is ―[a]lien,‖445 hive-like and viscerally upsetting to Case. For Gibson, anxiety over collectivism seems to be an anxiety over an increasingly Japanized, or alien, future.

Alienation in this context conforms to Fromm‘s (1955) definition of ―a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien,‖ no longer the ―center of his world‖ or the ―creator of his own acts.‖446 In Neuromancer the AI Wintermute occupies the role of creator, building the ―flat personality-substitute‖ of Armitage out of the ―wreck of a man named Corto‖447 and manipulating characters into doing its bidding.

For Gibson, to experience oneself as an alien means to experience oneself as a simulation, as the Dixie construct does. Technologies of simulation now produce the subject, who experiences his actions and affect as mere approximations of some disappeared original.

In ―Evil Eyes,‖ collectivism is embodied by the grotesque figure of Mugen. Collectivism

444 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 8. 445 Gibson, Neuromancer, 126. 446 Fromm, The Sane Society, 120. 447 Gibson, Neuromancer, 125. 121 and bureaucracy are furthermore portrayed as products of capitalistic rationalization, not as indigenous modes or tendencies. Although Masaki also depicts alienation as the experience of oneself as a simulation, in ―Evil Eyes‖ the chief form of alienation is that of a person from his work.

While Gibson and Masaki come to different conclusions about the possibility of a technologically-mediated reenchantment, it is interesting that both authors employ sexual tropes to convey the (at least initial) enchantment of technologies like cyberspace and the

VR construct Venus City. It is as though the sexual were the seat of the magical. In sexualizing cyberspace and Venus City, Gibson and Masaki present us with a union of two opposites: the sensual and the rational / dispassionate. This suggests a kind of paradox. The impulse to replace the rational with the sensual or magical is surely based on a dissatisfaction with the rational. And yet it is technology, the product of that very rationality, that is fetishized, invested with powerful significance. Perhaps this discursive configuration of technology and sexuality is just as integral to so-called cyberpunk works as images of hyper-consumerist East Asia. I will have to revisit this discussion in another project.

122

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