The Shaman Detective: a Comparative Reading of Enchantment and Animism in Contemporary Japanese Detective Fiction

THE SHAMAN DETECTIVE: A COMPARATIVE READING OF ENCHANTMENT AND ANIMISM IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE DETECTIVE FICTION

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Require- ments for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Theory, Culture & Politics M.A. Graduate Program

September 2015 ABSTRACT

The Shaman Detective: A Comparative Reading of Enchantment and Animism in Contemporary Japanese Detective Fiction

Samuel Dennis

This thesis examines a specific figure that appears throughout contemporary Japanese detective fiction (across different media), which I have termed the Shaman detective. A liminal figure that combines Japanese folk cosmologies with contemporary detective work, the Shaman detective is at once similar to, yet separate from, western postmodernist detective fiction. Invested in narratives of enchantment the Shaman detective is marked by his rejection of the epistemological ties of the modern and classical detectives that cause his counterparts to fail in the face of postmodern subjectivism. Committed to il-logic, dreaming, play, and intuition, the Shaman detective exists in the realm of the Fantastic, bridging the gap between mundane and marvellous realities. This thesis reads Shaman detective texts using western postmodernist theory with

Todorov’s theory of the Fantastic and Jane Bennett’s New Materialism. This is synthesized with

Japanese thought traditions, cosmologies and philosophies, in order to draw out the Shaman detective.

Keywords: Enchantment, Japanese fiction, Jane Bennett, New Materialism, Detective Fiction, Shamanism, Postmodern Fiction, Shintoism, the Fantastic.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Emeritus Veronica Hollinger, my faculty supervisor, as without her this project would have been impossible. Thank you for giving me advice not only on topic and style, but also for calming me down and encouraging me when I was ready to give up. Thank you to professor Michael Epp, my second reader, for providing invaluable advice, as well as recommending some stellar TV shows to occupy my time when I was not, but should have been, working. Thank you Carley MacKay, Amalia Moir, Paul Ciuk, Mark Allwood, Arij

Sheepers, as well as the rest of my cohort for being a great source of inspiration, as well as a great group to complain about the writing process to. To David Holdsworth, for being an excellent program director. To Nancy, who always made visiting the Theory, Culture, Politics office fun, and who was always there to help no matter what was needed. Finally, to my partner Becky

Smith, who put up with my incessant whining and procrastination, and who taught me that not only was my work valuable but worthy of pride. I would also like to thank God, as well as the academy, for making this all possible, as I am sure I am the only one to make such an original joke in an acknowledgments section.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 The Classical and Postmodern Detective 3 The Shaman Detective 6 Shamanism, Buddhism and New Materialism 8 A Brief Outline 10 Conclusion 13 Chapter 1: Detective 15 The Limits of Postmodern theory 15 What is the Shaman Detective? 20 The histories and legacies of the Shaman Detective 21 Wuwei and the cultivation of ‘No-Mind’ 24 The Problem of Genre: The Fantastic and the Marvellous 26 Twilight and hesitation: The Western Fantastic and Japanese folk cosmologies 28 Paranoia Agent 30 Agent Maniwa’s Shamanic Awakening: The Shaman Detective Par Excellence 33 Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition: An Infinite Feedback Game 38 Chapter 2: The Question 42 Detective work and Enchantment 44 Paul Auster’s City of Glass 46 Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map 51 Kobo Abe’s Shaman Detective Trilogy 54 Liminal Spaces and Disappearance 60 Chapter III: Place 66 Enchantment and the Shaman Detective 68 Japanese Cosmologies and New Materialism 71 New Materialism’s critique of Postmodernity 74 Shamanic Places 77 Space in China Miéville’s The City & The City 79

iv The Two Paprikas 82 The Blurring of Dreams and Reality 86 Paprika and Japanese Cosmologies 88 Coda: So whodunit? 92 Unanswered Questions and Future Mysteries 94 Works Cited 97

v Introduction

In 1993, capitalizing on the cult success of the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and its prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) in Japan, David Lynch directed a series of television ads for the Japanese coffee company Georgia. Using many original cast members, these four advertisements episodically tell the story of a Japanese girl who has gone missing in the town of Twin Peaks (and more specifically trapped in the otherworldly Black Lodge), and a

Japanese detective who must partner with the Twin Peaks police department (Agent Cooper,

Sheriff Truman, et al.) to solve the mystery of her disappearance, all the while taking several breaks to consume vast quantities of Georgia brand coffee in a can. Although somewhat absurd in premise, the TV spots (ironically, like the show, cancelled despite four sets originally planned) highlight the strange appeal, not just of the show itself, but more specifically of Agent Dale

Cooper. His unorthodox and often mystical methods of detection along with his playfulness allow for the commercials to exist in some sort of liminal canon, in which the events of the ads and the television series cannot coincide, but neither can the TV spots be written off as purely unrelated or as an alternate universe. Despite Georgia management ultimately cancelling a continued run, Japanese interest in Twin Peaks continued, culminating (most recently) in swery65 aka

Hidetaka Suehiro’s 2010 video game Deadly Premonition.

A game that plays like a love letter to the David Lynch series, Deadly Premonition puts the gamer in control of Agent Francis York Morgan, an unconventional FBI agent drawn to the case of a young, beautiful murdered prom queen in a small, woodsy, Pacific Northwest Ameri- can town. Like Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition has achieved cult status amongst mystery and horror fans both in Japan and the west. What is significant about this lineage – from western tele-

1 vision show and Japanese advertisement to a Japanese interpretation of a western cultural product – is that Agent Dale Cooper and Twin Peaks as a whole are demonstrative of, and perhaps a western response to, a liminal detective figure that appears throughout contemporary Japanese media. This figure will be referred to as “the Shaman detective”, and will be defined against hardboiled, noir, and metaphysical/postmodern detective figures that make up the western canon.

To address this figure as the “Japanese detective” would be to ignore other Japanese detective figures that fall more readily into ‘standard’ (read: western) iterations of the detective. Returning to Twin Peaks, this is not to say that Agent Cooper is fully indebted to Japanese media, nor even to suggest David Lynch was overtly aware of the above mentioned Japanese figure in the craft- ing of his character. Rather, the Detective figure being discussed, which by its very nature is at once fluid and fragmentary, arises from a Japanese reading of western detective fiction and the subsequent narratives that it produced. This Detective exists in a liminal space, a cultural product generated by a trans-national discourse. With his love of Tibetan Buddhism, dreams, and other methods of detection that resemble Eastern mystical, philosophical, and religious traditions,1 it is perhaps then no surprise that Agent Cooper resembles and even falls within this category of detective that stands apart from more traditional as well as postmodern figures.

1 It is also important to note that although Eastern and more specifically Japanese traditions of thought will play a significant role in this paper, I do not want to suggest anything inherent to Japanese thought or media. This detective figure appears in Japanese texts due to a synthesis of many different ideas, both local and global, and it is this unique context, rather than essential cultural characteristics, that gives rise to the detective. It is for this same reason David Lynch, working outside Japan but interested in Eastern mysticism and Transcendental Meditation, is able to create a character that is deeply reflective of that figure, even if he were totally ignorant of other examples in Japanese works.

2 The Classical and Postmodern Detective

Before exploring the Shaman detective any further, it is useful to examine the genres it arises from (classical detective fiction from both the west and Japan) and against which it will be defined (postmodern detective fiction). Although it is an oversimplification that erases many of the nuances of western detective works, for the purposes of this paper it is easiest to break western detective fiction into two categories:2 classical detective fiction3 – which I define as any detective work that upholds the rules outlined immediately below, and as such includes Golden

Age, modern, noir, and hardboiled detective fiction – and postmodern detective Fiction. It is important to note that this distinction is not a clean one, with texts often overlapping in terms of genre and possible readings.

In his list of rules for Golden Age detective fiction, “A Detective Story Decalogue”

(1929), British detective novelist and theologian Ronald Knox writes that: “All supernatural or preternatural abilities are ruled out as a matter of course,” and furthermore that “[n]o accident may ever help the detective, nor must he [sic] ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right” (Hague, 130). The Golden Age Detective (and arguably pre-Golden Age or classical detective as well as the hardboiled and noir detective) is one who is highly analytical, using his intellect to reveal a well hidden crime. As in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, what often appears as supernatural has a logical and earthly explanation in the end, and thus this detective, like the scientist or the doctor, lays bare what is invisible and is heavily invested in acts of demystification (Merivale and Sweeney, 6-7). This also assumes that the world that this

2 These categories will be discussed throughout my work. 3 Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie and Anne Hocking would be counted amongst this category in the west. It should be noted that there is significant Japanese work that falls within these categories, most notably by Edogawa Rampo.

3 detective occupies is inherently rational and knowable, an important and necessary feature of most detective fiction (Merivale and Sweeney, 6).4 Although Shaman detective literature is a

Japanese phenomenon, it is not the only type of detective fiction in Japan. During the Meiji Res- toration, 1868-1912, as well as in pre- and post-war Japan, detective fiction of a classical nature became incredibly popular, and to this day mystery and detective fiction remain popular genres in novels, anime, manga and video games. And although there are some distinctive differences,5 it is fair to say that many of the detective stories in Japan are a local iteration of a global genre

(Kawana, 8-9).6

In their essay on detective fiction, Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney posit the category of the ‘Metaphysical Detective’ story in order to account for the various postmodern iterations of the detective. Outlining several characteristics of the genre, this detective story troubles the tropes set out in the classical or golden age of detective fiction. With a focus on defeat, meaninglessness and confusion, works within this category highlight the detective’s (and by extension the reader’s) inability to centre himself7 in the postmodern era. This detective departs from the earlier modern detective in the sense that the objectivity of material reality or ‘the truth’ can no longer be taken for granted. Although Merivale and Sweeney make a case for the inade-

4 This of course excludes postmodern detective fiction, which will be defined later, Shaman detective fiction, and supernatural detective fiction, which, although will be discussed briefly, falls outside the scope of this paper. 5 The popularity of ‘ero, guro, nonsense’ (erotic, grotesque nonsense) in modern Japan led to a classical detective fiction more heavily indebted to the gothic and the Weird than that of the west (‘Weird’ as a category, rather than the derogatory adjective often levelled at contemporary Japanese culture)(Figal, 25). 6 Much like in the west, Japanese detective works fall more often within the category of classical or modern, rather than postmodern or even Shaman detective fiction. 7 Throughout this paper the detective will be referred to with male pronouns (except in the case of the discussion of Paprika) simply due to the fact that this detective is almost always male.

4 quacy of the term ‘Postmodern’ (and thus term their figure ‘Metaphysical’), throughout this paper I will continue to use the term postmodern detective. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985-

6)8 is perhaps the most notable work of this genre. Although the essays collected by Merivale and Sweeney go on to discuss some Japanese examples of the postmodern detective, the Shaman detective exists contemporaneously to the postmodern detective. Although displaying similar characteristics, the Shaman detective departs from the work of the postmodern detective in terms of his focus on enchantment9 and play. This is not to suggest that other regional works that subvert, respond to, or play with a western concept of the detective10 do not exist, or are of little importance. Rather, an examination of this particular Japanese figure and its subgenre can help western readers better understand postmodern or metaphysical detective fiction through the different ways western concepts enmesh with regional concepts to create new forms through the process of transculturation. This is not to imply that the Japanese detective is in any way a derivative form of its western analog, although he may fall under the larger heading of postmodernist fiction, but rather both genres of detective (and their variations) exist in an ongoing global and cultural feedback loop.

8 Comprised of City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986). 9 Enchantment within the scope of this paper will mean both an engagement with the possibility of the Todorovian ‘Fantastic’, discussed in Chapter 1, and more specifically the vital materiality discussed by Jane Bennett, which will be examined in Chapter 2. 10 This also means that one can find examples of the Metaphysical, as well as classical and other detective archetypes throughout Japanese media.

5 The Shaman Detective

The Shaman detective, although characteristically varied and fluid, has two important characteristics:

i. The Shaman detective may destabilize objectivity in much the same way as the western postmodern detective does, but ultimately his work (as well as the accompanying text) is not one of disenchantment.11 Rather, it is re-enchantment of the world – or, significantly, the discovery of a world already enchanted – through a ‘Vibrant Materialism’,12 that the detective often discovers, even if only implicitly in an insurmountable unknowability of this ‘truth’.13

ii. Although the postmodern detective certainly traverses labyrinthine and often absurd spaces, the text itself is almost always grounded in a mundane reality (any deviation a result of insanity or flaws of perception), but the Shaman detective traverses planes of existence, be it in dreams, landscapes that are reflections or manifestations of psyche, or realms of the Fantastic. In this sense Shaman detective fiction shares some characteristics with Weird and New Weird fiction

(an example of which, China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009) will be discussed in the third chapter).14

11 This is an attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to remove magic and mystery from the world in order to solve the crime through rationality and logic. Contemporary police procedural television shows such as Law and Order (1990-2010) and CSI (2000-2015) are examples of this. Although different from these examples, the postmodernist detective is also involved in epistemological detection. 12 I will be focusing on Jane Bennett’s theories of Vibrant Matter, which I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2. 13 Another distinction concerning the ‘Truth’ is that it is unknowable, within the Shaman detective context, not because it is nonexistent, but rather because it is varied and fluid. The ‘Truth’ resists being pinned down but can only be intuited or experienced, rather than grasped and mastered. 14 A similar concept can be seen in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), in which two cities share one physical space but must be mentally separated by their respective citizens for fear of commit- ting an illegal psychical border crossing known as ‘breaching’.

6 The concept of play is of great significance within Shaman detective works. This is not due to an immaturity or lack of seriousness to these narratives as many of the examined works contain stories and events that are as dark as many of their western contemporaries. Rather, play defines the style of detection, which is free-flowing, intuitive, emotive, pre, post or simply il-logical, and often affective. Furthermore, the Shaman detective must constantly take on other roles, becoming malleable and shaping himself to fit a variety of parts as they arise. It is for this reason that the Shaman detective’s grasp on the situation is often tenuous, and like the religious

Shaman, he must risk madness,15 persecution, and utter consumption of the self by the forces that surround him. As is common in many postmodern works, disenchantment becomes a by-product of the act of detection, in so much as it seeks to fixedly define the mystery and its answer.16 The

Shaman detective on the other hand is always invested in re-enchantment, ironically by the same drive to shed light on and understand the ‘truth’ of the mystery.

Expanding upon the second characteristic (ii), the Shaman detective finds himself part of a world that is far more surreal and/or spirit filled17 than he initially imagined. The degree to which the fantastical saturates the mundane varies, from Kafka-esque (especially in the works of

Kobo Abe) absurdity to gods and spirits traversing cityscapes. It is thus tempting to classify

Shaman detective fiction as supernatural detective fiction.18 However, this categorization does

15 For the purpose of this paper madness will be taken to mean as a total loss of a coherent self in relation to the outside world. Although the Shaman detective must remain flexible and changing, madness occurs when he is no longer able to be a medium for truth(s). 16 This occurs regardless of whether this is their intention at first (as it usually is), or a byproduct of their inability to access the ‘truth’. A classical detective’s job is to make logical and known what is not. 17 Here I mean a world that belongs to an enchanted and animistic or animated universe or cosmology. 18 Perhaps most notably Jim Butcher’s fantasy book series The Dresden Files (2000-Ongoing) and TV’s The X Files (1993-2002).

7 not fit for a few reasons. First and foremost, supernatural carries western overtones with a familiar supernatural cosmology.19 This genre already exists within Japanese media, and is coupled with fantastical fiction that makes use of a Japanese fushigi.20 Furthermore, supernatural detective works stemming from both traditions are most often engaged in traditional narrative to entertain and titillate. This is not to suggest a value-judgment of the supernatural genre’s ‘literary- ness’, but rather to demonstrate how it differs from the Shaman detective genre. The Shaman detective text is almost always engaged in experimentation in form and style, and although its supernatural or fushigi elements are central to the narrative, it more often than not utilizes tradition to create something new, rather than utilize tropes and archetypal otherworldly ‘others’ to craft

‘traditional’ stories.21 For this reason it would be more accurate to classify Shaman detective literature as part of a literature of the Fantastic, rather than the subcategory ‘supernatural’.

Shamanism, Buddhism and New Materialism

In order to understand the Shaman detective, first one must understand the world he comes from. It should come as no surprise that the historical and cultural legacies of the Shaman within Japan (and indeed globally) have significant bearing upon this detective figure. Chapter I:

Detective will go into a much more detailed analysis about the traditions from which the Shaman

19 To a western reader this would include ghosts, vampires, werewolves and other monsters and appari- tions that are familiar to a western mythos of the Fantastic. 20 In Japanese fushigi literally means ‘mysterious’ or ‘secret’ but carries heavy connotations of the supernatural or Fantastic. The world of fushigi in Japan has some familiar inhabitants, such as ghosts, but also an entirely unique bestiary of spirits, demons and monsters (bakemono) that are distinct from western creatures of the Fantastic. 21 Supernatural detective fiction is perhaps most recognizable as classic detective fiction at work in a supernatural world.

8 detective arises, but it is important to note here that the history of Japanese religion makes it difficult to discuss distinct categories. Although Japanese Shamanism is largely a composite of folk beliefs, more-or-less overlapping with Shintoism,22 it also draws on and was changed by the arrival of Buddhism, which had its own distinct ideas surrounding spirits, animism and shamans.

The arrival of other outside religious traditions, along with a constant vying for supremacy between Shintoism and Buddhism, has resulted in a multiplicitous contemporary Japanese cosmology made up of ‘personal’ religions and eclectic spiritual belief systems (Thomas, 11-12). De- spite the difficulty this presents, to ignore the cosmological and philosophical backgrounds of Ja- pan that quite clearly have a bearing on this detective figure in favour of a methodology that privileges western texts and readings would result in one-sided analysis. Although I plan to make use of western postmodern thought and literary analysis, it is also necessary to do a reading of the selected text of Shamanism, Shintoism, Buddhism and Taoism. To those familiar with Japa- nese history, the inclusion of Taoism may seem strange, given its (almost entirely exclusive) popularity in China. However, Zen Buddhism, perhaps the largest and most culturally significant school of Buddhism within Japan, comes from the Chinese Ch’an Buddhism, which itself is heavily influenced by Taoism. Furthermore, Japanese scholars and aristocrats in the middle ages were very aware of philosophical trends within China, and could not help but be influenced by them even without the importation and mass popularization of certain schools. Lastly, Taoism helps elucidate concepts in Buddhism as well as characteristics of the Shaman detective and is

22 Shintoism has its own fraught history, with regional variances and an effort during the Meiji Restora- tion by the Japanese government to consolidate Shintoism into a codified national religion. This led to no shortage of manufactured traditions and the erasure and rejection of others in an attempt to create a coherent and ‘authentic’ national cosmology.

9 thus invaluable not only as a means of accessing the figure, but also as an important cosmology from which Shaman detective draws.23

It is not, however, enough to do separate readings of the Shaman detective through ‘East- ern’ and ‘western’ lenses without attempting to synthesize the two. The bridge between these two readings can be found in the theory of New Materialism, especially the theories of Jane Ben- nett. New Materialism’s affective privileging of things not only complements (and in some ways is inspired by) an ‘Eastern’ cosmology – specifically that of Japanese animistic Shintoism and surrounding folk beliefs – but it also introduces a unique reading of the detective story at large. It opens a reading that decentralizes the detective as the only active orderer of worlds into a passive recipient of truth(s). The detective, and the Shaman detective especially, is acted upon by objects

(clues, evidence) and pulled into labyrinthine spaces (the city, the psyche) that are equally important, if not more so, in directing the text’s (case’s) trajectory. If nothing else, the Shaman detective is more sensitive to this than his classical and postmodern counterparts, and as such relies on affect and on play, to do his ‘job’. Like the Taoist ideal, he becomes an empty vessel through which things act (Laotzu, 5).24

A Brief Outline

Chapter I: Detective, will focus upon the figure of the Shamanic detective, his origins, and characteristics. It will examine and contextualize the role of the shaman within religious and

23 This should not suggest an essentialism when examining Japanese or ‘Eastern’ culture. Although it would be folly to ignore Japanese cultural and philosophical systems, this does not mean that all works from Japan have an inherent “Japaneseness". Rather, by doing a reading through systems that could have influenced a given text we can strengthen our interpretations. 24 Put another way, the Taoist ideal simply reacts (through non-action, a concept that will be discussed later) naturally and harmoniously.

10 secular life in Japan (historically and contemporarily), as well as various other religious and philosophical traditions that intersect with both the figure of the shaman and the Shaman detective.

Analyzing Satoshi Kon’s television series Paranoia Agent (2004), and more specifically its ‘protagonist’ Detective Maniwa,25 I will further flesh out what the Shaman detective is. Drawing on

Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s work Detecting Texts (1999), I will set up a comparison between the Shaman detective and its western counterparts through an examination of the television show Twin Peaks and the recent Japanese video game Deadly Premonition, reading the Shaman detective as a product of not only a certain cultural legacy but also global communication and exchange. I will discuss how the Shaman detective responds to and engages with western postmodern theory, as well as the limits of that theory to discuss contemporary Jap- anese media. Finally, I will look at the question of genre in terms of the Shaman detective and his text as a figure and a literature of the Fantastic.

Chapter II: The Question. This will centre around an analysis of what initiates the journey of the Shaman detective, introducing my New Materialist and Buddhist reading of this figure.

Although the initial mystery and subsequent detection mirror many tropes within a western postmodern detective tradition (the revelation that there may be no villain and/or no crime), a trait of the Shaman detective narrative is that ultimately the solution to the mystery becomes less and less important.26 In some senses the mystery takes a back seat to the narrative that the original mystery has brought about. This is not to say the mystery acts simply as a clue towards a much

25 Agent Maniwa is perhaps the most definitive example of the Shaman detective. 26 This is not to suggest that the Shaman detective is not invested in solving the Question. Rather, the Question acts more often as a catalyst or step on a much larger journey. This is not unusual in postmodern detective fiction as well, but the journey the Shaman detective undertakes is much closer to a pilgrimage or spiritual sojourn.

11 larger conspiracy (as is common), 27 but rather that it is a gateway to other realms in which the stakes of crime are rendered insignificant. Importantly it is in the Question and subsequent narrative arc that the Shaman and postmodern detectives and their texts become momentarily indistin- guishable. I will return briefly to my reading of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent as it is significantly illustrative of this trajectory, before moving on to a comparative analysis of Kobo Abe’s

The Ruined Map (1967) and the uncannily similar City of Glass by Paul Auster, demonstrating where the postmodern and Shaman detectives intersect, and more significantly, diverge.

Chapter III: Place. This concerns itself with the materiality of the mystery, its spaces and objects. Here, I will further synthesize my readings of Japanese cosmology and New Material- ism. I will examine the ways in which Japanese Shaman detective fiction moves beyond the trope of the labyrinthine city in postmodern detective fiction through playful reimaginings of that labyrinth. Within much of postmodern western detective fiction, the city is an ambiguous space of networked yet unmappable sites. And although elements of the fantastical or the surreal may be incorporated in to the narrative, the hallucinatory experience the detective encounters is one in which the city mirrors his inner psychology. The city becomes a screen on which his psyche (or mystery made manifest) is projected and ultimately navigated. This is important because, with the exception of supernatural detective fiction, the strangeness of the city is always located in either the unfamiliarity or the uncanny nature of its denizens, events, and sites. It may represent the futility of the pursuit of a singular, objective truth, but ultimately it – the actual city – does exist,

27 For example, a mystery in which the initial crime being investigated is revealed to be a small part of a much larger plot, one that makes the original crime look insignificant in comparative scope. This trope is common in the Noir genre, where the plot and crime simultaneously move from ‘simple’ to complex. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is a classic example of this trope.

12 in the mundane sense, outside the mind and/or perceptions of the narrator.28 Where Japanese detective fiction departs is that the city itself is not mundane; it incorporates on a much more literal level supernatural and otherworldly elements. There is a meshing (‘crosshatching’ as China

Miéville puts it in The City & The City) that goes beyond the sort of cultural and spatial boundaries the reader may encounter in a ‘real’ city.29 The city within the postmodern western tradition is a construction of perception, where perception and physical matter do not intersect. The material reality of physical spaces is not altered by perception, but rather it is perception itself that may become altered. Within Shaman detective fiction, however, the city’s strangeness is its own, and perception has the ability to bend materiality not only for the perceiver, but for all of its inhabitants. Central to this discussion will be Satoshi Kon’s film Paprika (2006),30 China

Miéville’s The City & The City (2009).

Conclusion

The Shaman detective is a figure who is most notable for his playful and open relationship to detection. It is the interplay between traditionally western archetypes (in the form of the golden age detective) and Japanese cosmologies and folk traditions that synthesizes this figure.

Furthermore, it is the Shaman detective’s uniqueness that separates him from the postmodern detective, not a derivative but a remixing of a form. Concerned less with the epistemologically

28 To argue that the city exists entirely outside the narrative is, of course, an argument that falls outside the scope of this essay. Rather, I hope the reader agrees that the city that appears within the narrative, whether or not it is distorted or altered by narration, exists for the world of the narrative in a mundane sense. Whether or not it is distorted by the narrative, the reader must assume there is some sort of logical materiality in which the hallucinations are based. 29 For instance, beyond the liminal zones of ethnic ‘mini-cities’ or neighbourhoods such as Toronto’s ‘China Town’ or San Francisco’s ‘Little Tokyo’. 30 This film is an adaptation of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel of the same name – a text also of great importance to this paper.

13 mundane worlds of western modernity and postmodernity, 31 the Shaman detective exists in a realm that is always already enchanted. Through a reading that incorporates western postmodernist theory and studies of Eastern mysticism and cosmologies, this paper will trace the trajectory of the Shaman detective as he appears in some exemplary Japanese texts.

31 Here I mean the mundane world of postmodern detective fiction – not postmodernity as a whole.

14 Chapter 1: Detective The Limits of Postmodern theory

Merivale and Sweeney’s six characteristics of the postmodern detective fiction are as follows: a) the defeated or failed detective; b) the metaphorical labyrinth of the city, body or text; c) the text presented to the reader as a object within the text: i.e. references to the text as the notebook of the protagonist; novels written in an epistolary style, etc.; d) unclear importance of or utter meaninglessness of the clues; e) the double, lost or transformed identity, and finally; f) a lack of closure, either in the form of a thwarted investigation or through the text’s own circular nature

(Merivale and Sweeney, 8). Mapping the postmodern detective as a sort of subversion of, pa- rodic play on, or attempt to reconcile contemporary thought with the classical detective figure, there is a striking resemblance between the postmodern detective and the Shaman detective. This is not, however, to suggest that they are the same thing, or that the Shaman detective can be classified entirely in the framework of the postmodern detective. Postmodern thought seeks to understand and cope with (or perhaps more accurately represent) the problems of contemporary society, but its concerns are not and cannot be universal. Certain themes may mirror each other, or even defy borders, but postmodernity as it is discussed should be appended with the word ‘western’. It would be folly to assume that places and cultures that experienced quite disparate modernities (Kawana, 27-8) would, by way of telos, become part of a unified and singular postmodernity.32 Of the relationship between modernity and Japanese detective fiction, Sari Kawana writes:

Less interested in upholding the generic format than their Western counterparts, Japanese

detective writers used the framework of the genre to package and disseminate their ideas

32 It is, of course, limiting to describe postmodernism as unified or singular given its own fragmentary nature. However, it is important to trouble some of the ‘universal’ themes at work (and hidden) in the discourse.

15 on such modern phenomena as urbanization, privacy… abnormal sexuality, science de-

void of ethics, and total war… [The] central figures of such stories…readily immersed

themselves in the mayhem of modernity…fueled both by their impulse to uncover the

truth, however unpleasant, and their willingness to transgress conventional boundaries.

(Kawana, 10: my emphasis)

Thus the detective fiction that arises out of Japan may at times bear striking resemblance (in some aspects) to its western counterparts, but evolves from a very different set of influences and backgrounds.

In her work The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon argues that postmodernism

(or more specifically her postmodernism) centres around the issue or politics of representation.

Postmodern representation is for her something that de-naturalizes or ‘de-doxifies’ (Hutcheon, 3) that which culture and/or society has assumed to be natural phenomena. It is that which “at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant culture and social forces of the twentieth century western world” (Hutcheon, 11). Hutcheon’s work is concerned primarily with politics, but her concept of de-doxification is useful to Shaman detective fiction if we mod- ify the definition. At its simplest, de-doxification is about de-naturalizing or estranging a preconceived notion or set of notions. Both Shaman and postmodern detective texts are grounded, at least initially, in a mundane reality that becomes troubled and/or subverted through a gradual es- trangment of the world of the text. The postmodern detective de-doxifies in a way quite similar to Hutcheon’s original definition. He grapples with the desire to represent, but fails to do so without encoding a new ideology that supplants the old. In bringing to light the absurd and fantastical qualities of the worlds of his texts, the Shaman detective can also show the reader how to examine their world anew. It is helpful to briefly examine theorist Brian McHale’s discussion of

16 Darko Suvin’s definition of Science Fiction as “‘literature of cognitive estrangement’” (McHale,

59). Given that McHale asserts that Science Fiction is the postmodernist genre ‘par excellence’, we can extend cognitive estrangement to be a characteristic, to varying degrees, of postmodernist fiction in general. In cognitive estrangement, of which the first step is de-doxification, the ‘empirical givens’ of the world are put up against something “not given, something from beyond or outside [our world]” (McHale, 59). This ‘strange newness’ or ‘novum’ appear in all works of literature, as they are things that do not appear in empirical reality and are thus fictional. However,

Science Fiction, and to a lesser but still present extent all postmodern fiction, the ‘novum’ occurs at the levels of “the structures of the represented world itself” (McHale, 59). This means that on the level of text, postmodern, and thus postmodernist detective fiction, participates in cognitive estrangement.

Hutcheon’s postmodernist theory, however, suggests that representation is a matter of construction,33 and that it can never accurately represent the ‘real’ (Hutcheon, 41), and this is where a significant difference between the Shaman and postmodern detective lies. Although both detectives concern themselves with trying to represent the real, as the act of detection necessi- tates, the text of the Shaman detective does not centre itself around the impossibility of representation. Both figures and their texts estrange in hopes of glimpsing the real once the veils of preconceived notions and ideologies stripped back. However, the postmodern detective often re- signs himself to failure in the face of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. Rather than suffer from existential angst created by the fluidity of meaning, the Shaman detective channels this fluidity, shaping himself to fit not only the truth, but the process of trying to understand that

33 The real is always already constructed through perceptions, and is not a thing wholly separate or independent of perceptions (Hutcheon, 33).

17 truth. Framed another way, the limitations of representation are taken not as a problem that generates anxiety, but rather as an already accepted truth. If we take Hutcheon’s de-doxification to mean an estrangement that strips away preconceived notions about the real, rather than one of ideology, we can begin to see how the Shaman detective text opens itself to the Fantastic in denying norms of logic and reason and instead opting for intuition and ‘magic’. In introducing the possibility of the Fantastic – Agent Cooper who throws rocks to develop leads or Agent Mor- gan who sees the future in his coffee cup – the Shaman detective text asks its reader to see the world both anew and alive with potential outside the mundane.

That a mundane reality seems to underpin most postmodernist texts (where madness or hallucination account for the oddities presented to the reader/viewer) suggests that there are traces of the epistemological in the western postmodernist detective from his modernist lineage.

Where golden age detective fiction encapsulated the spirit of the modernist era in its quest to know and understand, the possibility of both of these pursuits never questioned, postmodernist detective fiction theoretically moves towards questions of ontology (McHale, 22-3). In this sense, the postmodern detective operates from the position of the classical detective (things can be, and will be known), but in a world that has lost its fixed identities and objective forms (the world of the postmodern). In his work Postmodernist Fiction, theorist Brian McHale writes:

“Science Fiction…is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism…the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence (McHale, 16: emphasis his), and “that the detective thriller is modernist fiction’s sister genre” (McHale, 59). He then goes on to suggest that

“the dead-ending of epistemology in solipsism can be transcended, but only by shifting from a modernist poetics of epistemology to a postmodern poetics of ontology” (McHale, 25). How- ever, although postmodernism often subverts modernism, it still in many ways requires it as a

18 theoretically base from which subversion is possible (Hutcheon, 5-6). Although the postmodern detective seeks to trouble the objective, he cannot rid himself entirely of his modernist and therefore epistemological traditions. This is because detection often hinges on knowledge and epistemological reasoning. The detective may deal with questions of ontology through the course of a narrative, but it is that shift from epistemology to ontology that often leads to his failure. In deal- ing with questions of ontology, genres of the Fantastic, such as Science Fiction as McHale suggests, offers a much more solid foundation from which to explore them (McHale, 25).

The postmodern detective wants to be the modern detective, in that our understanding of the act of detection depends upon fixed truths. There must be an answer to every mystery, and more importantly this answer must be, through logic and deduction, accessible. These expectations are taken for granted by the detective, and yet under a framework of postmodernism neither can be guaranteed. The postmodern detective is quite often ironic and self-reflexive, but he is also marked by a deep anxiety, a discomfort with the fluidity of the postmodern world. The loss of the objectivity of modernity upon which classical detection relies becomes the central problem for the postmodern detective. The world of the postmodern detective, like the Shaman detective, is one both enchanted and estranged, rife with an existential hesitancy. It is a land that must be repeatedly reintepreted. The Shaman detective is marked by an utter lack of anxiety towards postmodern identity. He, like his world, is fluid and does not rely on nor is held back by ties to the epistemological. Any anxiety is only present in the reader; the moment of hesitation where it is yet uncertain as to whether one is faced with the mundane or the marvellous.34 And in many

34 This hesitation is central to Todorov’s concept of the Fantastic, which is a liminal state that exists before the reader and/or the characters of a work have not yet determined whether the world is marvellous (fantasy) or mundane (conventionally ‘realistic’). Todorov’s theory will be discussed to a greater degree later on in this chapter.

19 ways, the Shaman detective text is comfortable remaining within the liminal state of indeterminacy.

What is the Shaman Detective?

Here I wish to give a more thorough description of the Shaman detective to supplement the two characteristics (namely, that he is involved in enchantment, and exists in a world of the

Fantastic) outlined in this paper’s introduction. These additional characteristics serve as a means of recognizing not only the figure of the Shaman detective, but the texts in which he appears. 1)

Although the narrative may be dark and/or the detective is ultimately defeated, the story is not nihilistic or cynical, and is invested in, to some degree, enchantment. Rather than the absence of truth present in postmodernist works, in Shaman detective fiction some higher order exists, even if it is neither knowable nor capable of articulation. 2) Affect and intuition take precedence over the rational or coldly logical: this detective privileges emotions, dreams, free-association, myth and other means of detection that fall outside the realm of the mundane or purely material. 3) As a liminal figure, the detective treads dangerous territory. Traversing planes and using one’s body as a medium – like a traditional Shaman, opening oneself up to and channeling forces outside oneself – there is always the risk of madness, obsession or succumbing to/being consumed by forces greater than the self. And lastly, 4) the Question finds its origins in, or has elements of, otherworldly or Fantastic phenomena. This detective is closer to the shaman than to the tradi- tional35 investigator. As such, the mystery, although remaining central, is less about the detective actively pursuing an answer. Rather, the Shaman detective passively attempts to understand and

35 As we will see, these two figures are not as disparate as one would first assume.

20 channel the ‘truth’ through intuitive epiphany (or perhaps divine revelation) rather than deduc- tive logic. The fluidity and danger required in some ways make listing characteristics arbitrary, for once the detective is pinned down he no longer exist as ‘the Shaman detective’.36

The histories and legacies of the Shaman Detective

A Shaman is a figure who can communicate with supernatural beings and traverse their realms; he occupies the role of healer within traditional societies (Blacker, 5-6). It is no stretch to draw comparisons between detection and medical sciences, because a doctor, detective, and the shaman all must get to the root cause of a problem37 that is gestured to by a series of clues/symptoms. Furthermore, it is their job (regardless of the results of their efforts) to re-establish the threatened order by interacting with a realm that is hidden from everyday life (be it the micro- scopic world of biology or the world of spirits). In Carmen Blacker’s work The Catalpa Bow

(1975), she defines shamans as those who have been gifted the ability to interact with spirits, a skill that is entirely separate from intellect or strength. Within the Japanese context specifically, she recognizes two possible types of shaman: the medium, who becomes a vessel for spirits to occupy, whose journey takes them in to their own mind and body; and the ascetic, who journeys to the land of spirits and acts primarily as a healer (Blacker, 4). The Shaman detective I will be discussing belongs largely to the latter category, and although he will occasionally let his body be used as vessels for forces outside himself, he is very rarely permanently possessed or consumed by the spirits. Although contemporary Japanese society is largely secular, the shaman still

36 This is much like the Tao, as the Tao that can be expressed is not the Tao (Lao-Tzu, 1). 37 A problem that is symbolically and often literally disruptive of an order (crime threatens established societal norms, whereas a cold threatens the homeostatic norms of the body).

21 appears today, acting in similar capacities to psychics or exorcists in a western context (Blacker,

2).38 Historically and contemporarily, roles for shamans within Japan include divination, endow- ments of blessing and luck, spiritual cleansing from the taint of soiled or taboo items and events,39 exorcism, as well as worshiping and acting as caretaker for a holy site or object. ‘Magi- cal feats’ are also part of larger shamanic ceremonies, such as fire-walking or climbing ladders made of swords (Blacker, 8, 137).

What is most interesting about the shamanic legacy of Japan is that, much like contemporary Japanese spirituality, beliefs surrounding shamanism originate from a variety of sources, belief structures, and religions. Perhaps the two most dominant religious systems in Japan are Shin- toism and Buddhism, and elements of each appear in shamanic practices, despite their competition for religious dominance. One of the most lasting legacies of the Shinto influence upon shamanism, as well as Japanese culture as a whole, is the animistic belief that ‘mundane’ objects contain spirits (kami or gods, although kami usually signifies a spirit of a much higher order) and, as such, agency and even intentionality (Blacker, 17).40 We could say then that shamans are characterized by openness, both literally in terms of allowing spirits to enter their bodies, and figura- tively in terms of the fluidity required to adapt to the ever-changing landscapes and entirely non-

38 This is not an assessment of the validity of beliefs in shamans or shamanism, nor to assert that they are widely accepted by Japanese culture. Rather, shamans still practice their arts in parts of Japan, and contemporary society is quite familiar with them, as evidenced by popular anime such as Shaman King (2001-2002), or the variety of shamanic characters that appear throughout Japanese media. 39 In Japanese Shamanism, death is seen as the major cause of defilement. 40 An example of the prevalence of this belief is Marie Kondo’s recent work on how to clean one’s house properly, The life-changing magic of tidying up (2011), which is a best seller in Japan. Kondo asks her readers to pay respect to the objects in their household by organizing them so that they will be happy. In a chapter entirely about socks, she suggests that socks work very hard and thus needed to be folded properly so that they may relax when not being worn (Kondo, 82). Furthermore, Kondo suggests thanking objects one is getting rid of. There are also shrines in Japan that act as ‘retirement’ homes for old appliances, although accounts of these are anecdotal.

22 rational events. As we will see later, the Shaman detective (and in many ways, most of the characters who inhabit his worlds) experience very little normative affect41 in the face of the uncanny, Fantastic, or even the marvellous. There is also a certain passivity to this openness, although passivity within a western context contains a vaguely negative connotation. It is best to supplement the term passivity with the Taoist principle of wuwei.42 A notoriously difficult concept to define (like much of Taoism), it means something akin to acting naturally or without thought (to be moved by instincts after cultivating a sage-like state of being), although it is often defined in English as ‘non-action’.43 Furthermore, this ‘non-action’ requires, not inaction, but rather acting without intentions, expectations, goals, or judgment. It may seem contradictory to suggest that the Shaman detective on the one hand intends to restore order or balance while on the other hand he practices wuwei. However, both Taoism and Buddhism require holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously. It is best to think then of the Shaman detective not as an entirely self-governing actor, but as an agent of change who is drawn to and helps create a sort of cosmic rebalancing, like ripples of water eventually returning to stillness.

41 The characters are rarely, if ever, surprised by what is irrational or illogical. 42 Although Taoism is a Chinese tradition of thought, certain tenets made it to Japan through Chan/Zen Buddhism (Chinese and Japanese, respectively). 43 Two stories from The way of Chuang Tzu, a collection of Taoist writings, illustrate this. One tells the story of a master butcher who is able to cut meat perfectly because he has learned to intuit instinctively the spaces where the blade may pass through flesh and bone without resistance, rather than through ex- ceptional strength or agility. The other is the advice that to practice wuwei, one must make oneself like water, as water does not resist but rather flows to where it must. And although water may seem passive or weak, it ultimately wears away even the mightiest boulder (Merton, 45-49, 127-9).

23 Wuwei and the cultivation of ‘No-Mind’

Generally, the postmodern detective seeks the truth and fails, revealing a lack of truth as an objective possibility from a postmodernist perspective. The world is often depicted as mundane material, and any element of the Fantastic enters through hallucination or madness, troubling not only the idea of the subject, but also any concept of objective knowledge or epistemological certainty.44 Although a similar trajectory may be charted by the Shaman detective, the failure to obtain the truth or closure does not suggest that it does not exist. Reflecting the immateriality of Buddhism (it is only this reality that lacks substance), the incommunicability of the higher order present in Taoism and Shamanism or even Zen (one can act in accordance with a natural law such as the Tao/Way, but one can not be taught nor communicate to others how to do so), and finally the vibrant vitalism of Shintoism (matter imbued with what Bennett describes as agential thing power), the Shaman detective embarks on a synthesis of religious pilgrimage and detective work. From modernity on, the Japanese detective has been familiar with transgressing and traversing boundaries, with moral ambiguity and fluid identity. The erotic, the grotesque, and the absurd45 figure heavily in Japanese detective fiction, especially in earlier works, most notably Edogawa Rampo’s mystery and horror novels.46 This is not to say the same topics are not also addressed in western detective fictions. However, Ero Guro Nonsense has carried connotations of the Fantastic within a Japanese detective context (Kawana, 11). Satoshi Kon’s Shonen

Bat is the perfect example: a grotesque monstrosity that is neither metaphorical nor hallucinated,

44 See the discussion of Paul Auster’s City of Glass in Chapter 2. 45 ‘Ero Guro Nonsense’ was a modernist movement or genre in Japan, in which literature and other media focused itself heavily upon the intersection of the erotic and grotesque (Kawana, 10). It is not dissimilar from many western works of horror, such as the relatively new genre of ‘Torture porn’. 46 Examples include the pulp mystery novel The Black Lizard (1934), in which a famous detective must outwit a dangerous and beautiful criminal mastermind, and The Beast in the Shadow (1928), the story of a man who attempts to save his lover from her paranoid fantasies of an ever-present voyeur, yet becomes a voyeur himself.

24 but a real physical force in the world of Paranoia Agent. The western detective may interact with the absurd, the grotesque, or the marginal (like Philip Marlowe’s interactions with gangsters and pornographers in The Big Sleep), yet even when these figures are uncanny, they still exist within a framework of logic and conventional knowledge.

Playful openness is characteristic of the Shaman detective, informed, in many ways, by the pervasive influence of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Those familiar with Zen might see this state- ment as contradictory, as Zen Buddhist practice is known for its violence47 and rigour. However, it is particularly unique among Buddhist schools for its view of enlightenment. Most schools hold that enlightenment is a permanent state once achieved. Contrary to this, Zen sees enlightenment as a process (Suzuki, 29). Rather than ‘nirvana’, one seeks satori, a flash of insight that is not a permanent state but a transient one. It cannot be grasped but only sought again (Suzuki,

89). Most important to cultivating oneself as one who is capable of satori48 is a mind that is at once empty (free from judgments, thoughts, and preconceptions) and open (capable of growing, learning, and changing). The preeminent Buddhist Scholar D.T. Suzuki refers to this state as

‘No-Mind’, and it is conceptually quite similar to wuwei in Taoism. One must empty oneself entirely to allow for maximum creative potential, and perhaps more importantly, to cultivate a non- judgmental flexibility in response to the world. In other words, one must act, must be, without thinking.

47 Historically, Zen is associated with the Samurai and their military codes of conduct. However, Zen is not the only Buddhist (and thus theoretically pacifist) school to have embraced militarism throughout history. In terms of everyday practice within Zen, there are many anecdotes of masters striking their pupils to disorient them, or long hours of grueling labour, in order to break down normative perception on the path to enlightenment (Suzuki, 19). 48 Everyone is already able to attain brief flashes of insight when the mind if befuddled. However, to achieve it more regularly requires a variety of practices.

25 From a conventional western traditional perspective both wuwei and No-mind can be difficult concepts to grasp, as thinking without acting is often synonymous with rash action or base instincts and drives. But rather than give into animalistic tendencies, Zen and Taoism49 call on its practitioners to train themselves to act through ritual and practice. Before one can act naturally, one must, paradoxically, cultivate a self that can do so properly (Suzuki, 158-160). Acting

‘naturally’, without thought, in many ways resembles play, which is reflected in the absurd and often humorous Zen and Taoist writings. The Tao Te Ching contains many stories of Taoist practitioners throwing raucous parties at funerals for their lost teachers, much at odds with Confucian propriety at the time, as a sort of carnivalesque celebration designed to play with and subvert preconceived notions about loss, mortality, and sadness. Words like ‘harmony’ get tossed around nonchalantly when discussing Eastern Philosophy, but the optimum state of a Zen Buddhist, Ta- oist and Shaman detective is to act harmoniously as part of a system. Each of these figures is not a solitary and permanent individual but rather a channeller of energies within a system that incorporates not only humans and animals, but just as importantly things: objects inanimate (literal stuff: objects, atoms) or intangible (thoughts and ideas).

The Problem of Genre: The Fantastic and the Marvellous

Shaman detective fiction falls into the category of the Fantastic as theorized by Todorov, straddling the border between ‘Fantastic uncanny’ – strange or unfamiliar but ultimately mundane or conventional – and ‘Fantastic marvellous’ – magical, supernatural and/or Fantastical.

Generally, both Shaman and postmodern detective texts generally start as uncanny, strange and

49 This is also true for Confucianism, another predominantly Chinese philosophical system that experienced longstanding popularity in Japan up until modern times.

26 abnormal events may occur but the world still operates under a conventional logic. However, the

Shaman detective text is unique in terms of postmodern fiction in that is readily steps outside the uncanny, and moves nearer to the marvellous, in which conventionality and logic no longer determine events.50 More often than not Shaman detective fiction comes closer to the marvellous

(Todorov, 43-45). And although different texts will be situated at different points on the spectrum proposed by Todorov,51 it is important to note the limitations of that spectrum. Almost all works analyzed are generically indeterminate throughout, remaining in the liminal state of the

Fantastic, although the degree to which they fluctuate between uncanny and marvellous differs.

Paranoia Agent – which will be discussed more thoroughly later on in this chapter – is perhaps a perfect example of this, where the overall trajectory of the series moves increasingly towards the marvellous. Thus in the end when Shonen Bat52 is shown to be a hallucination and by-product of media hysteria, suggesting a mundane explanation for the increasing violence and destruction, the viewers are still left with scenes of a ravaged Tokyo that could be nothing else but the after- effects of an actual monster, troubling any clear distinction between reality and fantasy. Rather than contest Todorov’s theories of the Fantastic, however, this indeterminacy of classification of many Shaman detective fictions does not refute them. This is due in large part to Todorov’s defi-

50 Franz Kafka’s works are a good measure of this. His novel The Trial (1925), which documents its protagonists struggle with an entirely absurd and surreal bureaucratic legal system, is uncanny in the Todo- rovian sense; it is strange and abnormal but possible. The short story The Metamorphosis (1915), however, is marvellous in that its protagonist wakes up one day to discover he is a giant insect, incorporating elements of the supernatural and logically impossible into a conventional setting. 51 For example, the works of Abe Kobo fall much closer to simply uncanny, such as the Woman in the Dunes (1964), in which the world is entirely rational, although the circumstances of Junpei Niki’s impris- onment and the residents of the sand dunes are certainly bizarre. Even later works like Kangaroo Note- book (1991) suggest a hallucinatory uncanniness in a rational world rather than a distinctly marvellous or fantasy landscape. 52 Shonen Bat is the series’ antagonist.

27 nition of the Fantastic as being defined by the “duration of uncertainty…[of] that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (Todorov, 25). The Fantastic resists determinacy. This hesitation occurs most often in the reader of a Shaman detective text, rather than its characters. The Shaman detective and other characters (usually) accept marvellous incidents with neither surprise nor hesitancy, as there is always the possibility for the Fantastic to occur.

Twilight and hesitation: The Western Fantastic and Japanese folk cosmologies

Tzvetan Todorov’s work on the Fantastic also introduces the concept of hesitation, which is an important concept in Japanese depictions of the marvellous. In his work on monstrosity and modernity in Japan, Japanese scholar Gerald Figal discusses the indeterminacy of twilight. Twi- light, especially pre-Meiji revolution,53 represented a time in which indeterminacy prevailed.

Seen as a boundary (between day and night, light and dark), it was the time in which bakemono

(monsters) could emerge. This was in large part due to the lack of electrical lighting, meaning that figures approached at twilight were shrouded in shadow, making it unclear as to whether or not a traveler was about to encounter a human, or something else merely taking human form

(Figal, 3-4). As such, spaces were redefined during this time as border zones – zones of easy transition between forms and roles. It is significant that the Japanese word for monster (bakemono) literally means ‘changing thing’ (Figal, 5). Twilight was of course not the only liminal space/time, and road crossings, riverbanks, and mountains all represented sites of subversion and

53 Began in 1868, this period in Japanese history was one of rapid modernization and technological advancement that quickly transformed Japan into a major global and colonial superpower. State mandated, it is particularly interesting for the government’s role in manufacturing of national identity through academ- ics, a common vernacular, and rewritings of history to make Shinto Japan’s state religion.

28 play.54 Although superstitions and folk beliefs may not hold the same sway in contemporary Jap- anese society, it is undeniable that the government’s efforts to construct and ingrain a national identity55 caused elements of this folklore to linger within the public consciousness – largely through the popularity of supernatural media – as well as within a general, although indeterminate, cosmology (Figal, 12-13).

This argument is echoed by Jolyon Baraka Thomas in his work on religion in contemporary anime and manga. He argues that rather than a tool for the dissemination of a unified religion, anime and manga (and by extension, television series, novels, video games and other forms of media) reflect some of the author’s (as well as its viewers) own beliefs in a medium where said beliefs can be constructed and played with. Rather than proselytize, or even act as a definitive guide to belief, these works are products of and dialogues with a variety of different beliefs

(Thomas, 11-12). Perhaps the largest reason for this is contemporary perceptions of religion and spirituality in Japan. In discussing his use of the terms ‘spirituality’ or ‘vernacular’ to discuss religion in Japan, Thomas states: “[w]ithin the larger global academic trend, Japanese scholars have mobilized categories such as ‘individualized religion’, ‘spirituality’, and ‘new spirituality movements and culture’ to describe groups and movements characterized by loose commitments to vaguely religious contents and practices…[s]uch as Reiki, physical exercise and meditative regimes such as yoga, tourism to sacred sites [etc]” (Thomas, 12). In a largely secular society, tenets from a variety of faiths, young and old, have imprinted upon daily life, even when the average citizen adheres to none of the religions of origin. To return to Todorov and the Fantastic,

54 This is in large part due to the general lawlessness in these areas, as they were often contested zones between municipalities. As such, illegal performances, circuses, and freak shows often would take place here, giving further credence to their general perception as uncanny and supernatural (Figal, 6-8). 55 One that was portrayed as not being a modern identity but one that essentialized (not unproblemati- cally) a Japanese identity throughout history.

29 the qualities of indeterminacy and hesitation permeate many Japanese works, and more importantly Shaman detective fiction. This is at least partially due to cultural legacies surrounding twilight and other liminal border zones, and their impacts on contemporary vernacular or spiritual beliefs. The Shaman detective is rarely, if ever, hesitant in the face of this indeterminacy, often accepting and giving himself up to circumstances, no matter how bizarre or irrational.56

Even Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks demonstrates this quality throughout the show: accepting advice from talking logs that witnessed the murder, putting faith in dreams, or witnessing the town’s inhabitants being possessed by spirits, all without surprise but rather with determination and curiosity.

Paranoia Agent

Satoshi Kon’s 2004 television series Paranoia Agent (妄想代理人 in the original Japa- nese) tells the story of a string of assaults by a young boy identifiable by his bent golden baseball bat and roller skates (Shonen Bat57 in anglicized Japanese and Lil’ Slugger in translation). Each of the 13 episodes are relayed at least partially from the viewpoint of a central character that changes every episode.58 The story however is not strictly episodic, and although for the most part each episode is a self-contained narrative, each character’s narrative is interwoven with the others, held together by the mystery of the Shonen Bat case. Furthermore, there are three central characters whose stories are told throughout each episode: Tsukiko Sagi, the first victim and the

56 I will return to this in Chapter 3: Space. 57 Shonen Bat translates literally to “Bat Boy”. I will be using the character’s Japanese name throughout this paper as a matter of preference. 58 The show intentionally rejects formula throughout. The final 3 episodes are a break from the more episodic narration entirely, and one episode (Episode 10: “Mellow Maromi”) acts an informative documen- tary and meta-commentary on the creation of anime, narrated by the insidious and kawaii (Japanese for ‘cute’, but carries connotations not present in the western term) Maromi.

30 animator responsible for the dog-like media franchise Maromi – an adorable and disarming talking dog that is overwhelmingly popular in Paranoia Agent’s Japan; Detective Keiichi Ikari, a senior detective infatuated with the an imagined era of golden age detective work and morality; and finally Mitsuhiro Maniwa, Ikari’s partner and Shaman detective figure whose unconventional methods bear many similarities to those of Agent Cooper of Twin Peaks.

As the plot moves forward, the conventional police procedural drama is troubled by an increasing encroachment of the Fantastic.59 Recalling the fourth quality of Shaman detective narrative, the show’s antagonist Shonen Bat cannot be satisfactorily explained through logic. Near the middle of the series, the two detectives begin to suspect that Shonen Bat is nothing more than a sort of mass hysteria, as each incident seems to occur when the victim is overwhelmed with stress, with Shonen Bat appearing to intervene as a sort of release.60 Contributing to this potential interpretation is the ever evolving popularity of Maromi, the dog-like and kawaii character that sweeps Japan, which gradually comes to be conflated with (or is perhaps the ‘good’ twin of)

Shonen Bat, implying that both are a product of hysteria and media driven hallucination.61 Epi- sode 9, “ETC” seems to drive this point home even more, as it centres around four housewives who are competing to see who can create the most believable Shonen Bat attack gossip. Kamo- hara, the youngest of the housewives, attempts to join in with her own “it happened to a friend of a friend…” style story, but is shunned by the group who refuse to believe her, despite the total

59 The magical and/or supernatural increasingly infiltrates mundane reality. 60 The detectives initially suspect that the attacks come to represent a socially acceptable scapegoat for self-harm and/or suicide. 61 In some ways this mirrors the incident in Japan in which several children experienced seizures when watching an episode of Pokemon. Although some of the affected children definitely had epilepsy trig- gered by the show’s flashing lights, many more had no discernible medical cause, and were likely influenced by the increasing media hype and fear around this infamous episode (Radford, 5).

31 absurdity of their own stories. Returning home, she is relieved and even ecstatic to find her husband savagely beaten, apparently by Shonen Bat, as she finally can assume top spot in her gossip circle.

Paranoia Agent consistently presents events, seen through the eyes of the ‘rational’ detectives, that are illogical and impossible. Upon capturing a copycat who may be responsible for all but the first attack, Agents Ikari and Maniwa witness their suspect savagely murdered by the

‘real’ Shonen Bat, who then skates through the jail walls, disappearing completely. Later on in the series, Shonen Bat begins to transform from small boy to a grotesque monster, and finally into a black sludge that consumes all of Tokyo. And although there are some suggestions that the final destruction of the city is metaphorical – that it represents the psychical destruction and dis- ruption caused by mass hysteria and the media – the series concludes with a news report that the damage as well as the black sludge had real and lasting physical effects on the material world.

Simultaneously however, the viewer learns that Shonen Bat, like Maromi, originated from Tsu- kiko Sagi’s over-stressed mind as a coping mechanism and excuse. As a girl she is careless with her real dog, also named Maromi, who in her negligence runs out in front of a car. Rather than accept blame or the responsibility for having caused a loved pet to die, she pins the attack on an imagined young boy with a baseball bat. This revelation causes Shonen Bat finally to vanish, but the viewer cannot help but accept that something marvellous occurred – that in many ways the psychical and material spaces collapsed (or were shown to always already have been one). Fur- thermore, to the denizens of Paranoia Agent’s Tokyo, the increasing strangeness (to the viewer) is in no way uncanny or even strange – for them the increasing fantastical monstrosity of both

Shonen Bat and Maromi is acceptably plausible in the same way a natural disaster, no matter how terrible or unexpected, would be.

Agent Maniwa’s Shamanic Awakening: The Shaman Detective Par Excellence

Before addressing Maniwa’s trajectory as a Shaman detective, I want to focus on an important minor character who appears both directly within the show and as part of the show’s meta-narrative. Never named, he is a mysterious white-haired old man who can often be seen scribbling immensely complicated algorithms in chalk, and who appears to have the ability to predict each Shonen Bat attack. Whether he is prophet or lunatic is left ambiguous (an important point I will return to later), 62 and as such it is hard to discern when he is speaking truth or simply raving. He is never involved with the show’s main investigation, but upon the conclusion of each episode, he addresses the audience directly in a segment called “Prophetic Visions”, where he talks in riddles and nonsense, inviting the audience to plumb even deeper into the mystery of the television show. At the conclusion of the series, in which the original trauma in Tsu- kiko Sagi’s mind is revealed and therefore addressed63 and all seems well, we the audience are treated to one more “Prophetic Vision”, this time led by a white-haired and unstable-looking De- tective Maniwa, who has replaced the mysterious old man after his death. Maniwa asks the audience to return to the beginning of the series to retrace a new path through “recurring dreams” as

“no mystery remains unsolved forever, and no answer is without mystery” (Paranoia Agent, Epi- sode 13), gesturing towards a sort of inescapable cycle of events that must always repeat itself.

There is some suggestion that Maniwa has lost himself and become a conduit for the mystery itself, in some ways echoing the conclusion of Twin Peaks in which Agent Cooper is possessed

62 This is another example of hesitation in the Todorovian sense. 63 Although it is outside the scope of this paper, very interesting work can be done with Freudian analysis in terms of Paranoia Agent, with Shonen Bat acting simultaneously as the return of what has been re- pressed, as well as a further repression through physical violence. Those who survive the attacks often have their previous problems ‘solved’, and exist in a state of opiate like empty happiness. An equally ap- pealing interpretation is that Agent Maniwa represents the Freudian analyst.

33 and consumed by the malignant spirit BOB. However, I think the audience should be sceptical in accepting the conclusion as a failure through an inescapable descent into madness, if only because Maniwa has not simply ‘lost’ himself. He has also gained powers of prophecy and fore- telling.

In the beginning of Paranoia Agent Detective Maniwa appears to be a fairly normal detective; a young, optimistic counterbalance to the cynical and tired Detective Ikari. However, he quickly separates himself from his partner when he wholeheartedly believes in the Shonen Bat attacks, even after initial evidence suggests that the first attack of Tsukiko Sagi a fabrication. He is very much open to the world around him, which culminates in a major turning point for him in the fifth episode. Episode 5, “The Holy Warrior”, is a departure for the series. Maniwa and Ikari have just apprehended a boy (Makoto Kozuka) who fits the description of Shonen Bat, and furthermore has perpetrated at least one copycat attack. However, through interrogation the two detectives learn that the boy believes himself to be the protagonist in a fantasy role-playing game.

Detective Ikari is angered by Kozuka’s view of reality, but Detective Maniwa readily immerses himself in the game within the boy’s psyche. Initially Maniwa’s playful taking on the role of the

Warrior of Light seems aimed at lulling the boy into a false sense of security in order to extract a confession. On the level of narrative, the device of the role-playing game also seems to serve as an excuse to add action and adventure into what would otherwise be twenty-four minutes of three characters sitting in a room talking. However, as the interrogation progresses, Detective

Maniwa becomes more and more caught up in the world of the game, switching entirely from detective to warrior. Rather than solve the mystery, he very literally must fight to survive in the game world,64 quickly learning and accepting the rules of this new ‘realm’ and participating fully

64 Maniwa must conform to and follow the rules of the video game he is inhabiting, battling monsters and risking his symbolic and perhaps actual death.

34 within it. Echoing the conclusion of the series, what started as a visual metaphor takes on material qualities, with very real stakes.

Following this episode, Detective Maniwa diverges more and more from traditional police work, briefly disappearing from the narrative to reappear as the abject homeless character

Radar Man. Appearing to the general public as a mentally ill man wandering the streets mutter- ing to himself and wearing several radios, through shifts in animation and thus worlds the audience discovers that Maniwa/Radar Man is actually the returned Warrior of Light from the video game. Radar Man utilizes radio waves to tune into the psyche of the denizens of Tokyo in order to determine who may be Shonen Bat’s next victim. Maniwa’s commitment to the game casts him to the margins of society where he is able to directly battle with the now literally monstrous

Shonen Bat. His abject position also allows him to take on entirely new means of detection, such as consulting talking anime figurines who aid him in his quest.65 It is important to note that although portrayed as the vanquishing hero, Maniwa/Radar Man is ultimately defeated in battle by

Shonen Bat, and it is this defeat that forces him to embark on the most important stage of his journey, which is to bring Tsukiko Sagi face to face with her guilt and trauma, thus enabling her to end the devastation that Shonen Bat and Maromi66 are wreaking on the city. It is the plumbing of Tsukiko’s psyche, as well as his incredible physical battles with Shonen Bat, that reduces Ma- niwa to the white-haired and frail version we see in the final “Prophetic Visions” sequence.

The shaman in traditional societies is often a liminal figure. In being in commune with

65 These figurines are collected by an otaku – colloquially an ‘anime geek’ – within the series. 66 To clarify, Maromi throughout the series gradually becomes a much more innocuous manifestation of the same trauma that Shonen Bat represents, progressing from a voice in Tsukiko’s head to a physical being. Where Shonen Bat represses with violence and death, Maromi represses with sleep and complacency. Maromi consistently asks the cast as well as the audience to sleep, which is emphasized by the sinister end credits in which the main characters encircle a giant Maromi, all lying in a death like slumber. The two beings eventually converge when it is revealed they are one and the same, forming one terrible monstrous black ooze.

35 spirits, shamans necessarily exist between two realms, on the margin of their society. They carry great power, but often work in ways strange and inaccessible to society at large (Blacker, 5).

Shamanism is a vocation in which one is called into a spiritual and psychical journey. The self is tested and broken down until a new ‘person’ is born as a shaman, who can act as vessel to spirits and as a guide to other realms. The journey itself is both spiritually and physically taxing, usually involving prolonged sickness or suffering, and those who are unable to complete their journeys often die or succumb to madness (Blacker, 5, 144). After being initiated, the new shaman is able to traverse realms, enter dreams (his own and others) and ecstatic states, offer cryptic prophesies, speak with animals, objects (at least in animistic societies or cosmologies), and the dead, com- mand spirits, and perhaps most importantly act as a healer of mind and body (Blacker, 146).

However, although shamans in many ways exists as a religious leader, their duty is to serve their communities and the spirit realm.67 To return to the shaman’s role as healer, it is not difficult to draw superficial comparisons between the (regular) detective and the shaman, as both seek to un- earth and address a trauma (the mystery) in order to begin a process of healing.68

Returning to Paranoia Agent, we see Detective Maniwa undergo a shamanic transformation as he is pulled deeper and deeper into the case of Shonen Bat, culminating in his role as

Radar Man and the new host of the Prophetic Visions segment that ends the final episode. In all the texts I will examine here, his journey is the most literally shamanic, as his narrative arc en- compasses the whole process of moving from ‘average’ citizen to shaman.69 Keeping in mind that the role of shaman within a society is one that is passed down from master to apprentice

67 There are, of course, historical accounts of shamans performing for notoriety, power and wealth. This discussion instead represents the shaman’s ideal role. 68 Although it is admittedly a stretch in that the detective seeks ‘justice’ rather than a true, holistic healing as the end goal. 69 Other works this paper will look at typically start with the detective having already become a Shaman detective, or at the very least began the process of transformation before the the narrative opens.

36 (Blacker, 140), a viable interpretation is that the mysterious old man is the series’ original shaman, reserving Detective Maniwa’s place until his journey is completed. Maniwa’s ultimate rendering as frail, white-haired and rambling need not be seen as a loss of self or sanity (as with

Agent Cooper), but rather his total embodiment of the shaman within the show, and perhaps more importantly of the show itself. That he is constantly surrounding himself with and invading media (entering video games, speaking with anime action figures, and wearing a series of radios) only further emphasizes that Maniwa/Radar Man is a contemporary shaman, a shaman of technology and media.70 Furthermore, his playfulness in terms of his willingness to assume new roles and even worldviews as needed is important not only for his character development, but is necessary for his proficiency as a shaman. The fourth-wall breaking “Prophetic Visions” segment allows for both the mysterious man and Maniwa to traverse another boundary – the one between audience and media. Maniwa’s involvement in the show’s finale – not to defeat the monster but rather to help lead Tsukiko Sagi to the truth – is reflective of his new role as shaman. In revealing the trauma, he enables Tsukiko, and Tokyo as a whole, to begin a process of healing. Perhaps more significantly, the process rather than the finality of healing is highlighted. The final few minutes of the show mirror the first few, in which the camera moves around Tokyo and the audience hears the thoughts of its citizens. The same minor complaints and gripes continue, even after the Shonen Bat disaster two years previously, and a cute cat-like character now appears on all the billboards, replacing Maromi. This, combined with the final Prophetic Vision, suggests that there will be an inevitable relapse, further necessitating Maniwa’s continued presence as a sha-

70 It needs to be said although that I do not mean this in the sense in which ‘shaman’ is contemporarily used to mean savvy or a sort of uncanny proficiency. Rather, Maniwa is a shaman of the same ilk as traditional shaman, although one who has adjusted to and makes use of contemporary media and media tech- nologies.

37 manic figure to once again address the trauma. Maniwa does not ‘fail’ at the end, but rather remains open to forces outside himself.

Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition: An Infinite Feedback Game

In her essay “Infinite Games: The Derationalization of Detection in Twin Peaks”, Angela

Hague uses philosopher Robert Carse’s concept of ‘infinite play’ to demonstrate the ways in which Twin Peak’s Agent Cooper subverts the classical figure of the detective (Hague, 133). As opposed to finite games/play, which depends “upon the existence of unchanging rules, spatial and temporal boundaries, and ‘conclusions’, in which someone must ‘win’,” (Hague, 133), infinite play seeks to erase structures to continue the game indefinitely. In this sense the game is ex- panded to cover all aspects of existence, allowing for previously unrelated and impossible connections to be made that were prohibited under the framework of the finite. Although it is clear that while classical detective fiction can be read as a series of finite games, the concept of infinite play suggests the unique nature of both Lynch’s Agent Cooper and the Japanese Shaman detective. This is because although the author or the text itself may be playful, the postmodern detective rarely is. Returning to Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition, both detectives utilize non-rational means of intuiting the ‘solutions’ to crimes. For instance, in season one of Twin Peaks,

Agent Cooper utilizes a technique of throwing a rock at a bottle while the names of suspects are read. This technique he claims to have learned of in a dream whilst reflecting on Tibetan Bud- dhism. And although ultimately it does not lead him to the criminal, it does provide him with enough direction to move the investigation forward. Additionally, Agent Cooper does not allow his attention to be confined by the case at hand – the murder of Laura Palmer – but rather is fascinated by everything that comes across his path, such as coffee, a piece of cherry pie, or the

38 plentiful Douglas firs. In recognizing the enchantment of the landscape and mundane objects, he is able to draw out patterns and connections that would be hidden by normative frameworks and discourses, such as the clues from the Log Lady’s log, which witnessed the crime and has many things to say when the time is right and someone is listening. What is more, on a meta-narrative level, what can be more playful than taking a ‘serious’ television show and converting it into a canonical series of television commercials that are as much parody as they are an actual homage?

Swery65’s Agent Francis York Morgan pays as much homage to Agent Cooper as the game Deadly Premonition does to Twin Peaks. A free-spirited FBI agent who works in dreams and visions, he is drawn to the case through an ongoing meta-mystery that is slowly revealed throughout the game. He is constantly talking offside to a character named Zach, mimicking

Agent Cooper’s short notes to Diane (who may or may not be just his tape-recorder). Equally captivated by mundane objects, coffee for Agent Morgan acts not only as a ‘damn fine’ drink, but also a means of reading the future through the cryptic shapes that appear when adding milk.

An important part of the actual gameplay involves finding clues in the form of photographs that lead to a gameplay mechanic (or minigame) called ‘profiling’. As Agent Morgan accumulates evidence, a sequence of film cuts and audio is played from the scene of the crime, suggesting a psychic intuition that not only suggests the order of events but visually recreates them like a film.

Those that fall outside of the finite game of detection – the child, the madman or woman71 – offer perhaps the most information by virtue of falling outside the normative discourse. This is not to suggest, however, that Agent Cooper and Agent Morgan are totally interchangeable. Where

Cooper resembles a Buddhist monk at times – non-confrontational, fluid, and playful – Agent

71 For example, Twin Peak’s Log-Lady or the twins who discover the scene of the crime in Deadly Prem- onition. These are figures who would normally be written of as ‘unreliable’ witnesses.

39 Morgan seems to incorporate Japanese reflections on a very American hardboiled detective. Alt- hough he employs equally unorthodox methodology, Agent Morgan makes it clear from the beginning that he means to assume control of the investigation, and that there will be no straying from his means of deduction. Eschewing the collaborative spirit of Cooper who respects input from all sides, Morgan attempts to make finite (by entrenching rules) his infinite game. And although this may be an attempt to appeal to video game fans – a male protagonist who takes charge and gets his way – as well as an attempt to narrow the story so that there is a singular narrative point of view, it reads like a westernization of Twin Peaks, ironically by a Japanese video game company for an originally Japanese audience. This dialogue between the two texts can be read as an attempt to play with the generic characteristics of both, 72 through a sort of homage/pa- rodic structure. This may account for some of the fluidity of the Shaman detective, as he is constantly being written and rewritten within a global context.

It is within this framework of infinite play that the eastern and specifically Japanese philosophical and religious traditions are most important. Within Twin Peaks and Deadly Premoni- tion, as well as other texts in which this figure appears, unorthodox and fantastic methods are not just beneficial (having dream visions of patterns that would otherwise remain hidden) but ultimately necessary in attempting to solve the crime. This is because the criminal,73 whether human or otherworldly being, cannot be accessed by conventional deduction. Sherlock Holmes, with his reliance of cold logic, would be no match for BOB or the Raincoat Killer74 because they do not

72 Generic in this context meaning characteristics that have been perceived to belong to one text/figure or the other, rather than essential ones. 73 It is also significant to note that there rarely is a criminal in the classical sense, but rather a body or bodies that energies and forces may act through. 74 These are the metaphysical villains of Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition, respectively.

40 only to defy reason; they operate fully outside of it. Agent Cooper and Agent Morgan must channel energies and forces outside themselves, like a shaman, and as such are mediums that who allow events to unfold rather than typical detectives who force the story along. This is also where the danger lies – in opening himself up to outside forces, the detective is always susceptible to being utterly consumed by the forces he channels. This attuning oneself to cosmic energies mirrors the person who has mastered the Tao or reached Zen satori in becoming a conduit for a higher order of being.

In the proceeding chapter, I will attempt a reading that synthesizes New Materialism and affect theory with Japanese religious and philosophical traditions such as Buddhism and Shinto- ism, in order to navigate deeper into the Shaman detective and the works he inhabits. Even under the structure of classical detection, there is an undeniable agential thing power present in inanimate objects as clues (Vibrant Matter, 3-4). Even in a framework that seeks to rationalize materiality, there is no genre quite like the detective mystery in which objects have the same degree of ability to drive the plot as have its human characters. Complimentary to this is the animism of

Shinto, the Japanese state religion, which holds all objects are imbued with a spirit or soul, and as such deserve a degree of reverence. This sets the foundations for a reading of the Shaman detective through the framework of New Materialism and religious thought that can shed some light both on the role of this figure and its significance.

41 Chapter 2: The Question

It is a common trope in the mystery genre that the initial mystery that sets off the story

(which I will be referring to as ‘the Question’) is revealed through the course of the text to be part of a much larger conspiracy that the detective must then solve. This is why, in Raymond

Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), Philip Marlowe is hired to investigate an attempted blackmail- ing but winds up uncovering the fact that his employer’s daughters have committed murder and covered it up. Everything Marlowe does, sees, and experiences over the course of the novel matters. Each incident is significant in that each of Marlowe’s movements reveals the larger pattern, and in doing so, seeks to answer the central question. The epistemological detective is usually successful in his task – the larger conspiracy or mystery still necessarily conforms to the laws of nature –75 and can thus be explored and explained by the same rules of logic mobilized for the initial crime, if only on a much larger scale. We can agree that the detective is an interpreter, tasked with deciphering and connecting a series of signs to form a larger narrative (Nealon,

117).76

The postmodern detective, as we have noted, is defined by his inability to make the Ques- tion conform to reason, often failing to order the incidents and evidence in such a way that they clearly point to a perpetrator, and more importantly, a motive. He is unable to recognize patterns, and, more often than not sees patterns where there are none. In many ways, this is because the postmodern detective text is one in which the fallibility of the detective’s perceptions and assumptions are highlighted (Merivale and Sweeney, 2).77 Like many works that fall under the loose category of the postmodern, no longer can we take for granted the once-solid foundations

75 And just as importantly, this detective conforms to the laws of human perception and logic. 76 This refers to the narrative of the Question itself. 77 This too is true of the fallibility of the reader’s perceptions.

42 of veracity, reason, cause and effect, and reliable narration. Stability – the ability for objects and events to be pinned down, to have their contexts fixed, and for identities to remain stable, even in the presence of disguise and subterfuge, is necessary for epistemological detection. The evidence is always out there and can always be found. Nothing may be forever misplaced. Mysteries are always solvable.78 As we have seen, stories about both postmodern and Shaman detectives trouble these assumptions, leaving the figure of the detective in a difficult spot.

The Question79 is often, if not always, the site of misdirection. It can blind the detective, trap him in its own labyrinthine and unreadable mysteries, oblivious to the (perhaps) obvious patterns forming around him. Or, conversely, the Question itself can be misinterpreted. It can be a meaningless event wrongly imbued with a significance, a false start that necessarily leads no- where. Finally, and perhaps most cruelly, it can be the detective’s very desire to engage with the trope of the bigger mystery that prevents him from ever engaging with what was, in and of itself, a simple mystery. All three of these can be true, as in Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985) and

Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map (1969), which represent the postmodern and Shaman detectives respectively. It is within the realm of the Question that the two figures intersect most readily, and as such is the site at which they are hardest to distinguish from one another. Abe’s Unnamed

78 Contemporary crime dramas, such as CSI, illustrate this point. Detection in an epistemological sense is a science that is perfectible and increasingly reliable. 79 When speaking of the Question here, misdirection is not always created intentionally. Rather, the Ques- tion, on a stylistic and narrative level, operates not only as the beginning of the mystery, but also that which often prevents the mystery from being solved. Within classical detective fiction the Question is the unknown variable, whereas in postmodern and Shaman works, it is often a cannot-be-known. When operating under the framework of the classical detective, the Question is necessarily full of misdirection in order to generate suspense and mystery, but its unravelling and/or solution is already built in to the narrative. For the postmodern and Shaman, solvability cannot be taken for granted, and the Question often begins the narrative arc on the wrong foot entirely.

43 Narrator and Auster’s Daniel Quinn are primarily concerned with mapping physical and psychological spaces, and are thwarted by the limitations of the map as a true representation of reality.

Although both texts represent a ‘failure’ of the detective, under the framework of the Shaman detective, failure cannot come to properly represent the conclusion of The Ruined Map.80 Given the, at times uncanny, similarity between the plot structures, events and even style of these two texts, a comparative analysis will also prove fruitful in our exploration of the Shaman detective as a transnational conversation between regional forms of detective texts. Furthermore, the overall similarities should suggest the porous nature of these two categories.

Detective work and Enchantment

Theorist Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) is particularly useful in analyzing the Shaman detective for a number of reasons. Her goal is to demonstrate the ethical necessity of ‘joyful attachment’ and play, affects of enchantment, in order to enliven and invigor- ate not only our world but also how we participate in it (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 3-4).

In many ways this text serves as a prelude to Vibrant Matter (2009), where Bennett more fully outlines her New Materialism. In order to outline this ethics,81 Bennett weaves what she calls an

‘alter-tale’ to the disenchantment of modernity, most often by demonstrating the truly enchanting qualities of modern life (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 8). Her theory mirrors the practice of the texts being discussed; they enliven the mundane everydayness of reality by imbuing it with a

80 This is true for many reasons that I will explore later, although perhaps most notably because the mystery cannot be made to reflect a success/failure scenario, and is representative of a journey on which the detective embarks. 81 Here I use the term ‘ethics’ as Bennett describes her project as examining the ethical necessity in viewing the world as enchanted, in order to rid ourselves of an apathy towards nature and matter she sees in contemporary western society.

44 magical sense of wonder and play. Here we can draw similarities to Hutcheon’s theories of de- doxification, which is a necessary step in opening up our perceptions to the possibility of enchantment.82 Alter-tales within a Japanese context are created by blending folk beliefs with the secular, scientific, and rational. It is important to note that Jane Bennett makes sure to separate her task from mysticism, although not due an aversion to mysticism in academia. Rather, she attempts to locate enchantment in everyday experience, through an openness, rather than in a return to pre-modern belief. Although her grounding is western cultural study, Bennett’s theory is just as true for the Shaman detective. The Shaman detective is not a return to a figure of the past but a blending of traditions with contemporary detective literature. The individual spiritualities present in Japanese society (Thomas, 16) mean, furthermore, that the Shaman detective does not enchant by returning to the past, but by participating in something that is always present. What may at first appear as mysticism is only so from a western secular perspective.83

Although I will be discussing her work Vibrant Matter in greater detail in the proceeding chapter (Chapter 3: Place), Bennett’s further outlining of what an ethically enchanted materialism might look like is useful for our examination of the works of Auster and Abe, and for

Shaman detective fiction as a whole. In this work, Jane Bennett describes a re-conception of materialism in which things (atoms, objects) are lively, if not necessarily alive in the same ways we consider animate things to be. She imagines ethical enchantment as recognizing the “agential…thing power” (Vibrant Matter, 12) of objects. Rather than limiting agency to that which is

82 De-doxification can also lend itself to demystification and even disenchantment, depending what ideology comes to take the place of the ones that have been stripped away. Here, however, I take de-doxification to mean a sort of resetting; notions are stripped away, leaving one with a tabula rasa through which reality can be reinterpreted. 83 I will even go as far to argue here that the secularism in the west is a distinct, western secularity in the same way as our concept of modernity is inherently western. Furthermore, even western secularism can be seen to be involved in its own sort of enchantments and mysticisms, after a process of de-doxification.

45 animate, Bennett argues that agency must be spread out throughout all matter, in order to properly understand cause and effect. To illustrate, she uses the example of the 2003 mass black- outs that occurred across much of Eastern North America, examining how we cannot say it was the fault of the people involved, but that the electrical system itself must bear some responsibility

(Vibrant Matter, 32).84 In terms of crime and enchantment, what is significant here is that in terms of Bennett’s theory, the human is decentered as a main actant, and instead incorporated into an entire system of actants, where the border between subject and object become fluid. In

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett once again cautions the reader that she is not arguing for a return to mysticism. However, I argue that her Vibrant Materialism is a kind of secular animism, and is thus compatible and even complementary with the animism of Shinto and other cultural legacies of the Shaman detective’s cosmology. Enchantment, in terms of the texts being discussed, can be seen as an enlivening of our perceptions of the world.

Paul Auster’s City of Glass

I begin my comparison with Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which, although written later than Abe’s The Ruined Map, is most demonstrative of the Postmodern detective paradigm. This is important for a number of reasons, although perhaps most prominently is that this is a paper constructed from a largely western perspective. In order to begin to understand the Shaman detective, it is easier if we first have a clear idea of the figure he subverts, plays with, and reimagi- nes. The Ruined Map may have come first chronologically, but in many ways it is responding to growing western archetype, and this archetype is best represented by City of Glass’s protagonist,

84 Although how she assigns responsibility to objects without removing responsibility from humans is outside the scope of this paper, Bennett makes a strong case for her ethical enchantment in Vibrant Mat- ter.

46 Daniel Quinn. Central to both works is a similar anxiety concerning Postmodernity, although with different emphasis. For Paul Auster, the anxiety lies in the question ‘How can one write a detective novel now?’, after the loss of the possibility of true representation and epistemological basis for knowledge -, whereas for Kobo Abe, the question is ‘How can you be a detective now?’

Paul Auster’s City of Glass is perhaps the most easily distinguishable text of Postmodern detective fiction. It ticks all the boxes: unreliable narration, mistaken identity, labyrinthine cities and mysteries that the detective can never successfully map, a failed detective, and an inability to plant itself firmly within an objective reality. On its surface it tells the story of Daniel Quinn, a divorced thirty-five-year-old mystery novelist living in New York. He begins receiving calls for a Paul Auster, a private detective whom the anonymous caller is looking to hire. After some time and persistent calls, Quinn decides to take on the role of Paul Auster-the-detective. He learns that he is being called by a Peter Stillman, a shut-in who was abused by his father, Mr. Peter Stillman

Sr., in an effort to create a child who can speak with the language of God.85 Peter Stillman is, of course, not his real name we learn (Auster, 16), nor is ‘Auster’ “Auster’s”, founding their relationship and the very start of the actual detection upon deceit and mistaken identity. The job

Stillman Jr., wishes to hire Auster for is to track down and follow his father, Stillman Sr., who is being released from jail after having been arrested for the acts of abuse and neglect he visited upon his then-infant son. This is because Stillman Jr. suspects that his father wishes to kill him.

“Auster” decides to play along, interested in inhabiting the role of the detective characters he had only previously written about, in the concept of a ‘true’ language of God, and finally in

Stillman Jr.’s seductive wife, Virginia. However, on the day Auster is to intercept Stillman Sr. at the train station, he is faced with a doubling: two men who match perfectly the description of

85 He does this by locking him away and depriving him of everything, believing that humans must have an innate language before it comes to be supplanted by our own, limited and thus false, human language.

47 Stillman Sr. that he has been given. Deciding on a gamble and knowing he can only properly tail one, he goes after the man he suspects is Peter Stillman Sr.. What is perhaps most interesting about this is that it forces “Auster” not only to make a pattern, but to force all evidence to support his potentially false assumption that he is tracking the real ‘criminal’. The element of chance, that a detective may come to a false conclusion, is part of what drives the suspense of a mystery novel, even when we know that ultimately the detective must be right. But within the framework of the Postmodern mystery it is that one fatal yet invisible mistake – the false trail where one cannot retrace one’s steps because it was never clear if the trail was true to begin with

– that is best highlighted by City of Glass.

The novel leaves it vague as to whether Auster does follow the right Stillman, whether

Stillman Sr. really means to murder his son, and ultimately whether or not the purported Stillman

Jr. and his case are real or imagined. Auster becomes obsessed with making sense of the mess of data he observes and documents (in his red notebook), believing that if only he can collect enough information (to have a map that represents the totality of the ‘crime’) all will be revealed.

This mapping occurs on a literal level as well, as ‘Auster’ charts the routes through which he pursues his target. However, this too leads to false pattern-making, with Auster reasoning that the routes Stillman Sr. follows must spell out an answer when drawn on a map. During the case, he encounters Paul Auster-the-novelist, who is of little help, and the mysterious man who may or may not be Stillman Sr., and who is at least coincidentally as interested in true representation86 as his double may be. After repeated failures, missteps and poor pattern recognition,87 and losing

86 In Stillman Sr.’s terms: ‘the language of God.’ 87 The text often implies that Quinn/Auster, over enthusiastic about his job and overconfident about his abilities sees patterns everywhere they are not, leading him to follow after insignificant details long after they prove not to be fruitful.

48 contact with the man he was tailing, “Auster” resorts to staking out the Stillman’s building, becoming a vagrant so that he may guarantee seeing Mr. Stillman’s approach. When nothing happens, and it is clear he has lost contact with his employer, “Auster” enters the Stillmans' apartment, which has been vacated and with no sign there ever having been any Stillmans, where he descends into madness, his narration become more and more disjointed, and finally he disappears entirely from the text. At this point his narration stops, and he is replaced by another, unnamed narrator who has organized and presented ‘Auster’s’ notes in the form of the text the reader receives. As he spends more time locked in the empty apartment, it becomes clear someone is feeding him, and that in many ways he has come to inhabit the role of suffering, neglect and isolation Stillman Jr. claims to have experienced. The novel then ends with a new narrator (the

‘real’ Auster-the-detective?) that Quinn and the Stillmans have gone missing, and that what we have just read is the contents of Daniel Quinn’s investigation notebook, found in the Stillmans’ old apartment, sorted, but without the imposition of interpretation by the new narrator (Auster,

130).

Ironically, all the reader is left with is the contents of the text-within-the-text as the text itself, left wondering what is fabricated, what if anything is real, and where the patterns lie. The reader is pushed towards becoming an “Auster”, despite the ending’s warning (echoed later by

Satoshi Kon’s anime Paranoia Agent) that this way lies madness. Perhaps most troubling is the uncertainty as to whether Quinn is making a mountain out of a (possibly non-existent) mole hill, and, despite the awareness, the reader cannot help but do the same.88 City of Glass likewise high- lights the failure of the detective and thus the reader because of the very nature of assumption. In attempting to solve a mystery, we seek to impose order, a solution that we often come to before

88 Unless, of course, the reader refuses to engage with the text at all.

49 the evidence. The problem with this is that all incidents and objects become imbued with our de- sires to this end. We force upon them our interpretations of how events could and did happen: blinding ourselves by cutting off all contexts that do not subscribe to our conceptions of logic

(Nealon, 123-4).89

Despite his text’s rejection of even the possibility of objective truths – such as City of

Glass’s ultimate portrayal of ‘truth’ as entirely subjective, as discussed previously – the Post- modern detective is unable to succeed, ironically due to his reliance on that which is central to the Modern detective. This is a blind, although perhaps necessary, faith in the possibility of epistemological certainty. The Postmodern detective is the Modern, rational detective, trying to map out a reality that refuses to be fixed or totally knowable. The Postmodern detective wants very much to be his modern counterpart, and in many ways he is, a modern detective with modern mindset thrust unwittingly into the world of postmodernity. The Shaman detective may have a similar teleological purpose in mind, but it in is in practice where the two separate. The Shaman detective attempts to solve a crime – to access some sort of truth – but without attempting to impose order. In some senses the Shaman detective acts as a medium of varied truths, one who must channel, rather than act upon, the crime. In many ways, Kobo Abe’s unnamed protagonist of The Ruined Map appears to fall into the category of the Postmodern detective, experiencing the same failures of epistemological reason. However, its conclusion, alongside the current of other, secret worlds at work in much of the work of Kobo Abe, suggests a departure into the fan-

89 This is, perhaps, unavoidable. To fully open oneself up to the multiplicitous contexts and interpretations available would be to render oneself immobile. For the narrative to move forward, the reader and the detective must make choices, ignore possibilities and make patterns which they hope are correct.

50 tastical realm of the Shaman detective. Where “Auster” fails, the fate of Abe’s unnamed protagonist, although similar, is much more ambiguous, and perhaps even optimistic in his freedom from names and identities.

Kobo Abe’s The Ruined Map

The Ruined Map tells the story of an unnamed first-person narrator, a private detective belonging to a shadowy detective agency that is referenced but never directly encountered by the reader. At the beginning of the novel, he is hired to find a missing man who disappeared seemingly without reason several months previously. This man’s wife, with whom the protagonist develops a strange relationship, can offer little information about where her husband has gone or why, and seems to concern herself very little with whether or not he can be found. Complicating matters is her ‘brother’, a man who was previously investigating the case but turned up nothing.

At every turn, the detective narrator encounters this brother, before he is eventually killed at a construction site. Although the brother is involved in insidious business – blackmail, a splinter prostitution ring within a larger criminal organization – he is revealed to have very little to do with the overall case. This is not to say he does not act as a means of access into Tokyo’s seedy underbelly, but that it is never clear whether he is an asset to the case or a distraction. Also im- peding progress in the case is the detective agency’s rules to protect and serve the client, even if it means obfuscating or flatly ignoring the truth rather than exposing clients to truth that may hurt them. In many ways then, the detective’s job is not to uncover the missing husband (although he tries nevertheless), but to create narrative that both explains and satisfies. Not the truth, but what is desired as the truth.

51 Unlike in City of Glass where there is an overabundance of information Daniel Quinn must sort through, accepting what fits his narrative and refusing the rest, the unnamed narrator of

The Ruined Map must attempt to piece together a crime with an almost complete lack of information. Initially, he is given a matchbook with a phone number and a hand-drawn map, all that remains of the missing man’s possessions. The matchbox and phone number belong to a nearby cafe, which runs an illegal taxi and shipping service in its off hours, and which represents a hub for over 80,000 unlicensed and undocumented drivers, a number, the novel tells us, exactly equal to that of missing men in Tokyo (The Ruined Map, 5). Rather than a lead, the cafe represents a dead end presenting two options: the missing man wants to be missing and will never be found, or the matchbook has nothing to do with the case. This, however, does not deter the narrator, who becomes so fixed upon the matchbook that he cannot escape the tyranny of its foundational false lead. Rather than discard it, the narrator insists on making the case fit what little evidence there is. A third piece of evidence – a journal – is promised to the narrator by the missing man’s brother-in-law before his death, but after the funeral no further information materializes.

The strongest lead comes from one of the missing man’s co-workers, who appears to know something of his whereabouts and who has in his possession a series of grotesque erotic photographs, purportedly taken by the missing man. These photographs are doggedly pursued by the narrator as a lead for nearly half the span of the novel, but this too turns out to be misinfor- mation. The co-worker is revealed to be a perpetual liar, offering up a series of explanations and retracting them as falsehoods, casting into doubt where he has lied and when. The co-worker ultimately kills himself when the narrator refuses to engage with him anymore, as the detective cannot decipher the man’s truth from his lies. Counter-intuitively he keeps the photographs as leads. Throughout the novel, evidence can never be separated from doubt; there is so little to go

52 on that even items of dubious significance have to be considered. His focus upon the photographs as evidence – which the reader knows just as well as he does are a false lead – in many ways parallels the Zen monk’s repetition of koans,90 in order to shock the mind out of its preconceptions and to see the world as it truly is.

The narrator begins to collapse into an existential crisis as he attempts to draw a map with faulty landmarks and ever-changing reference points, quitting his job and pursuing the case as his sole interest. In the novel’s climax, the narrator tries to enter the cafe and unlicensed driver dispatch early one morning and is severely beaten by the men there, who refuse to let him enter into the other, darker world they inhabit. Their violent rejection of his presence is not only because they fear identification,91 but also because they stand as gatekeepers to a world that the unnamed protagonist is not yet ready to enter. This leads him back to the apartment of the missing man, where the wife takes care of him. Falling into a three-day sleep, he begins to dream he is the missing man and the two identities become blurred, suggesting he may have been that man all along.

The conclusion of the novel is even more disorienting. We experience a new narrative voice and it is never wholly clear who it may be, although it is suggested by the text that it may be the missing man, or the detective collapsed into amnesia.92 This narrator is ambling up the hill, in the direction of the missing man’s apartment, thinking about returning home when he is struck with the realization that he cannot remember what his home looks like. Trapped by this anxiety, he is unable to crest the hill for fear that, if what he sees does not retrieve his memories,

90 See footnote #104 for further information on koans. 91 This would entail being reincorporated into the system or society they abandoned. 92 This is in many ways similar to the narrative break in David Lynch’s film Lost Highway (1997). In keeping with the rest of the text, there is also no reason to believe that these narrators are mutually exclusive.

53 the landscape, his home, and his memories will be entirely forgotten, supplanted by whatever now lies at the top of the hill. Rather than risk this erasure, he turns back down the hill and goes to the cafe, where he discovers he is holding the evidence from the earlier (or future) investigation, as well as a pin given to the detective by the missing-man’s brother-in-law.93 He leaves the cafe and decides to call the number on the matchbook from a payphone. A woman answers and tells him to wait there, seemingly entertained by his inability to remember details about himself yet suggesting she knows who he really is. Rather than wait, he watches the payphone from a hiding place until the woman arrives, at which point he turns in the other direction and loses himself in the labyrinth of the city. Within the context of the Question, both novels turn the trope of the larger mystery on its head. Either there was no larger mystery where it was expected to be,94 or the central mystery of the narrative gets usurped by the narrator’s own descent into madness.

Faced with a reality that rejects rational ordering, the detective is no longer able to convey meaning. His mind becomes uncoupled from the logic of signification, and the narrative becomes about the detective’s departure from sanity.

Kobo Abe’s Shaman Detective Trilogy

It is helpful to situate The Ruined Map as the first novel in a loose trilogy with two other

Abe novels: The Box Man (1973) and Secret Rendezvous (1977). Secret Rendezvous has often been read by scholars (such as Christopher Bolton) as a sort of sequel95 to The Box Man, given

93 This suggests that the narrator is the old narrator, transformed somehow into something between the searcher and the lost; he is both the detective and the lost man. 94 Or perhaps it was just always unknowable. 95 Each novel does not necessarily tell one part of a larger narrative. It is left vague as to whether the narrators are different manifestations of the same ‘person’, or are entirely distinct. It is a continuation, how-

54 some narrative similarities in terms of where the first ends and the second begins (Bolton, 198-

199), but The Ruined Map acts as an excellent precursor in setting up the much more Shaman- detective-like protagonist(s) of the following two. 96 By way of summary, The Box Man is the story of a man who relinquishes his life and becomes an unidentifiable homeless man who wears a box over his head. The text itself acts as a guide on how to live one’s life as an marginal yet powerful vagabond figure, offering pieces of advice, tips, and instructions. This box allows him to watch others without being seen himself (as he is often mistaken for trash). The box’s design is described at the outset, and its workings somewhat resemble a camera obscura – the optical device that led to the development of photography. The camera obscura would project an exter- nal image onto an internal surface, which, in the case of The Box Man, are the eyes of the Box

Man (Bolton, 3).

To return briefly to the two previously discussed novels, both City of Glass and The Ru- ined Map’s narrators experience a doubling of identity that leads them to an existential collapse and ultimate erasure, a disappearance into their respective cities and texts. And although both can be read as a descent into madness precipitated by the loss of objectivity (symbolized in both texts by the loss of the easily interpretable map, grounded firmly in mundane reality), the narrative rupture near the conclusion of The Ruined Map suggests something larger at work. Although there is some suggestion of the loss of identity of the narrator, the rupture implies a passage through boundaries. Where Daniel Quinn disappears with modernity as it is supplanted or overlapped by postmodernity, Abe’s detective is able to adapt through a kind of transformation.

ever, in that it picks up and further articulates themes that are first explored in The Ruined Map. The Ru- ined Map, The Box Man, and Secret Rendezvous are thus a trilogy not in terms of plot but rather in terms of topics and concepts. 96 It is possible to read all three novels having the same, disjointed narrator, or perhaps a variety of narrators that are thematically linked

55 From the outset of the novel, there is the suggestion that to be missing is to have entered another world (willingly or unwillingly). Furthermore, it is in these worlds that these men are able to engage in play – with boundaries, societal norms. They play at becoming kings, in the case of The

Box Man, and even with detection itself in Secret Rendezvous.

There is a tradition within Japanese folk belief (although not directly tied to shamanism) that deals with the kidnapping of people97 by spirits, gods or kami. The Japanese term for this is kamikakushi (literally to be spirited away).98 Kami (god or spirit) – kakushi (kidnapping) stories involve a spirit typically choosing a human – sometimes to teach them a lesson, other times simply because of the random and unknowable whims of the kami – and stealing them away into another world (Figal, 178). These other worlds often border ours, and are physically accessible by transition points such as mountains, crossroads and riversides, as discussed in the previous chapter. Like the Shaman, those who are spirited away may return with amazing powers, knowledge, or spirit blessings, although Kami-kakushi tales are usually not explicitly positive.99

In many examples, people are never returned, lost in liminal spirit realms, or are later found dead. In some cases, to have been kidnapped by a spirit taints a person, leading them to be driven

97 Those kidnapped are usually women and children. Often these stories include overtones, or explicit examples, of rape by the kidnapping spirits (Figal, 178). 98 This is where the English translation of the Oscar Award winning film Spirited Away (2001) takes its name from. The original Japanese title being “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi” (千と千尋の神隠し) translates more literally to: “Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away”, and situates Japanese folklore around spirit kidnap- pings within a modern setting. Although not expressly related to the Shaman detective, the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are reflective of a similar folklore based cosmology to the one being discussed in this thesis. 99 Shaman tales are not always entirely positive either as most shaman undergo intense suffering in order to become a marginalized yet powerful figure, and are more likely to be a slave to spirits or at best an ar- biter between spirit and human realms than a master of magic similar to, say, a western wizard. By positive I only mean Shamans tend to have a role in society, where those who are spirited away are not guaranteed this.

56 away from society, living mysterious and sinister lives as hermits in the mountains (Figal, 179-

80).

In The Ruined Map this liminal world is represented by the city’s underbelly of crime, transience and loss of identity. The kidnapping kami is vaguer, an elusive force or energy that draws the protagonist deeper into the mystery. The two worlds are not easily bridgeable, however, and to enter this other world, one must fully discard one’s identity. This, however, means they can never reappear in ‘our’ (read: the real) world of society. Slipping through the cracks represents a sacrifice of self similar to that of a Shaman. As shown earlier, the journey of the

Shaman begins with some sort of traumatic period of suffering, both psychical and physical, in which the self is broken down to the point that it may fluidly traverse realms and identities. The detective narrator too undergoes this trauma, as evidenced in the dreams he experiences in which he and the husband’s identities seem to converge, and after which he wakes up as a totally new person, a missing person himself. The Ruined Map is unique among the texts I am examining in that the majority of the narrative takes place pre-transformation, and represents the commence- ment, or point at which the Shamanic journey begins, without exploring the world after.

Returning to Abe’s The Box Man, although not a detective per se, this titular protagonist navigates the landscape, observing others and recording all that he sees in his notebook (which is allegedly the text the reader is accessing, although even this is troubled by fourth-wall breaking narration in which the protagonist acknowledges his inability to have actually written down events as they happened, despite previous implications of real-time narration). The text itself is interwoven with photographic negatives taken by the author (Kobo Abe), paper clippings de- scribing the issues of homelessness in Japan, as well as shorter narratives concerning acts of voyeurism similar to living in a box. It is unclear in these narratives whether it is still the Box Man

57 speaking through fragmented, schizophrenic personalities,100 or if the text represents a loose collection of related stories. In order to navigate the text, the reader must be open to these shifts and changes, avoiding imposing an order or reasoning if, counterintuitively, the text is to be accessed. The Box Man gets tangled up with a Doctor and Nurse who wish to pay him to give up the box, in order that the Doctor can himself become a Box Man, and then have himself eu- thanized.101 The novel concludes with the narrator (the original Box Man?) usurping possession of the hospital from the Doctor. He enters into a sexual relationship with the Nurse, and decides to forgo his Box exterior or shell, choosing instead the walls of the hospital. However, the Nurse disappears into what quickly becomes a labyrinthine space, an entire city inside the basement, and the narrator suggests that the entire text has been his ramblings which he has written on the box itself.102 He hears a siren in the distance and the novel ends.

Again, although it is not necessarily a work of detective fiction, it is useful to situate and contextualize the trilogy and more importantly Abe’s conceptualization of the world in which his novels are set, which I will be referring to as his cosmology. Although not expressly a mystery novel itself, the text contains many mysteries for the reader to uncover,103 inviting the reader to

100 It is interesting to note that the novel used to be part of the education of Mental Health workers in Ja- pan, as a means of experiencing the perceived inner workings of a schizophrenic patients psyche (Bolton, 207). 101 Although his death is somewhat suspect. The reader does seem to receive narration, written by the doctor, yet from the perspective of either the original Box Man or perhaps a mentally ill patient, but it occurs entirely in the second person. 102 The Box Man closes the novel by cautioning the reader to “ensure leaving plenty of blank space for scribbling [on the inside of the box]” (The Box Man, 177), suggesting that the text is written on the walls of his box. Whether this is true or another deception is left vague as he goes on to suggest that the box, being a labyrinth, has infinite space for writing/continuing the story. Kon’s Paranoia Agent echoes this in the final “Prophetic Visions” segment. 103 Purportedly if one keeps a notebook while reading, the reader can grasp the narrative in its entirety; a narrative that is cohesive, unified and simple, with one single narrator (Bolton, 207). Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, descriptions of how the reader can make sense of the narration in this way, or even what keeping a notebook reveals, are absent.

58 inhabit the role of the Shaman detective (supported by sections written in the second-person).

And if The Box Man is partially a primer to becoming a box man (read: shaman), the text acts doubly as a way to force the reader into the perspective of the shaman.104 It is of course not unusual for a text to ask its readers to step outside themselves and into the role of the detective.

However, what distinguishes The Box Man in what it asks of its readers is that it requires an abandoning of logic. The narrative, like most narratives, asks to be solved, to have a coherent order imposed. But in order to access The Box Man, the reader must give up on the imposition of logic and order, and instead participate in the playfulness of its style, as it cannot be contained within a conventional order. The reader must become not just a detective – attempting to create or enforce order – but a Shaman detective.105

Secret Rendezvous opens with the unnamed protagonist106 hearing a siren moving away, exactly how The Box Man ends, and we learn it is taking his wife to a hospital in which she ultimately disappears. Although I will not go into much detail concerning the plot until the next chapter, it involves a Kafka-esque search for the missing wife in the alien bureaucracy of a hospital that insists she was never a patient. Ties between Secret Rendezvous and The Box Man are always tenuous, as Secret Rendezvous has a coherent, although bizarre, narrative track. Although the narrator remains unnamed, if he is the Box Man (or even a box man), he has developed a

104 As mentioned previously, this is done through the text’s experimentation with multimedia and style. In many ways the narrative breaks act similarly to the Zen koan; usually an absurd or paradoxical phrase that, when repeated, is supposed to force the psyche out of its normative thinking processes and result in a brief flash of enlightenment (satori) (Suzuki, 84-5). 105 It is perhaps wrong to suggest this sort of reading would be unique to The Box Man, as one could attempt a Shaman detective interpretation of almost any work of mystery. However, The Box Man is unique in its guidance of the reader towards this interpretation 106 Interestingly this is the first book in the trilogy with third-person narration. The first-person narrator appears only briefly, and like the final narrator of City of Glass, is also an investigator combing through notebooks of the protagonist whom he has been employed to track down.

59 new identity, complete with new memories and life. If we trace the trajectory of the narrator across these three narratives, we see a detective search for a missing husband, only to find himself missing, identity-less in the city. Then we have a man encounter a vagrant in a box, and become so disturbed by it, he finds himself drawn to the life of homelessness, and disappears into a labyrinth himself.107 Finally, we have a man whose wife has gone missing, and who must navigate an alien and absurd landscape in order to find her. We have the shamanic journey, of one called (the dogged pursuit of an unsolvable case), a journey of suffering and fragmentation (The

Box Man), and finally of bridging worlds after being born anew (Blacker, 16).

In the west, as well as in Japan, Kobo Abe’s stories are considered Postmodern, and, under the framework outlined in the introduction and first chapter, much of his work can be read and understood as falling within postmodern detective fiction. It is worth reiterating that Shaman and postmodern detective fictions are not mutually exclusive categories. Given the similarities between City of Glass and The Ruined Map, it is clear that Kobo Abe would be closer to the centre of a Venn diagram mapping the two genres. However, in order to attempt to drive a wedge between the two, if only to separate temporarily for sake of definition, it is useful to take a closer look at each text.

Liminal Spaces and Disappearance

In Foucault’s discussion of discourse, he analyzes how, under contemporary regimes of hygiene the madman is excluded and ostracized, confined to a space where he is invisible, yet manageable. This is because discourse must set its limits. No discourse can be all encompassing and thus there must always be an outside. The abjection of the madman no longer threatens to

107 These labyrinths are made of cardboard, hospital walls, city streets, and perhaps most importantly, the text itself.

60 destabilize. However, in past constructions of society the role of the madman, the fool, or the drunk was one of considerable significance. Importantly they were marginal figures who still had a place in the social order. And this role was vaguely mystical, the bumbling fool who occasionally acted as the medium of truths in the same way a shaman would in traditional communities

(Pasquino, 244-6)(Foucault, 64-5). The marginality of the shaman and the madman is significant because they were both expelled and drawn in to societies, never fully being subsumed or cast out. Their marginality, however, is not the same, but parallel. Both figures are dangerous in terms of their ability to destabilize societal and symbolic order. Unlike the madman, however, the shaman is in possession of great and fantastic powers. The madman may occasionally speak truths but is kept at arms length from society, whereas the shaman fulfills an integral, yet liminal, role within it. This conceptualization of how the madman and other marginalized figures operate in relation to society is important to understanding many of Kobo Abe’s works.

Certain ideas recur in Abe’s Fiction: the power of looking and voyeurism, disappearance and withdrawal from society, and perhaps most strongly, the abject, the grotesque and the ugly.

An examination of Kobo Abe’s topics is necessary in order that we may draw out a persistent108 cosmology that runs through his work and is necessary for the Shaman detective to appear. The

Ruined Map and The Box Man focus upon missing and transient men (respectively), lost in a labyrinthine city and bureaucracy. Both novels seem at first to be much in line with many modern and postmodern works.109 Even “Auster” in City of Glass experiences the vagrancy and loss of identity as he embraces homelessness – in leaving his apartment, possessions, and even his identity behind to doggedly pursue the case by living in the alley outside the Stillmans’ building –

108 This cosmology can be found throughout his work, but for the sake of space I will only mention the trilogy outlined previously as they directly pertain to the Shaman detective. 109 Kobo Abe’s constant comparison to Kafka by critics is not entirely unwarranted, unlike many of the other comparisons to Kafka that seem to exist.

61 that parallels the collapse of the symbolic power of language to convey meaning in the novel.

This is not to suggest that Kobo Abe’s , and for that matter any works being discussed, are not modern/postmodern110 works, in as much as they contain similar qualities. However, there is a significant difference in the way in which the Shaman detective’s symbolic and literal disappearance differs from the postmodern detective. As Quinn becomes homeless in order to watch the

Stillman’s building, the novel tells us “We cannot say for certain what happened to Quinn during this period, for it is this point in the story that he began to lose his grip” (Auster, 111). Quinn’s journey has been discounted; he is, or will soon be, a madman. And like the archetypal fool in the plays of Shakespeare, the madman may speak truths that can estrange the ‘real’, allowing the audience to see the everyday (or perhaps any other ‘objective’ thing we take for granted)111 a- new, and perhaps even as re-enchanted. However, his power exists purely in the register of the symbolic while remaining, paradoxically, concretely mundane, as at the end of the day he is still mad. There is no magic, only illness.

This is not to say that The Ruined Map and The Box Man cannot be read as accounts of madness rather than shamanic transcendence; the anecdote of medical practitioners in Japan being assigned the latter novel as a medical text as a means of exploring mental illness proves just the contrary. However, and importantly, Kobo Abe’s texts leave greater room for the reader to see an alternative reading. Kobo Abe’s “cosmology” of men disappearing into other worlds could be distinctly mundane. The unnamed detective and the missing husband he seeks do, on a literal level, simply disappear into the world of underground drivers. But the crossing of borders

110 This despite the impossibility of using western terms to fully define Japanese texts. 111 Perhaps most prominently is the novels exploration of a true, God-given language that would completely represent instead of, often only vaguely, signify. It is the implied impossibility of this language that drives Stillman Sr., as well as “Auster” mad, but it serves to highlight for the reader the fallibility of day-to-day language, which is so often taken for granted as an objective and ‘true’ representation.

62 represents a rupture. The detective in The Ruined Map does explore the same physical spaces of those missing men, but always from the outside, observing. This is why he is initially assaulted by the illegal drivers upon trying to enter their cafe. At the conclusion of the novel however, once he has shed is memories and identity, he is allowed into the world; to finally enter the café of missing men unencumbered. In order to join their ranks and enter their world, he had to go through a period of trance-like reawakening112 (as represented by his several day waking dream) as a sort of initiation. However, by crossing into this other world he has become invisible113 in much the same way the missing husband had previously.

This disappearance as entering a new world – or better yet, a plane overlapping our own

– is echoed in The Box Man a number of times. The best example occurs at the beginning of the novel, with the account of a man named A who encounters a Box Man, and is so shocked by the experience he becomes one himself. A describes looking out from the box as “much more natural…much more at home” (The Box Man, 13), noting that the view from the observation hole he created displays an enchanted landscape in which he is only able to see beauty. Soon after don- ning the box, A goes out into the street and never comes back. At this point, as if cautioning the reader, the narrator states “If you are one of those who have dreamed of, described in their thoughts even once, the anonymous city that exists for its nameless inhabitants, you should not be indifferent, because you are always exposed to the same dangers as A…. where you can mix with the unnamed crowds whenever you choose” (The Box Man, 14). In the end these box men

112 This occurs through a forgetting of himself. 113 This is not to imply that he is literally invisible; he still occupies a physical body. Rather he has become unidentifiable to himself, and anyone he may have known across the border.

63 may be navigating the same physical spaces,114 but this new world of transience is distinctly separate from the normal world.

In withdrawing from society, these men disappear totally, losing name and identity, becoming statistics. They become unrecognizable to their friends and neighbours. Yet their disappearance is not a fall, a descent into madness. The irony of The Box Man is that a man who chooses to confine himself in a box experiences freedom of movement, and the ability to see things that would be denied to normal eyes; they are agents of de-doxification through an estrangement of society. These men can move between worlds and spaces without totally being consumed by them, their disappearances never complete in the same way as Quinn’s is. Perhaps most importantly, the texts they inhabit does not write them off even if society may. After going insane, subjected to the same isolation Stillman Jr was purportedly exposed to, Quinn exits the novel and is entirely replaced by the first-person narrator who finds his notes. Abe’s protagonists on the other hand remain visible and even accessible to the reader after passing into the world of the unidentifiable. They maintain their significance past the point of their disappearance (from society), exhibiting the power to traverse landscapes115 previously inaccessible. They are shamans. When Quinn disappears from the world of his narrative, it is difficult to read this disappearance as anything other than a failure of detection.

To return to a question I raised earlier, namely ‘how can one be a detective now?’, taking now to mean postmodernity, we can see postmodern and Shaman detective fiction offer up two

114 By which I mean the same streets, cafes, alleyways and hospitals. 115 The Shaman detective moves between the mundane world and liminal spaces. For example, the alleyways, and underneath overpasses. Places that would remain blank on maps or go unnoticed to passersby. In the case of The Ruined Map, the cafe becomes most representative of these spots. During daylight hours it operates as a normal cafe, accessible to the average citizen of the city. In the early mornings however, it also becomes a dispatch for drivers, and retains this status throughout the day, although only for those who are able to see it as such.

64 different interpretations. Although Auster’s City of Glass and subsequent New York Trilogy is largely concerned with the problem of writing and the inability to perfectly convey meaning, problems faced when the focus shifts from epistemology to ontology, it is evident that the problem of the writer is also the problem of the detective. For if it has become impossible to convey, and thus to receive or interpret true meaning, the detective is left with only guess work and intuition. The systems of logic and reason must ultimately fail the postmodern detective because of their limitations. However, the Shaman detective is not bound to these systems; he is free to incorporate the spiritual, mystical, and illogical to complete his task. Thus if Auster’s answer to the problem of detection is that is incompatible with postmodernity, the Shaman detective we have seen thus far in the works of Kon and Abe suggest a new system of detection. One that can grap- ple with the problems of ontology, and one that is fluid enough to deal with a world of ever changing meaning. The detective may no longer be able to answer the Question in the way that his modern counterpart did, but this does not mean that the detective must be obsolete in a postmodern world.

65 Chapter III: Place

Place concerns far more than the site of the crime or the space of the mystery. Rather, I take ‘Place’ to mean the entire materiality and metaphysicality of the world in which the Ques- tion and subsequent detection occurs.116 Central to this is physical evidence,117 upon which the entire investigation hinges. Given the significance of these things, it is not only possible but even fruitful to do a reading of detective or mystery fiction using New Materialist theory, in order to draw out the detective’s reliance on and interactions with the material. In terms of the Shaman detective this reading takes on added significance, as an analysis of the materiality of his world is necessary to understand the Shaman detective as a figure. As previously discussed, this is due to the influence of Japanese folk beliefs and individualized spirituality, coupled with an investment in enchantment and enchanted worlds. At stake within Place is the centrality of the human detective as orderer of things. From a western perspective, the detective (both classical and postmodern) is steeped in a tradition of Cartesian dualism – he (his metaphysical self or identity, or from a religious perspective his soul) is separate from more base materiality (his body or the world).

And although postmodern detective fiction troubles these assumptions – most notably Daniel

Quinn’s utter loss of fixed identity – most of these texts118 are marked by a similar dualism. Tra- ditionally, this divide lies between human and all else, although to a larger extent this divide exists between animate and inanimate as well as between actants and objects.

116 Though I will address this point in further detail later, Japanese religions and folk beliefs such a Shin- toism do not distinguish the separation between materiality and metaphysicality to the same degree as occurs in the west. 117 Evidence can include a body for instance, in the case of a murder. Finger/footprints, broken glass, a message left by an arrogant and clever criminal, or a weapon, are all necessary components in detection. 118 For instance, The City and The City which will be discussed in greater detail later on in this chapter. Most classical detective works, such as Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and other works in Agatha

66 Although it is something of a generalization, Eastern cosmologies – and specifically those popular historically and contemporarily in Japan – have not relied upon the same dualistic philosophies. Both Taoism and Buddhism hold similar concepts of a primal oneness, in which all things are one and the differentiation of things we perceive is learned, and something we must undo (Suzuki, 12)(Laotzu, 6). In undoing the differentiation and shedding our perceptions, judge- ments, and most importantly our identities, we are able to enter into and become one with an undifferentiated state. 119 Generally speaking, in the west, from both the perspective of religion and secular society, the immutable soul or self as an individual has been taken for granted. Bud- dhism, Taoism, and Shintoism, however, find their basis in this conception of an undifferentiated oneness. It is an opening up to this primal oneness that is the Shaman detective’s most important task. The illusory nature of reality as an ephemeral mask of a more permanent ‘life’ (be it Nir- vana or Heaven) seems at first to mirror western Christian traditions, yet to the religions and cosmologies examined here, there is no fixed self against which the impermanent world is defined.

For Buddhists, the self is as much of an illusion as ‘reality’, a mixture of ever changing perceptions and senses, with no unified centre (Suzuki, 73). This is contrasted with the western detective, in which the centrality and at least semi-permanence of self is and must be taken for

Christie’s ‘Hercule Poirot’ mysteries take for granted a fixed identity at the core of the individual, and the supremacy of the individual over the object. The epistemological leanings of the postmodern detective have lead to an inheriting of the western tradition of Cartesian dualism, except where such a dualism is explicitly denied. From this perspective there are living things that act (Daniel Quinn) and inanimate objects that are acted upon (Quinn’s notebook). 119 The Tao or Way, Nirvana, Satori, etc., are all examples of religious conceptualizations of this state.

67 granted.120 If the legacy of the western detective is in some ways indebted to Descartes’ pro- nouncement ‘cogito ergo sum’, then the legacy of the Shaman detective is equally indebted to the

Buddhist tenant of ‘non-being’.

Enchantment and the Shaman Detective

If disenchantment has, according to scholars like Jane Bennett, become a fairly mainstream narrative in the west, one that is sometimes also taken up by postmodernism, then the recent interest in New Materialism and Affect Theory exists as a sort of counter-mode, one that seeks to restore enchantment (re-enchant). To revisit enchantment briefly, it is an openness to the possibility of the Fantastic, that moment of hesitancy and liminal indeterminacy whilst during which something is simultaneously mundane and marvellous. Disenchantment can be read as a kind of mundane materiality in terms of how we view ourselves and the world around us (The

Enchantment of Modern Life, 11). From a modern and epistemological perspective, a disenchanted world is one without magic, where everything is or can be known. Some scholars cite the secularization of society and the advancement of sciences as the main perpetrators of disenchantment, given their destruction of creation myths that had once informed our western society

(The Enchantment of Modern Life, 15).121 For the purpose of this paper, disenchantment, at least within postmodernist detective fiction,122 will be taken to mean a closing off to, or rejection of, the Fantastic. We see this in Auster’s depiction of Quinn’s madness versus Abe’s unnamed detective’s transforming into something entirely new – the Fantastic as a delusion and the Fantastic

120 Without a defined self, good, evil, and responsibility become much more difficult topics to explore. 121 Science is of course open to an enchanted reading just as easily as it can seem to make things mundane. 122 I do not wish to do a disservice to all postmodernist theory here, as much of it is vibrant and enchanted, such as work around Hybridity and Hybrid theory (for example, Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991)).

68 as a real possibility, respectively. The postmodern detective usually participates (typically un- knowingly) with strains of postmodernist theory that are themselves disenchanted, bearing the epistemological influences of modernity. And given that the postmodern detective is responding to, and subverting the modern detective, this perpetuation of narratives of disenchantment is un- derstandable. What is ultimately at stake between the Shaman and postmodern detectives is that the Shaman detective exists in and has adapted to a world that is enchanted in ways similar to the theories of Jane Bennett, whereas the postmodern detective exists in a world – as a modernist – that is objectively unknowable, but is assumed123 to be mundanely real.

Before exploring this further, it is necessary to distinguish between re-enchantment and enchantment. Re-enchantment, on a simple level, is the process of undoing disenchantment with (or apathy towards) the material world. Enchantment, which I have defined earlier, is viewing the world as both alive and full of potential. Thus in attempting to re-enchant, one must attempt to view the world from a perspective of enchantment. Re-enchantment can only occur in the face of disenchantment, whereas is its possible to carry out an enchanted reading most texts.

As noted before, it is difficult to create a history of Japanese culture that conforms to western forms of “progress”124 of thought (modernity to post-modernity, etc), and as such, a Japanese

‘disenchantment’ is much harder to point to. This is not to say that disenchantment has not occurred, as the spread of western culture(s) through globalization has understandably had some

123 Assumed by the text, rather than just by the reader. We see this in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, where Daniel Quinn journey’s through the text’s version of New York City. The distortions and strange places are not of the city itself, but rather occur only in Daniel Quinn’s own gradually unravelling perceptions. 124 Which is to say, the way thought has ‘evolved’ in the west and is thus is generally accepted as the ‘correct’ way. Japan, in a Latourian sense, was never modern, in that nature and culture were never fully separated, unlike during western modernity (Latour, 11-12).

69 effect. Furthermore, the top-down imposition of ‘western’125 modernity was at least partially successful in imposing state religion and state cosmology, one that, like all modernities, was much more secular and ‘rational’ than previous dominant modes of thought. Where the Shaman and postmodern detective texts are most divergent appears in their commitment or lack thereof to ideas of an enchanted world. Historically, postmodern detective fiction (perhaps due to its epistemological ties to modernism) has participated in a narrative of disenchantment in the west.

Shaman detective fiction differs in that it utilizes or takes up a variety of regional folk beliefs in

Japan in order to construct or participate in a narrative of enchantment. The Shaman detective text can be read as a sort of alter-tale to western disenchantment. western theoretical works on re-enchantment are helpful in orienting Japanese enchantment for two reasons. Firstly, they help us as potentially disenchanted western readers understand better what an already enchanted text looks like. And secondly, in the reading together of enchanted texts with work on re-enchantment, we can conceptualize and reinforce a means of re-enchanting some aspects of western society, through the Shaman detective. Thus, when utilizing works discussing re-enchantment,126 it is best to keep in mind that the enchantments alive in the texts being examined are not attempting to restore enchantment127 but rather expressive of, and playing with, localized folk beliefs.128

125 Here I am not calling into question that the modernity the government sought to impose was styled after western modernity, but rather that despite attempts to mirror the west, Japanese and western cultural values mixed to form a hybridized local or regional modernity that is in many ways unique. 126 Works that are still quite useful in the discussion of the Shaman detective’s world and cosmology. 127 Nor, significantly, are they an effort to proselytize or convert audiences to previous forms of belief. 128 Keeping in mind that this may be so localized that it pertains only to a certain author’s works. Abe for instance has a cosmology that is much informed by Japanese folk belief as western postmodern and avant- garde literature, as we have seen.

70 Japanese Cosmologies and New Materialism

Shintoism also provides an interesting counterpoint to Cartesian dualism. Rather than a focus primarily on a unified oneness of all things, it instead chooses to recognize the liveliness of objects through an animistic belief system (Yamakage, 56-57). Although not itself a materialistic religion, Shintoism is concerned primarily with nature and with life (Yamakage, 54, 59). Every- day objects are always already imbued with kami – spirits or gods – creating a worldview that resembles western dualism, although with all physical objects possessing a soul or spirit instead of only humans or sometimes humans, plants, and animals. Unlike many western dualistic traditions spirit and material in Shintoism are inherent to one another, to the point where one would not discuss the kami and its material form as separate from one another (Yamakage, 63). The undifferentiated oneness of Buddhism and Taoism is also not necessarily incompatible with Shinto- ism,129 as Shintoism (and Taoism for that matter) focuses more upon the physical manifestations

(things/materiality) of that differentiation.130

However, the reconciliation of Jane Bennett’s New Materialist theory and historically

Japanese cosmologies is not quite so simple. In the introduction of Vibrant Matter, Bennett states that her “[v]ital materialism as a doctrine has affinities with several nonmodern (and often dis- credited) modes of thought, including animism” (Vibrant Matter, xvii-xviii). Throughout Vibrant

129 Historically, the blending of Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan has generated a sort of complementa- rity between the two religions’ beliefs. 130 Although outside the scope of my paper, one can draw a similar comparison between pantheism, or forms of esoteric and mystical Christianity in the west, with Buddhist oneness. From a western and/or Christian perspective, if all things come from and exist in God (the undifferentiated oneness), then, generally speaking, contemporary Christianity resembles Shintoism in its focusing upon our material lives and how oneness/God manifests itself. Both Christianity and Shintoism concern themselves with what we can learn from the differentiation or manifestations of god, as a means to accessing the religious/metaphysical truth of god/oneness. This is of course reductive and not true for every Christian, but demonstrates how we, from said western or Christian perspective, can attempt to understand religions and philosophies that at first appear markedly different from our own traditions.

71 Matter, and her earlier work The Enchantment of Modern Life, Bennett is careful to distance her philosophy from the religious and/or mystical, developing a kind of secular animism instead. At the heart of Bennett’s argument is an ethical and political theory which on some level rejects or ignores the religious aspects of Shinto’s animism. Thus in utilizing Bennett’s theories, like all western theory, there are limits in their application in terms of an analysis of Japanese cosmologies. That being said, Jane Bennett’s theoretical examination of animism is invaluable in terms of blending religious thought and critical theory in the examination of my chosen texts, and her Vi- brant Materialism’s ‘affinity’ with animism helps bridge the gap, even where there may be cosmological disagreements.

Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism redefines materialism in such a way that it decentralizes the human as the central actant or orderer of things. The things (be it objects, systems, etc.) with which we interact bear some responsibility in our actions, just as we bear responsibility in how we use the things around us. Things act upon us, as well as with us, and Bennett asks us to try and perceive the networks of nonhuman powers that shape not only our lives but also ‘reality’.

Things, according to Bennett, have agency, an ‘agential thing power’ that we often miss or refuse to see because they do not act in the same way a human or animal does, nor do they contain overt signs of consciousness (Vibrant Matter, ix). Perhaps her most evocative example, both ironic and humorous, suggests that if we are to recognize the force of things (that they are actants, not simply acted upon), we must ethically acknowledge the responsibility of trash in creating and sustaining ecological movements. For if our affective response to a pile of garbage is one of dis- gust, followed by a commitment to sustainable living, that trash has played an an integral role because of its influence. And thus the ecological movement is not just a human movement, but one participated in by humans, trash, animals, trees, etc. (Vibrant Matter, 50-51). Applying this mode

72 of thought to the detective,131 a mystery is no longer solved by one party. The detective is not a hero, but an interpreter (and the Shaman detective especially here) of things. A true detective is able to listen to what evidence tells him on a very literal level. For if it were not for the physical objects he uncovers (or fails to do so), there would be no possible solution. If we broaden the definition of the detective momentarily, the detective, at least while pursuing the Question, is not a person, but an assemblage of all things relating to the case, perhaps even the case itself, with all its known and unknown components. The detective is detection as a process, his form encompassing not just his body, but also the Place of the Question. What sets the Shaman detective apart from other detectives is his acceptance of not only his role as part of a process, but his openness to becoming and/or participating in an assemblage larger than himself. In doing so, the

Shaman detective is able to transcend the traditional detective in order to more fully engage in the case.

Jane Bennett’s secular animism also helps bridge the gap between western theory and

Japanese cosmology in another sense. In attempting to illustrate a world imbued with living matter yet without God/gods/kami, Bennett creates a picture of how a western audience (for whom matter is generally thought of as dead or inanimate) can imagine a materiality that exists somewhere between Shinto’s animism and dead materialism, allowing for a much smaller theoretical leap between the two. This allows us as a western audience to envision how a Vibrant Material- ism could operate in an entirely secular and/or almost scientific sense, before attempting to access more spiritual iterations of this theory. In discussing the atomism of the Greek philosopher

131 Here I mean the detective in general, encompassing all detective figures I have mentioned.

73 Lucretius,132 Bennett states: “Lucretius tells us of bodies falling in a void, bodies that are not life- less stuff but matter on the go, entering and leaving assemblages, swerving into each another”

(Vibrant Matter, 18). This is a particularly useful conceptualization of both animism and Vibrant

Materialism. All matter, down to its smallest building blocks, is enlivened, and more importantly animated. This liveliness opens up almost unlimited possibilities of ‘assemblages’ configured and reconfigured in new and unexpected forms. It is this very possibility of a world awash with living matter as a multitude of energies and forces, that I define as enchantment.133

New Materialism’s critique of Postmodernity

A useful way to look at a secular animism is through Bruno Latour’s134 theory of the

‘Parliament of Things’, in which he outlines a new ‘constitution’ under which the rights of objects are recognized. In creating a Parliament of Things, Latour seeks to recognize the networks of people and things – which can include objects, traditions, technology, and nature – responsible for everyday life. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour attempts to refute the postmodern, modern, and antimodern, as they all hinge upon what he sees as the false divides of modernity: the dualisms of subject and object, and of nature and society (Latour, 47, 142-143). This

132 It is important to note that animism (as well as shamanism) is not something that belongs entirely to Eastern philosophy, with many religious and philosophical forms of animism appearing throughout western history. These forms of thought, both in the west and east, have become largely outmoded in academic and scientific communities as naive and superstitious (Vibrant Matter, 17-18). The prominence of animistic thought in Japan is largely due to the continued popularity of Shintoism – through government mandates – whereas Christianity has largely confined similar beliefs to its more esoteric and mystical sects. It is also worth noting that recent developments in quantum physics and related scientific fields have begun to re-embrace enchanted and ‘nonmodern’ beliefs. For an example, see Fritjof Capra’s work The Tao of Physics (1975). 133 The Shaman detective, compared to other forms of the detective, adheres most readily to a New Mate- rialist reading. However, there is significant potential for using enchantment and New Materialism in an analysis of detective fiction in general. 134 Latour’s work is considered by many scholars, Jane Bennett among them, to be one of the starting points of New Materialism.

74 is not to suggest that Latour wants to discard modernity (hence his rejection of the antimodern) but rather to re-establish what he sees as a balance between science, nature, and society that ex- isted before they were divided: a state he names as nonmodern (Latour, 138). Bennett’s work seeks to further break down this dualism, suggesting what we have taken as merely objects are in fact also subjects. In broadening subjecthood to all things that can act, locomotion and intention aside, the subject/object boundary is blurred, and one’s position as subject or object, if not both simultaneously, is fluid. Acting and action too must be redefined under New Materialism, and

Bennett views anything that can effect or impress upon something else as an actant (Vibrant

Matter, xi). Responsibility becomes much more difficult to assign, as all subjects are always already a network of subjects. No one and no thing acts alone. The resultant state mirrors and creates a very similar problem to that of the postmodern detective. If there is a myriad of things acting all the time, there can be no one criminal. Similarly, the Shaman detective must be able to determine the important voices in all the noise of the ‘Parliament of Things’.

In Vibrant Matter, Bennett briefly discusses how her version of vital matter differs from the Marxist criticism of the Fetish. The Fetish of Marxist theory is an adoration of or enchant- ment135 with objects. However, in elevating the object to the level of human – to assign surplus value and worth to inanimate things – the relationship between humans and their labours become hidden. The risk of Materialism is to see only the thing at hand, a computer for example, and not the labour and people who made it. Fetishization occurs when we begin to see the object as magical, it is self perpetuating and inexplicable, an object taken on faith. Thus from a Marxist per-

135 Here I use enchantment in a darkly magical sense, one is bewitched by the object.

75 spective, New Materialism could be seen as a giving into the fetishization of the object, at the ex- pense of oppression. To overcome the fetishization of commodity, Marxist theory attempts to de- mystify the processes that remain hidden in contemporary life so that we do not become enchanted by, and thus blinded to, the systems of commodification and oppression (Vibrant Matter, xiii-xiv). Enchantment and demystification then run at odds; demystification may come at the ex- pense of magic and the unknown, but in doing so it frees us. We can draw similarities between

Hutcheon’s de-doxification and Marxist demystification as both seek to strip us of our ideologies and preconceived notions. Inevitably those ideologies are replaced by new ones, but this only means de-doxification and demystification must be a continual process.

Bennett attempts to answer this problem through her theory of assemblages. Her New

Materialism does not seek to replace the human subject with the object, but rather to recognize the subject/object network the two form. Rather than fetishize New Materialism would require, to use the same example above, the recognition of all the people and things that caused the computer to come into existence. Importantly, understanding the agential powers of the computer also leaves room for understanding the ways in which the computer-as-fetish holds sway over us as humans and consumers. For Bennett, demystification, and thus postmodernity as she sees it, is insufficient in scope. Although demystification and de-doxification are necessarily a constant process, without re-enchantment we risk becoming disengaged from society, culture, technology and nature. This is because we as humans need an alter-tale to move forward. Ethically speaking, enchantment, according to Bennett, is necessary for contemporary society to reinvest itself in contemporary life. And this enchantment requires a recognition of the power of things as very real forces that have the power to effect and be effected. New Materialism is a way to move forward from demystification, and a means by which humanity can recognize that we are not central

76 to human/non-human networks, but rather parts of a greater system.

Shamanic Places

Thus far I have been speaking of ‘other worlds’ or ‘spiritual realms’, but within the shamanic belief system(s) the boundaries between realms are porous. The most illustrative examples are two of the episodes of Paranoia Agent discussed in the first chapter: “The Holy Warrior” and

“No Entry”. In “Holy Warrior”, Detective Maniwa has apprehended a boy who claims to have perpetrated the attacks under the guise of Shonen Bat. The narrative departure of ‘real world’ detectives entering a video game could be explained away as a way to make visible the frenzied imagination of a disturbed boy in order to draw the viewer in. However, evidence suggests that

Maniwa does move between realms, especially given that he carries the sword in later episodes that he obtains in the ‘game’. In “No Entry”, Ikari, Maniwa’s partner, and decidedly rational detective, escapes into a fantasy world. He confesses he became a police officer to be a hero, and thus appears to have constructed a simple version of a golden age Japan in which everyone is good, and all crimes petty and largely harmless. He stays in what appears to be his own fantasy landscape or psychological defence, and since he is the only character animated as three dimen- sional in this world, it suggests to the viewer that the world is hallucinatory or constructed by

Ikari as a means of escaping from his unsatisfying reality. However, he is rescued from this world by another character, interestingly Tsukiko Sagi, as she begins to awaken to the dangers of

77 repression. She does not communicate with him from ‘reality’, but quite literally comes to inhabit what appears to be his made-up world. This fluidity between realms and spaces is also seen in both the novel and film Paprika,136 which will be discussed later on in this chapter.

Space within postmodern detective works is, however, often mundane and static. In City of Glass, even after the Stillmans disappear, their apartment remains the same for ‘Auster’;137 the contents may have disappeared but the physicality of the rooms remain unchanged. Although the Fantastic may be at work in some senses on the level of narration,138 there is no indication at all during the text that ‘Auster’s’ New York is separate from the actual, real and mundane New

York. That is not to say, however, that some postmodern detective fiction does not play with the idea of Place in similar ways to Shaman detective works, that is, by imagining Place as enchanted.139 China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009) is an example of a postmodern detective text that plays with Place yet never takes it out of the realm of mundane materiality. A relatively recent work, it seems at first to be a police procedural mystery set in an fictional Eastern Euro- pean country, and as such contains many of the familiar tropes of traditional or epistemological detective fiction. However, the way in which Miéville plays with the psychical implications of borders and the political mapping and remapping of Place is decidedly postmodern.

136 Published/Produced 1993 and 2006 respectively. 137 This is true of Auster’s own apartment, which is rented out to someone new after his prolonged disappearance. 138 For example, the blending of meta-fictional tricks and hallucinations by the ‘Auster’, whose journal purportedly makes up the text the reader is reading. 139 To briefly revisit what I mean by enchantment, it is the possibility for the Fantastic to occur, in which matter is vital and animated.

78 Space in China Miéville’s The City & The City140

China Miéville’s The City & The City is a postmodern mystery novel set in the fictional

Eastern European twin city-states known as Besźel and Ul Qoma. Upon discovering the body of a foreign PhD student Mahalia Geary – who had previously been studying in Ul Qoma – dumped in Besźel’s territory, inspector Tyador Borlú is dragged into a conspiracy concerning the twin cities and a mythical third city known as Orciny. What makes The City & The City unique is the way in which the cities overlap. Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same physical space as one another; two cities sharing the same geographic space. Each city has its own language, culture, ar- chitecture, style of dress, laws, economy, and government. Complicating matters, the one city is not simply divided into two, but rather the two city-states are jumbled together geographically.

This creates three types of spaces: crosshatched, alter, and total areas. Crosshatched areas are spaces in which Besźel and Ul Qoma intersect, areas such as some streets and parks, and other public spaces.141 Alter spaces are the spaces that belong entirely to the opposing city, for example the Ul Qoma state building may border Besźel streets, but it itself is entirely within the psychical and legal space of Ul Qoma. Finally, a total space is the opposite of alter: it is a space entirely in one’s own city, such as a personal residence.

140 China Miéville is best known for his work, academic and literary, in the genre of the New Weird. Sim- ilar to Slipstream fiction, the New Weird, considered a postmodern form of writing, is difficult to define in that it participates within several genres simultaneously, as opposed to following one set of genre rules. New Weird is often influenced by horror, fantasy and science fiction, and is thus a literature of the Fantas- tic, but it is unlike any of those genres on their own. The fluidity of the New Weird makes it a useful bridge between the postmodern and Shaman detective fiction, in that it its playfulness with genre and form resembles a lot of Japanese genre fiction. 141 In each city, these spaces will have different names and contexts. A safe street in Ul Qoma and a dangerous street in Besźel may literally the same, physical and geographical street, but their contexts are kept from bleeding over into the other city.

79 In order to enforce what are entirely psychical rather than physical borders, the twin-cities are watched over by a shadow organization known as Breach. Breach’s jurisdiction is any incident that can be classified as ‘breaching’, which is a transgression of the boundaries between the two cities. Law requires that both Besźel and Ul Qoma citizens learn from a young age to ignore the people and spaces of the alter city. Even driving along roads requires that a citizen] ‘un- see’ the vehicles from the alter city. In order to legally cross from one city to another, one must go through the border crossing which exists at the geographical centre of both cities. Once having crossed, a citizen leaves through the same entrance one entered geographically, but are now occupying space in the alter city, and must intuitively un-see their home city. Later on in the novel, when Detective Borlú is investigating in Ul Qoma, he is unable to simply cross space and enter his home without recrossing the central border, even when he can see it from his hotel (and more importantly must un-see it). Those who commit a breach are immediately detained by

Breach and are never seen again.142 Later on it is revealed that Breach recruits those it has caught,143 in order to staff its own secret police. And although Breach is an independent power that can be invoked by either police department (when a breach is suspected) or when an actual breach is documented, Breach is unable to touch a citizen who is not obviously breaching.144

The status of the two cities makes detection particularly difficult; evidence, bodies, or even a suspect can occupy the same geographical space of the detective, but politically exist

142 With the exception of children, who are granted some leniency while they learn to separate space, and tourists, who are deported and banned from entering both city-states. To clarify, Breach the organization will be referred to using a capital ‘B’, whereas the crime will be referred to as breach with a lower case ‘b’. 143 Breachers can also be executed if their crimes are serious enough. 144 This limitation is important for the climax of the novel, in which Detective Borlú is tracking the suspected criminal, who has trained himself to be so vague in terms of his movement through spaces that it is impossible to tell whether he belongs to one city or another, making it near impossible to tell if and when he has committed a breach.

80 across a border. Even ‘seeing’ the evidence and returning to it once one has crossed to the appro- priate side counts as a breach. Cooperating with what should be local police is as complicated as working with an international police force across borders. Jurisdictions are confused, ignored, or even handed off to the alter city when evidence is vague. Politically, the landscape is also fraught, with unificationist terrorists and ultra- nationalists who wish to see the cities merged, or their alter city destroyed. The central mystery at first concerns Orciny – a mythical third city that both Mahalia Geary and her professor are investigating, although rumours of this city are considered to be based on pseudoscience within academic communities. However, Detective Borlú begins to suspect that there is a hidden third city, one that might pull the strings and keep rumours of itself quiet – hence the breached murder of Mahalia – existing in contested zones between Ul

Qoma and Besźel. These marginal sites are spaces that exist in neither city (psychically), yet are assumed to exist in each city’s alter city.145 Ultimately the conspiracy of Orciny turns out to be a misdirection in the case in order to disguise the killer’s intentions, but the reader and Detective

Borlú learn that there is indeed a third, contested, and liminal space, which is the space of

Breach.

In investigating the central crime, Detective Borlú breaches, and is subsequently pun- ished and recruited by Breach. Detective Borlú's breaching of borders in some ways mirrors some of the characteristics of the Shaman detective. Although very much a postmodern detective himself,146 Detective Borlú is forced to occupy a liminal role in becoming a Breach investigator,

145 For instance, a building believed to be part of Ul Qoma in Besźel, and part of Besźel in Ul Qoma, and thus ignored by both cities and citizens, constitutes this sort of liminal space. 146 The City & The City reads like a combination of a police procedural like CSI and an absurd, bureaucratic Kafka-esque nightmare.

81 traversing hidden landscapes and spaces. Perhaps this is why he, unlike so many postmodern detectives, is ultimately successful in his investigation, while losing his political Besźel identity.

What distinguishes Miéville’s text from Shaman detective fiction is that space’s alterability still exists in a purely psychical dimension. Space cannot physically change, but rather it is one’s perceptions, and thus their interactions with spaces, that are fluid and variable. Contrast this with much of the Shaman detective works in which space is always already composed of both ‘spirit’ or vitality and physical matter. Besźel and Ul Qoma only exist in different realms in the sense of politics and nationalism. However, this integration of two disparate ‘realms’, to the point of in- separability, mirrors the material and spiritual crosshatching of Shintoism. Conceptually, one must make the leap from political borders to metaphysical ones, but the holding and understanding of two paradoxical notions in The City & The City serves as an example of how we can envision a secular and religious animism working side by side. It should be noted here that theoretical work around The City & The City focuses on the way ideology shapes perception. Though I think this is a valid interpretation of the novel, my reading centres more upon the metaphysical, rather than political, connotations of Miéville’s work.

The Two Paprikas

Paprika is the title of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel, published in 1993, and Satoshi Kon’s animated film adaptation, released in 2006. Paprika, and especially the film version, offers an interesting contrast to The City & The City from a similar perspective. Miéville’s novel and Kon’s adaptation are both fairly contemporary, and furthermore concern themselves with place, falling respectively into the two categories I discuss in this chapter. The City & The City is a fantastic

82 example of Place that is uncanny but mundane – it is distinctly postmodern. Paprika on the other hand conceptualizes Place as living and fluid, and in doing so mirrors both religious and secular animisms. Unique for this figure, both novel and film feature a female Shaman detective protagonist, and as such, for the remainder of this section the Shaman detective will be referred to using female pronouns. Both versions will be analyzed in tandem, although greater emphasis will be placed upon the film adaptation.147 Paprika is set in a near future Tokyo, in which dream analysis has become the primary method of diagnosing and treating mental illness.148 Doctor

Atsuko Chiba and Doctor Kosaku Tokita, preeminent psychoanalyst and overweight and child- like genius respectively, employees of the Institute for Psychiatric Research, and unlikely lovers, are the protagonists of both versions. From the outset, Atsuko and Tokita are on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize for pioneering machine-based dream analysis, something that has been only marginally legal in Japan up until this point. The reason for its blurry legality is that Tokita has developed a machine that allows dreams to be recorded and even participated in by psycho- analysts. However, dream participation, and even simply dream watching, carries a danger in that an analyst is susceptible to ‘catching’ the mental illness of the patient through the images in their dreams.149 The controversy this generates in the Institute leads to a fierce competition, with

147 This is for two reasons. The first is that the film, being a visual medium, is able to capture the blurring of the boundary between dreams and reality to a greater degree than the novel is, as the novel also is more focused on its characters instead of its events. Secondly, the novel is problematic in its treatment of ho- mosexuality, gender, and mental illness. The problematic narration however is not carried over into Kon’s film adaptation, and as an analysis of the novels treatment of sexuality and gender falls outside the scope of this paper, it is a matter of personal preference to work primarily with the film. 148 Although depression and anxiety appear in Tsutsui’s novel, all mental illness is reduced to schizophrenia. The two former conditions are treated as initial symptoms for the latter. 149 The novel treats mental illness as a communicable illness, whereas the film suggests it is necessary to have distorted dreams directly imprinted upon one’s psyche, rather than simply watching those images unfold, that can drive someone mad. For a similar example, see the 2010 film Inception, in which one can change someone’s behaviour by planting an idea deep enough in their psyche through dreams.

83 the two ‘villains’, Doctors Morio Osonai and Sejiro Inui, also known as ‘The Chairman’,150 stealing experimental technology and eroding the walls between dreams and reality. This is problematic because Tokita has recently developed a new machine, called the ‘DC mini’, which allows its users up to enter and exit dreams at will. This ability comes at a price however, as makes the user’s dreams susceptible to invasion as well. Eventually the area of effect and the number of those who have been exposed to the technology cause a deterioration in the boundary between dreams and reality, and the two begin to blur together.151

To complicate matters, Doctor Atsuko Chiba illegally moonlights as a ‘dream detective’ named Paprika, a young freckled girl who always wears a red shirt and jeans. In becoming Pap- rika, Dr. Chiba dons a wig, fake freckles, and generally acts younger and more outgoing. The role of ‘dream detective’ is already very close to a Shaman detective. As a dream psychoanalyst,

Paprika must seek out the cause (the Question) of her patient’s neurosis, before aiding them in recovery (Shamanic healing/the revelation of ‘truth’). She does not force order, patterns or narratives upon her patients, but rather acts as a dream medium to reveal them. Where Detective Ma- niwa of Paranoia Agent is exemplary of the Shaman detective’s journey, Paprika perfectly represents the synthesis of roles required: Detective, Shaman, Analyst, Healer, Medium and

Dreamer.152 In Tsutsui’s novel Paprika is not so much an alter-ego of Doctor Chiba as she is a

150 In the film adaptation, Osonai and the Chairman are driven to evil due to their jealousy of their col- leagues’ success and their commitment to older, non-technologically mediated forms of analysis. In the novel however, both are members of a Judeo-Christian, Freudian, homosexual cult of misogynists, who are constantly trying to rape Doctor Chiba, in order, by the logic of the novel, to enslave her. 151 This is due, according to both novel and film, to ‘anaphylaxis’, in which the brain develops a somewhat supernatural sensitivity to dream journeys, and only needs technology to awaken its potential to do so(Paprika). 152 Again, it is the fluidity of dream logic or ‘dreason’ that the Shaman detective almost always participates within, even outside of dreams.

84 separate person, or at least one of two distinctive personalities occupying her body.153 In Kon’s version, however, Atsuko/Paprika’s position as a Shaman detective is much clearer. Paprika is a role Atsuko takes on when the situation calls for it. Her fluid transitions between ‘identities’ mirrors, and allows for, her fluid transitions in and out of dreams. It is this adaptation to flux and her mastery of dream logic and reason154 that makes her the lead psychoanalyst and dream detective employed by the Institute, and is ultimately what allows her to overcome Osonai and Inui through dream combat. Atsuko/Paprika is a liminal figure, existing always somewhere between dream and reality. Dream detection requires the same fluidity and skills as a Shaman detective.

Her understanding of ‘dreason’ parallels the Shaman detective’s commitment to il-logic, paradox and intuition. She does not force order but is able to ‘see’, to channel, a pattern that would be hidden to the epistemological detective.

Dream detection within Paprika operates as an excellent visual literalization of the significance of Place for the Shaman detective. Much like traditional and/or epistemological detection, the detective must seek out clues that allow her to map out a pattern and find an answer to the overlying mystery. These clues, under the framework of New Materialism, act upon the detective in the sense that they provoke ideas within her, allowing her to move on to the next step in the case. However, except in mysteries where the criminal leaves clues intentionally, such as the notes left by the titular jewel thief of the Pink Panther series of films, the material, and by extension the place of the crime, is not orchestrated.155 As discussed in the previous chapter, there is no guarantee, especially in terms of the postmodern, that the ‘clues’ carry any significance at all.

153 Furthermore, in the novel, Paprika seems to represent the normally cold and distant Atsuko’s re- pressed sexuality. 154 The logic of dreams, or ‘dream reason’, is abbreviated to ‘dreason’ in the novels translation. 155 This is true only at the level of narration – the Place of mysteries is always orchestrated by the author of the text.

85 Dream Detection, however, is the opposite of postmodern and/or ontological detection in that

Place exists within the psyche of the patient, and thus is constructed already saturated with significance. In fact, the opposite is true for Paprika, for once she has entered a dream, the dream space is filled with information. Every object she encounters is placed by the patient’s subcon- scious for a reason: to symbolize or gesture towards an underlying condition or state. It is of course true that until dreams escape the minds of patients into reality, Place in Paprika lacks materiality. They are psychic emanations and incorporeal signs. In the next section I will go into further detail about the animism of dreams and material reality of Paprika, but it should be noted here that the Place of Dream Detection (at least while the dreams lack materiality), resembles the cosmologies of Shinto and Buddhism in that dream ‘matter’ is fluid, saturated with significance, and most importantly animated. Furthermore, Dream Detection, and by extension Shaman Detec- tion deal with an overabundance of information and signification. However, a world saturated and/or alive with information presents less of a problem than it does for the postmodern detective. Having come to terms with the limitations of epistemological detection, the Shaman detective operates best when she is part of the greater assemblage of detection as a medium rather than a pattern maker.

The Blurring of Dreams and Reality

Both versions of Paprika are narratives of the Fantastic. After stealing and mastering the

DC minis, Osonai and Inui become so adept at entering the dreams of others (often without the victim being hooked up to a dream machine) that the walls between dream and reality are eroded. This leads to logic and reason being supplanted by ‘dreason’, granting the two doctors

86 the ability to manipulate reality in the way they can control dreams.156 Atsuko/Paprika represents

Tokyo (and humanity’s) only defence given her previous and illicit experience as a dream detective. Central to Osonai and Inui’s plan, in both the novel and the film, is to steal the dream of a catatonic schizophrenic patient and implant it into the dreams of others, creating a fear of communicable mental illness and discrediting the Institute’s dream research. In Kon’s film version, schizophrenia becomes a generalized madness, and is represented by an ever-advancing, unstop- pable, and riotous parade of household objects and traditional Japanese dolls. This parade becomes a runaway train when it exits the psyches of its victims and spills out into reality, no longer controllable by any one person. In the film, Paprika is able to stop the parade by literally consuming Inui’s psyche, from which the parade originally emanated.

Paprika represents a literalized version of the Shaman’s journey and powers. Rather than channeling hidden powers in mysterious ways (such as Paranoia Agent’s Radar man/Detective

Maniwa), Kon’s version visualizes for the audience alternate planes of existence. The film’s ani- matedness gives the audience a visual depiction of the blurring of two realms together as dreams begin to crash into reality, effecting all the citizens of Tokyo. The mad parade of dolls and objects pours out into the streets. Giant dolls walk amongst buildings. Paprika grows butterfly wings, and then eats a giant shadowy Inui. Place itself becomes warped, and more important, alive with unlimited possibility and potential. Much like a dream itself, characters are able to move from place to physical place without any regard for geography. In one scene, Detective

Konakawa, a patient of Paprika/Doctor Chiba, runs down a corridor from in his reoccurring

156 Although this is not always the case. ‘Dreason’ being illogical, it is often ungovernable, and dreams often can escape the control of the dreamer. The 1999 film The Matrix, in which ‘reality’ is really a computer simulation, shares many similarities with Paprika.

87 dream and out into the actual Institute. Soon after, he manages to shoot dream Osonai, who then splits, his physical form dying from the dream bullet and his bleeding dream self appearing in reality (outside of the dream in which he died) in its place. Similar to Kon’s Paranoia Agent, even after the dreams have been separated from reality and dispersed, physical scars remain in the city – most notably a crater where the final battle between Paprika and Inui occurs – suggesting to the audience that this was not all just a dream or hallucination. Or perhaps more importantly, it suggests that dreams and hallucinations are powerful, not illusions but liminally tan- gible things and events. This blurring is also significant in that it creates a Fantastical realm somewhere between mundane materiality and a sort of psycho-spiritual immateriality; a realm that in many way mirrors the world as conceived of in Shinto, and one we can access through the

Vibrant Materialism of Jane Bennett. Furthermore, this liminal space is one that visually manifests, and in some senses makes contemporary, the spaces the Shamanic healer interfaces with in order to work her magic.

Paprika and Japanese Cosmologies

From the perspective of Japanese history, there are significant parallels between the mad parade of Paprika and the Hyakki Yako E-maki.157 The Hyakki Yako E-maki (dating from the

16th century) is a scroll depicting a parade of hundreds of household objects that have transformed into demons (known as Tsukumogami: Kami or gods/spirit of tools), often to revenge themselves on previous owners for improper treatment (Foster, 8-9).158 These scrolls are repre-

157 In fact, the demonic or supernatural creature parade is a trope seen throughout Japanese media. For a non-Shaman detective example, see the 1994 Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko. 158 This is the most famous example in Japanese history of objects coming to life, but Japanese folklore is rife with depictions of ‘living’ objects, including other accounts of the Hyakki Yako.

88 sentative of a non-dualistic cosmology, in which spirit and matter are not separate but always already mixed. The nightmare parade of Paprika is representative of physical objects cast away, psychological detritus manifested in appliances and dolls divorced from their mundane contexts.

The image is haunting because the parade is so lively; its participants are noisy, jovial, and quite literally animated. Unlike Paranoia Agent, the denizens of Tokyo are shocked by this display of the Fantastic, making Paprika unique once more in the Shaman detective genre. It is only Pap- rika, who has traversed dream landscapes and adapted to ‘dreason’, who registers no affective response to the overlapping of the realms of dreams and reality. For most of the denizens of To- kyo the escaped dreams and mad parade wreaking havoc on their city is neither normal nor, before it happens at least, even possible. Importantly, in the film adaptation Paprika is also the only one able to restore balance in much the same way a Shaman would, by banishing the ‘spirits’ back to their separate realm. Paprika fulfills her role as a Shaman and psychoanalyst; she ban- ishes the nightmares or spirits and re-establishes order for not just an individual patient, but for the entire city.

Although seemingly based in science and realism (the dream world is only troubled psyches made manifest in reality by an ill-designed machine), both the novel and the film incorporate elements of Japanese religion. Paprika often conducts her business out of a bar, which is owned by two men. In the novel, once dreams have escaped into reality, they reveal themselves

(only to the audience) to be some sort of twin deities, or perhaps even manifestations of the Bud- dha, and are ultimately responsible for restoring balance to the world.159 In the film version there is no explicit reference to these bartenders being supernatural or spiritual beings, yet the bartenders are oddly unaffected by the presence of dreams in reality. Furthermore, they do manage to

159 Their actions, however, go unrecognized by any of the characters, and the deities return to their bar- tender forms at the end of the novel as if nothing ever happened.

89 save Paprika by distracting the giant nightmare version of Inui, suggesting they too have some familiarity with dreams and ‘dreason’.160 Regardless of whether they represent traditional Japa- nese gods or something else entirely, their presence situates both versions of Paprika further within the realm of the Fantastic, and in the case of the novel, the spiritual. This bridges the gap between a secular science-fictional cosmology and traditionally religious animism by incorporating traditional Japanese folk belief, something that occurs frequently within Shaman detective texts.

Both versions of Paprika are significant in the ways in which they bridge the theoretical gap between the two seemingly oppositional – or at least non-complementary – cosmologies of religious and secular animisms. In blending the science fictional with fantasy,161 Paprika envi- sions a world very much imbued with life. Given that dreams defy the logic of mundane reality

160 Also worth noting: in the film version, the bar Paprika operates out of is actually an internet chatroom with a jazz bar user interface, and the bartenders are part of this chatroom. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear whether or not the website is part of a dream (as we see characters physically interacting in the space of the bar after accessing the website). Characteristic of Satoshi Kon’s work is the collapse of not only dream and reality, but of media and reality. Significantly, before the invention of the DC mini, dreams were viewed and accessed through a computer monitor. Furthermore, even with the DC mini, dreams never cease to be technologically mediated, even where the medium becomes invisible (such as anaphylaxis and dream sensitivity). Thus in Kon’s version, the bartenders may not be gods in a Buddhist or Shinto sense, but they are most certainly beings that do not normally exist in mundane reality. 161 Both science fiction and fantasy are genres of the Fantastic. However, taken generally, science fiction, at least in the west, tends to veer away from the supernatural or magical that fantasy typically embraces. Furthermore, science fiction tends to operate in the realm of the speculative, in which most things are, from a contemporary scientific standpoint, at least theoretically possible. The truth of this of course varies from work to work, yet western science fiction is typically more readily involved in mundane and non- animistic realities. This is not to suggest that western science fiction is disenchanted, as the opposite is quite often the case, but rather that it operates much closer to a narrative of scientific realism than other works of the Fantastic. Another distinction is science fiction often attempts to base its world in a somewhat rational and logical cosmology, whereas fantasy tends to appeal to magic and the spiritual. Carl Freedman’s theory of “cognition effect” in science fiction posits that science fiction need not be rational, but rather that its texts position themselves in such a way (usually by utilizing scientific language) towards estrangement to suggest a sort of mundane and/or scientific validity that fantasy does not (Freed- man, 17-18).

90 yet are introduced to said reality through machines,162 and furthermore given the introduction of

‘dreason’, both a religious or at least supernatural and secular animism can be held at the same time. Things act – the parade of dolls and appliances destroy buildings and trample people be- neath them – because they possess a spirit. This spirit is truly Fantastic in the Todorovian sense as it rejects categorization; the viewer is never certain that what we are witnessing is marvellous or mundane. Furthermore, this spirit or liveliness is at once the agential thing power of Bennett and the kami of Shinto. Of course, Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism does not suggest our appliances will join a nightmare parade or the Hyakki Yako and seek revenge for mistreatment or negligence. Rather, Paprika can be read as both an interpretation and animating of Bennett’s theories. Given the difficulty of visually demonstrating the way in which inanimate material creates affects and forms assemblages, their locomotion within the film demonstrates similar ideas in a much more literal way. Paprika’s interaction with the parade may be much more epic than our day to day encounters with things, but the relationship between animate and inanimate remains the same, in that they are all actants, even if an object lacks obvious conscious agency. Similarly, it is Paprika’s willingness to act alongside objects, neither denying their agency nor asserting her control, that allows her to defeat Inui.163 In allowing herself to become a part of an assemblage

(or several: the assemblage of the mystery itself), Paprika opens herself up to knowledge and possibilities inaccessible to her otherwise.164

162 Machines that obey the laws of mundane or scientific reality and thus can be considered to be less Fan- tastic than uncanny or simply strange. 163 This is true too of Agent Maniwa, Agent Cooper, and any other Shaman or Shaman-esque detective. 164 Dr. Chiba has an advantage in this respect, in that she started out as a dream detective. Within the world of the novel/film, analyzing dreams requires one rarely interferes, but is instead carried along through the dream. Chiba/Paprika is a dream medium, and this in many ways requires the Taoist principle of wuwei, as previously discussed. Thus, Paprika is already used to and comfortable with acting as one of many actants in a network of things both animate and inanimate.

91 Coda: So whodunit?

“To begin, the story that seems to have ended spins back to the place where it began. Fol- lowing each stepping stone and connecting the dots, you find the eternal castle of recurring dreams. No mystery remains unsolved forever. And no answer is without mystery. Well then, we bid you farewell” (Paranoia Agent, Ep. 13). So ends the final episode of Paranoia Agent, asking its audience to return to the beginning as the answer to the Question is only temporary, and the process of detection must begin anew. This lack of fixedness is the central problem for the detective operating under the framework of the postmodern. I will spare the reader requests to return to the beginning of this thesis and re-immerse herself in its mysteries, if only because my intention has never been subterfuge or obfuscation. However, in invoking Agent Maniwa’s last words of the series, I hope to point the reader towards the potential of a Shaman and New

Materialist reading of detective fiction in general. Furthermore, the Shaman detective’s utility in helping the reader to recognize a world already enchanted – when coupled with New Materialist works such as the theories of Jane Bennett, or even the increasing (re)fascination with the Fan- tastic and Supernatural within contemporary western society –165 should not be underestimated.

It is fitting that the shaman, a legacy, however distant, of almost all cultures, has returned to help guide us through the ontological questions of postmodernity.

With the growing popularity of the New Weird and other postmodern revisions of pulp and genre fictions, there has been an influx of works that exist somewhere between the postmodern and Shaman detective iterations I have discussed here. Of note is Lauren Beukes’ novel Bro- ken Monsters (2014), which subverts the traditionally realistic serial killer drama by incorporating a malevolent spirit that resembles both Paranoia Agent’s Shonen Bat and Twin Peaks’ BOB,

165 The X-Files and Twin Peaks are returning to television after many years off the air.

92 set in contemporary Detroit. Crime fiction and the occult have often overlapped, but shows such as season one of HBO’s True Detective (2014-Ongoing) have begun to alter the relationship between the two by incorporating elements of the Fantastic. Set in the American South and what seems to be initially grounded in realism (deranged killers, fascinated with cults and the occult) is gradually revealed to be somewhere between reason and fantasy, a liminal ‘reality’ in which the audience is never sure if what they are encountering is the uncanny or the marvellous. In many cases, the repopularization of H.P. Lovecraft and his Weird Fiction contemporaries166 accounts for the blending of the ever-popular police procedural with the cosmic terror of unknowable and otherworldly beings.

The rise, for lack of a better term, of New Materialist Mystery fiction is not analogous to the Japanese Shaman detective, but can be seen as a response to the enchantment of postmodern and secular society, for good or for ill, and as such both genres seem to fulfill a similar purpose.167 The resurgence or increased mainstream support of radical and/or fundamental Christi- anity and its attack on science in the United States is one such force of enchantment. Others include the increasing rapidity of technological innovation, where science is beginning to look increasingly like magic; new discoveries that show us that there is still so much unknown, and that challenge the way we think, like the recent uncovering of the Higgs Boson particle; the popularity of environmental movement(s), especially in terms of Deep Ecology and fascination with pre- and non-modern methods of sustainability; the New Age movement that, though waning in popularity still receives some mainstream recognition in works like the reality television show Long

166 ‘New Weird’ is the term used to describe contemporary works that exhibit similar qualities to earlier works of ‘Weird’ Fiction. 167 This purpose is, of course, outside the more general purpose of most works, being to entertain and/or inform.

93 Island Medium; a general fascination with alter-tales to modernity, usually in the form of traditional knowledge like herbal medicine, meditation, and yoga; and perhaps most generally a reac- tion against the secularity of contemporary society into a kind of increasingly spiritual worldview.

Unanswered Questions and Future Mysteries

Going forward, I would like to use the research I have conducted here as a framework for further analysis of detective fiction in general, perhaps exploring a variety of regional variations of postmodern and/or Shaman detectives. New Materialist readings of other texts and genres would also be fruitful. Although I have discussed the ways in which many western postmodern texts assume matter to be mundane and/or unenchanted, it would be interesting to read postmodern works from the perspective of Vibrant Materiality and enchantment. At its most fundamental level, my project here has been to synthesize a style of reading utilizing texts that lends itself to particular texts. Although I have gone to great lengths to show how the Shaman detective differs from his postmodern counterpart, the fluidity of the postmodern genre(s) – especially the New

Weird – seems to lend itself readily to New Materialist interpretations. The Shaman detective differs from the postmodern detective in his ability to navigate postmodern, and perhaps

Latourian nonmodern, landscapes and problems of ontology, without meeting the same failures and anxieties. Where the Shaman detective plays within a text, the postmodern detective is played by the text. In this sense, both can be genres of enchantment and play, although with very different connotations. I readily accept Jane Bennett’s call to an ethical enchantment through a recognition of the ‘Parliament of Things’, and I think a necessary step in furthering this agenda is a New Materialist interpretation of a variety of medias.

94 Were I to begin this thesis again, or even to have double the time and space to explore the

Shaman detective, there are a few questions I would attempt to answer. First and foremost, though focusing on this particularly Japanese figure, I would like to explore other regional forms of the detective instead of a general North American iteration. Such work falls outside the scope of my thesis as is, but it would help to generate a clearer picture of the state of the detective globally, as I am certain regional folklore and alter-tales are mixing with the western detective to create a variety of diverse and fantastical forms that have been left largely unexplored. From a theoretical perspective, I think my analysis of the Shaman detective would have also benefited from the use of primary sources of Japanese literary analysis. Given the language barrier and lack of translation, I am certain I have left a great source of information untapped, which is a problem I will seek to remedy in future projects. Lastly, I would have liked to more thoroughly explore the history of detective and mystery fictions in Japan, in order to gain a better understanding of how the western noir and pulp detective novel initially adapted to a Japanese context, and the other figures that may have evolved from that original synthesis. Though also outside the scope of this thesis, it would be interesting to explore Japanese detective fiction that more closely resembles its western counterparts and whether or not the same Shamanic figure and enchanted world exists in more traditionally classical Japanese detective fiction.

If the figure of the Shaman is one of guidance and healing, one western secular society has largely abandoned as primitive, or cut off from its original, holistic context,168 what benefits can we gain from attempting to reintroduce this figure to our postmodern landscape? In redefin- ing and reinvigorating play, in discarding strict frameworks of logic and reason, in opening our-

168 The Shaman has arguably been separated into a number of figures: the priest, the detective, the doctor, the therapist, etc.

95 selves up to wuwei, satori, intuition, and instinct, we may find that the Shaman is an integral figure for navigating contemporary life. For if we begin to recognize the vital material around us, to see the ‘Parliament of Things’, we need a figure on which we can model our own fluidity and playfulness. As Jane Bennett argues, we can no longer rely on demystification alone to illumi- nate our world, because demystification is not enough. We as humans need mystery, twilight states into which the Fantastic can seep. Without wonder all we are left with is mundane material. And from this perspective, we deny possibility not only to the assemblages of things with which we are constantly coupling and uncoupling, but we deny possibilities to ourselves. We know that truth and knowledge can never remain fixed; everything is always changing, and so must our questions and answers. We are all part of an infinite game, whether we like it or not, for no mystery remains unsolved forever, and no answer is without mystery.

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