The Shaman Detective: a Comparative Reading of Enchantment and Animism in Contemporary Japanese Detective Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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 (c) Copyright by Samuel Dennis 2015 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 de- tective fiction (across different media), which I have termed the Shaman detective. A liminal fig- ure that combines Japanese folk cosmologies with contemporary detective work, the Shaman de- tective 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 epistemolog- ical 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 de- tective 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 de- tective. Keywords: Enchantment, Japanese fiction, Jane Bennett, New Materialism, Detective Fiction, Shamanism, Postmodern Fiction, Shintoism, the Fantastic. ii 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 excel- lent 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. iii 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 al- low 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 unre- lated 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 prod- uct – 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 de- tective 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 lo- cal 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 fig- ure, 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 west- ern detective fiction into two categories:2 classical detective fiction3 – which I define as any de- tective 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 im- portant 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.