Interpreting Anime This page intentionally left blank Interpreting Anime Christopher Bolton University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London An earlier version of chapter 1 was previously published as “From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from Origin to Oblivion,” Mechademia 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 295–315. An earlier version of chapter 2 was previously published as “The Mecha’s Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (November 2002): 453– 74, and in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fictions from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 123– 47. An earlier version of chapter 3 was pre- viously published as “From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater,” positions: east asia cul- tures critique 10, no. 3 (Winter 2002): 729–71. An earlier version of chap- ter 4 was previously published as “Anime Horror and Its Audience: 3x3 Eyes and Vampire Princess Miyu,” in Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 66– 76. An earlier version of chapter 6 was previously published as “The Quick and the Undead: Visual and Political Dynamics in Blood: The Last Vampire,” Mechademia 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 125– 42. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ- ten permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-0402-9 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-0403-6 (pb) A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Kija, Mariko, and Erika This page intentionally left blank Contents A Note on the Text ix Introduction. Read or Die: Reading Anime 1 1 From Origin to Oblivion: Akira as Anime and Manga 23 2 The Mecha’s Blind Spot: Cinematic and Electronic 59 in Patlabor 2 3 Puppet Voices, Cyborg Souls: Ghost in the Shell and 95 Classical Japanese Theater 4 The Forgetful Phallus and the Otaku’s Third Eye: 137 3x3 Eyes and Anime’s Audience 5 Anime in Drag: Stage Performance and Staged 169 Performance in Millennium Actress 6 The Quick and the Undead: Blood: The Last Vampire 197 and Television Anime 7 It’s Art, but Is It Anime? Howl’s Moving Castle and 233 the Novel Conclusion: Summer Wars 253 Chronology 261 Acknowledgments 263 Notes 265 Moving Image Sources 289 Bibliography 293 Index 305 This page intentionally left blank A Note on the Text With the exception of one or two titles mentioned in passing, all of the anime discussed in this book have been released in North America, in DVD or Blu- ray editions with English subtitles. These subtitles provide reliable translations, but for the quotations in this book I have made my own translations from the original Jap- anese dialogue. (Readers consulting English dubbed versions of the anime may notice some differences, since dubs often feature freer translations and incorporate changes to the original scripts.) Japanese names in the body of the text are given in Japanese order, family name first. ix This page intentionally left blank Introduction Read or Die Reading Anime This is a book about interpreting Japanese animation, or anime, but what does it mean to “read” or interpret a visual text? To ad- dress this question, I would like to begin this book about reading anime with an anime about reading books. Masunari Kōji’s three-part anime R.O.D: Read or Die (2001– 2) follows the adventures of a group of secret-agent superheroes em- ployed by the British Library who are sent on missions to recover stolen volumes. The protagonist is Yomiko Readman, a biblioma- niac who has to surround herself with books and who possesses the ability to manipulate paper to form objects that do her bid- ding (Figure 1). Her nemesis is the legendary fifteenth- century Zen priest and poet Ikkyū, resurrected with cloning technology and now intent on world destruction. Ikkyū leads a band of his- tory’s great artistic, scientific, and literary figures, who have been similarly cloned, augmented with fantastic powers, and harnessed for Ikkyū’s evil cause. These include the seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang (the historical protagonist of the Ming novel Jour- ney to the West), the eighteenth- century artist, author, and scholar Hiraga Gennai, the nineteenth- century French entomologist and nature writer Jean Henri Fabre, World War I spy Mata Hari, and, in a key role, composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Read or Die is an engaging comic drama with an entertaining setting, lively pacing (driven by Iwasaki Taku’s strong musical score), striking visual compositions, and colorful, even compelling characters. The premise and especially the title seem tailor made for a literary critic. But in fact, this work has an interestingly am- bivalent relationship with prose literature and the act of reading books. Although Yomiko’s obsession with books is linked to her 1 FIGURE 1. R.O.D: Read or Die’s protagonist Yomiko is obsessed with books and can manipulate paper to construct tools or even stop bullets. But the paper is blank, and there is not much actual reading portrayed in the action-oriented anime. All stills are from the Manga Entertainment DVD (2003). INTRODUCTION 3 powers, the anime treats it as a kind of unhealthy preoccupation that cuts her off from reality, and a key theme is her gradual reali- zation that real people and real relationships are more important than literature. In this context, it is no accident that this anime’s villains emerge largely from the world of literature and art, which is seen as a threat. The villains are plotting to recreate a lost Beethoven sym- phony, which is to be reconstructed from stolen books originally in Beethoven’s personal library, then performed by the resurrected Beethoven clone and broadcast to the world. The symphony is a weapon, a doomsday device: it is such an immersive or powerful aesthetic experience that it causes its listeners to turn away from real life and kill themselves. In this way, the theme of Read or Die turns out to be the peril of becoming too obsessed with art and literature. But even though the plot of Read or Die turns on reading, read- ing itself is not portrayed very explicitly or convincingly in this anime. With a cast of characters that references arts and literature ranging from Muromachi Zen Buddhism through Chinese classics to German Romanticism, one could imagine the series developing a very complex set of nested narratives, where the fictional plots of all these books and the characters’ lives could weave together and comment on one another. But Read or Die does not have this sense of intertextuality: it never delves into the fictional worlds of these different literary texts.1 Rather, the books in the anime seem to exist more as physical objects than as literary or textual ones: the villains’ literary backstories supply their costumes and powers but little else; there are scenes of Yomiko wading through piles of books in her house or in bookstores, but there is virtually no discussion of the books’ content; there are not even many scenes that show her reading the books she has collected. She does use her powers to assemble physical objects from reams of paper that she carries around in a suitcase, but each sheet is tellingly blank. Overall, Read or Die seems divided: for the most part it immerses its audience in action and emotion in a way that short-circuits any self- conscious consideration of what it means to be reading or viewing this work. And yet it does have this metatextual layer, one that encourages the viewer to see him- or herself in Yomiko 4 INTRODUCTION and ask if he or she is becoming too immersed in the fiction of this film. The opening credits seem to embody this division between the physical and the immediate on the one hand, and the medi- ated and the textual on the other. The credits begin with several screens of digital text that are cleared away by human hands, and then we see a series of action scenes intercut with stylized images of nude female bodies, painted with the names of the anime’s cre- ators. The written text, expressing the circumstances of the an- ime’s creation, is forced to compete with these naked bodies for the viewer’s attention (Figure 2). All this suggests some interesting questions. Why does Read or Die return obsessively to the theme of reading and yet encoun- ter such difficulty depicting the familiar experience of reading a book? Are there meanings that anime can represent (or ways of representing meaning) that elude other media? Most broadly, how is an audience’s experience of anime different from other media like printed prose? This volume addresses these general questions by asking more specific ones about how specific anime work, visu- ally and narratively. This brings me back to the question of what it means to read anime, the subject of this book.