Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation
Cinema Anime
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Cinema Anime
Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation
Edited by
Steven T. Brown
CINEMA ANIME
© Steven T. Brown, 2006.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cinema anime : critical engagements with Japanese animation / edited by Steven T. Brown.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Animated films—Japan. I. Brown, Steven T.
NC1766.J3C56 2005 791.43�340952—dc22 2005052934
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-0-230-60621-0 ISBN 978-1-4039-8308-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403983084
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7060-2
For Astro Boy’s Biggest Fan, Gabriel
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Contents
- Screening Anime 1 Steven T. Brown
Part I Towards a Cultural Politics of Anime
- “Excuse Me, Who Are You?”: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi 23 Susan Napier
- The Americanization of Anime and Manga: Negotiating Popular Culture 43 Antonia Levi
- The Advent of Meguro Empress: Decoding the Avant-Pop Anime TAMALA 2010 65 Tatsumi Takayuki
Part II Posthuman Bodies in the Animated Imaginary
- Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives 81 Sharalyn Orbaugh
- Animated Bodies and Cybernetic Selves: The Animatrix and the Question of Posthumanity 113 Carl Silvio
- The Robots from Takkun’s Head: Cyborg Adolescence in FLCL 139 Brian Ruh
Part III Anime and the Limits of Cinema
- The First Time as Farce: Digital Animation and the Repetition of Cinema 161 Thomas Lamarre
- “Such is the Contrivance of the Cinematograph”: Dur(anim)ation, Modernity, and Edo Culture in Tabaimo’s Animated Installations 189 Livia Monnet
Bibliography 227
Notes on Contributors 239
Index 241
viii CONTENTS
1
Screening Anime
Steven T. Brown
Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind. . . . The brain is the screen. . . . Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion [automouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain.1
—Gilles Deleuze
Cinema Anime charts the terrain of contemporary Japanese animation,one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production in the last twenty-five years. This collection of essays offers bold and insightful engagements with anime’s shifting negotiations with gender identity, anxieties about body mutation and posthumanity, and the asymmetry between two-dimensional cel animation and three-dimensional digital cinema. The contributors to Cinema Anime dismantle the distinction between “high” and “low” cul- ture and offer compelling arguments for the value and importance of critical scholarship on popular cultural flows in the transnational spaces of translation from the local to the global.
Rather than recapitulating the conventional distinction between “cinema” and “animation” that devalues anime as somewhat less than the cinematic standard of live action film, Cinema Anime explores anime’s hybridity of different styles and modes of image making. Instead of being defined as a pale reflection of national cinema, anime is repositioned along a continuum of visual production mapped in relation to the inter- secting and multidirectional lines of transnational movement out of which political, economic, social, technological, ethnic, and aesthetic flows emerge, coalesce, enter into conflict, and take flight. Authors discuss anime by Japanese directors ranging from Kon Satoshi to Oshii Mamoru, from
Rintark to Watanabe Shinichirk. This incredible diversity of approaches to anime, styles of animation, and modes of distribution begs the question: Where is the anime screen?
After all, it is not this question but another that one might have expected to read at the outset of a collection of critical engagements entitled Cinema Anime: that is, What is anime? By posing a different question—Where is the anime screen?—this volume seeks to avoid the essentialization of anime into the unitary, fixed object that is presupposed by the other, more ontological question: What is anime? Anime is so multifarious in its forms and genres, its styles and audiences, that one needs to pose the question differently: Where is the anime screen? By asking where instead of what—more specifically, by situating anime in relation to a “screen”—the question suggests that anime—anime “as such”—is nothing apart from the spaces of viewing and the technologies of projection (or illumination) that are utilized for the purposes of “screening” anime.
However, here, again, one is faced with the issue of multiplicity, since the “screen” of anime is hardly singular or univocal. That is, the “screen” of anime is as diverse as its modes of distribution and delivery. One’s viewing of anime will surely be different depending upon whether one views it as a 35 mm film projected on a large screen in a darkened theater in Tokyo, as a weekly late-night show viewed via cable or satellite television in an apartment in San Francisco, as a DVD projected on a rear-projection screen in a living room in Taipei, as a VCD (Video Compact Disc) pur- chased on the streets of Hong Kong (or perhaps as a BitTorrent file downloaded via peer-to-peer filesharing online) that is played on the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) of a laptop computer on a flight from Seoul to New York, or as a QuickTime movie playing on an iPod or cell phone while one rides the subway to work in Singapore. In other words, the screens of anime—its forms of projection and transnational spaces of viewing—are as diverse as anime’s forms of content and modes of distribution. But the anime screen is more than this—it is more than the multifarious vehicles of delivery, forms of projection, and spaces for viewing. Where else is the anime screen? Another possible answer to this question is offered by the thought-provoking animated television series Serial Experiments Lain (1998).
An adolescent girl named Iwakura Lain sits before her computer staring blankly at the screen (see figure 1.1). Blue rectangles reflecting the screen are projected onto Lain’s eyes, suggesting that she is transfixed by what she sees. Serial Experiments Lain, the highly acclaimed anime series directed by Nakamura Ryltark, which aired on Japanese television in 1998, is a coming- of-age story for the Internet age. Serial Experiments Lain presents a world that is split into two spheres that are distinct but nevertheless linked. On
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the one hand, there is the analog world “around us, a world of people, tac- tile sensation, and culture.” On the other hand, there is the digital world “inside the computer, of images, personalities, virtual experiences, and a culture of its own.”2 The series dramatizes the extent to which the primal scene of translation is no longer between speech and writing, or between consciousness and the unconscious, but rather between the analog and the digital. Every time we talk on a cell phone, compose e-mail, watch televi- sion, listen to music, or surf the Web, we enter and re-enter the scene of analog/digital translation. In the midst of this interminable scene of translation, Serial Experiments Lain explores the crisis that emerges when the distinction between the analog and digital worlds begins to dissolve in the person of an introverted thirteen-year-old girl named Lain.
After the suicide of one of her classmates, strange things begin to happen to Lain. She is haunted by the ghost of her dead classmate, Chisa, who continues to send her e-mail messages, explaining that although she has abandoned her body, she is still alive in the virtual world of the Inter- net. The spectrality and uncanniness of the Internet is further underscored by the emergence of Lain’s online doppelgänger whom others encounter in cyberspace in online chatrooms. Lain struggles with the duplicity of her identity in cyberspace after her virtual alter ego, called “Wired Lain,” takes on a life of its own, spreading nasty rumors online and engaging in various forms of antisocial behavior designed to disrupt the smooth functioning of the status quo.
SCREENING ANIME 3
Figure 1.1 Lain’s eyes reflect back her computer screen (Serial Experiments Lain).
Serial Experiments Lain traces the emergence of the Internet and the transformation it has brought about in the technologies of subjectivity that govern human forms of self-reference, categories of perception, and forms of communication. One of the most commonly accepted ideologies of cyberspace, at the time Serial Experiments Lain was first aired on Japan’s TV Tokyo network in the late 1990s, portrayed the Internet as a zone of unbridled democracy and freedom of expression, yet Serial Experiments Lain offered a counterdiscourse, linking the digital realm, referred to as “the Wired,” to surveillance technologies and a control society. In Serial Experiments Lain, the world of cyberspace is haunted by the anonymous eye of the Panopticon. What was all too often ignored by early Internet theorists in their enthusiasm for the “egalitarian” open-endedness of web surfing was the extent to which the reader-user is subjected to the pre- programmed constraints and filtered selectivity of Web site nodes consti- tuting a virtual network of links. Choices and options, no matter how decentralized, exist only to the extent that web programming and search- engine algorithms make them possible. As the Internet spread to every cor- ner of the world and was embraced as a sort of “digital democracy,” Serial Experiments Lain warned us of the need to be more attentive to the new “technologies of the self”3 enframing the subjectification of Internet users. How does the increasing accessibility of the Internet to users all over the world contribute to the disciplinary programming of gendered subjectivi- ties and bodies circulating in the analog world? How do techniques of online user-profiling and information-gathering figure in the emergence of new disciplinary technologies and the constitution of the Internet as a power- knowledge grid? How does the ideology of the Internet as “digital democracy” conduct readers into a rarefied and regulated field of possibilities— manipulating and controlling individual bodies, turning them into normal- ized, serviceable subjects directed toward strategic ends and goals? These are just a few of the questions evoked by Serial Experiments Lain.
Enframing the figure of the cyborg Lain, who is transformed into a “machinic junkie”4 (see figure 1.2) during the course of the thirteen- episode series—entwined from head to toe in electrical cables, with computer-generated holographs superimposed over her entire body, her perception almost completely mediated by the Internet—are the many abstract machines that channel and program her cybernetic body.
It is much easier to identify and domesticate the threat posed by tech- nology when it appears in the Hollywood form of the Terminator (with red eyes aglow), but technology is not always reducible to the technical machines, hardware prosthetics, and high-tech implants that are on display in science fiction films. Machines in the wider, more generalized sense of “abstract machines”5—a concept introduced by philosophers Gilles
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Deleuze and Félix Guattari—include social machines, political machines, economic machines, scientific machines, media machines, ecological machines, even aesthetic machines. Such abstract machines never operate in isolation but always in relation to larger arrangements and concrete assemblages. The value of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “abstract machine” is that it makes visible the less conspicuous, but no less constitutive, networks of control and stratification.
An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axioma- tizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real machinic effects. . . . Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecologi- cal, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic— but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent.6
Abstract machines operate as an exteriority that becomes immanent in the human subject, programming the forms, movements, and subjectivities of bodies in a controlled and premapped space. At its most provocative, cyberpunk anime such as Serial Experiments Lain demystify the workings of abstract machines—such as the family, the school, the city, the media, and the Internet—foregrounding their operations so that they are no longer simply taken for granted.7
SCREENING ANIME 5
Figure 1.2. Lain the machinic junkie (Serial Experiments Lain).
It is the trope of the screen that is used to greatest effect to suggest the operations of such abstract machines in Serial Experiments Lain. Various types of screens—from computer terminals to televisions, from classroom blackboards to large-format outdoor video screens—appear in Serial Experiments Lain and serve as devices that occasion Lain’s confrontation with abstract machines and the “control society”8 they constitute.
Moreover, it is noteworthy that when Wired Lain manifests herself, she is often represented with video scan lines, intermittent video noise and static, as well as vertical hold malfunctions and video ghosting—all of which serve as metonymies for the mediating force of abstract machines and their associated screen(ing) technologies. Nowhere is philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s claim that “the brain is the screen” (see epigraph) more applicable than in Serial Experiments Lain. Not only does the series show that “the brain is the screen” for Internet addicts such as Lain, but by explicitly visualizing the reflection of the blue computer screen onto Lain’s eyes as she looks back at the camera from the computer’s point of view— with the audience placed in the position of the computer screen (or just behind the terminal)—it suggests that we viewers and scholars of anime are also the screens of anime. If one accepts the argument of Deleuze that cinema not only “puts movement in the image” but also “puts movement in the mind,” tracing the circuits of the brain—the brain-as-screen—then perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that the movement of images produced by that particular form of cinema called “anime” also traces the brain circuits of anime viewers around the world and their transnational relations to abstract machines. In other words, the anime viewer is placed in a position similar to that of Lain, whose eyes reflect the screen’s projec- tions even as the screen traces the circuits of her brain. But I would go even further: if one considers the incredible rate of consumption of anime out- side of Japan, in regions as diverse as East and Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia, then it is not only the brain that is the screen of anime. One would have to say, in an era of global capitalism and the accel- erating transnational traffic of cultural flows, that the world is the anime screen.
Japanese anime currently constitute an estimated 60 percent of all forms of broadcast animation worldwide, and have shown no signs of slowing down.9 Anime business (including box-office revenue and licensed character goods) generates $4 billion a year in the United States alone and earns leading Japanese anime studios, such as Tkei, as much as 35 percent of their revenue each year from foreign markets.10 As Brian Ruh points out below in his essay “The Robots from Takkun’s Head: Cyborg Adolescence in FLCL,” it is through forms of popular culture, such as anime, that a new role has emerged for Japan in the global market, one
6 STEVEN T. BROWN
which is as much cultural as it is economic. One of the most important questions for anime scholars today is whether the dissemination of Japanese media worldwide marks the emergence of a new form of cultural imperialism (or form of “invisible colonization”11) that is not simply a variation on the American cultural export industry, or whether anime’s status as transna- tional “edge culture,” which frequently questions the status quo while at the same time lacking clearly identifiable Japanese national, racial, or ethnic markers (referred to by Japanese commentators as anime’s quality of being mukokuseki, or “without nationality”), undercuts (or at least complicates) the reconstruction of Japanese national/cultural identity through its very participation in the decentralizing networks of media globalization and global capitalism.12
As the essays included in this volume show, the answers to this question are as diverse as the forms of anime that are being created and distributed. Speculations about where the anime screen is (and who or what it shows) are as multifarious and differentiated as the genres that are screened by anime and as transnational as those who are doing the screening. This collection of essays entitled Cinema Anime is itself a screen for such questions about the status and location of the anime screen, including its transnational status as a popular cultural flow amidst other cross-fertilizing flows (including money, goods, technology, information, media, and bodies) in an era of decentralizing media globalization, localized con- sumption and appropriation, and the proliferation of indigenized Asian modernities.13
Part I: Towards a Cultural Politics of Anime
The three essays in the first section share an interest in anime’s provocative engagement with the politics of identity, whether defined in terms of the processes of self-invention, the shaping of gender identity by the power of media, the strategies of cultural negotiation at play in intercultural encounters between anime fans and their favorite characters, or the alle- gorical identities produced by historical revisionism and parodies of worldwide capitalism.
In her essay “ ‘Excuse Me, Who Are You?’”: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi,” Susan Napier examines the work of maverick auteur Kon Satoshi, one of the most innovative and challeng- ing animators in recent years. Utilizing self-reflexive cinematic techniques, complex narratives, and multidimensional characters, Kon’s anime address difficult sociocultural issues facing contemporary Japan, such as homeless- ness, the patriarchal exploitation of women, the ever-expanding power of
SCREENING ANIME 7
the media, and the politics of historical revisionism. From his early screen- play for Magnetic Rose (1995) to his latest theatrical releases, Napier explores Kon’s recurring engagement with “the fluctuating relation between perfor- mance and identity, the tension between the ideal and the real, and, above all, the very porous line between illusion and materiality.” In Kon’s work, Napier notes that such issues are typically played out in relation to complex female characters who exalt the feminine gaze over the masculine, sometimes leading men towards danger or even death.
In Magnetic Rose’s elusive character Eva—the hologram of a famous diva of the same name, who “stands at the nexus point between real and unreal”—Napier sees a character not unlike that of Hitchcock’s famous femmes fatales from Vertigo (1958) and Rebecca (1940). Oscillating between presence and absence, Eva evokes a nostalgic desire for lost home that is ultimately frustrated by the realization that the home appearing in one’s memories is as elusive and insubstantial as a simulated holo- gram or will-o’-the-wisp. Napier reads Magnetic Rose as a critical medita- tion on the dangers of nostalgia, which destroys those who get caught in its snares.
Next, Napier analyzes Kon’s breakthrough film Perfect Blue (1997), a tour de force murder mystery (or “urban Gothic”) in the tradition of Hitchcock and De Palma, which immediately established Kon as one of the most important new directors of anime. Perfect Blue clearly exemplifies Kon’s continuing preoccupation with the illusoriness of perception and the performativity of identity. Perfect Blue repeatedly undercuts the audience’s perception by showing that what the viewer initially takes to be the diegetic reality of the characters is, in fact, a mise-en-abîme (performance within a performance) on stage or television, an hallucination or dream, or a para- noid projection. The performative status of celebrity enters into the mix in the form of a pop idol named Mima who is confronted by the actions of her apparent doppelgänger, who criticizes her for not measuring up to the image her fans have of her. By exposing the obsessions and mechanisms of fandom, which consume the commodified idol both economically and emotionally, Napier shows us how Kon demystifies the constructedness of celebrity and the complex gender politics involved.
Napier continues to explore the interrelated problems of gender iden- tity, memory, and perception in relation to Kon’s more recent theatrical releases, Millenium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003), which create a space for a more collaborative exchange between the sexes—one that is not as overdetermined by the male gaze. Particularly in the case of Tokyo Godfathers, which deals with the efforts of three homeless people, includ- ing an aging transvestite named Hana, to create a nontraditional family in order to take care of an abandoned baby on Christmas night, the status of
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gender marking and role playing is often more complicated than the simple binarism between feminine and masculine permits.
Described by the New York Times as a “headlong cartoon love letter to the grand tradition of post–World War II live-action Japanese cinema, from samurai epics to urban domestic dramas to Godzilla,”14 Millenium Actress presents the biography of film idol Fujiwara Chiyoko against the backdrop of the history of Japanese cinema. Although the performativity of identity and the blurring of boundaries between reality and entertain- ment media continue to be at issue, Napier notes that the relationship between the celebrity actress and her audience is much more mutually empowering in Millenium Actress than it was in Perfect Blue. Moreover, the backdrop of Japanese film history serves as a device to suggest the medi- ated status of all historical representations, whether appearing in an historical film epic, in the sanitized history books read by students, or in the recollections of the actual agents and victims of history.
In “The Americanization of Anime and Manga: Negotiating Popular Culture,” Antonia Levi takes a critical look at the reception history of Japanese animation and manga in America. Wherever one looks today in America, Levi notes, it seems that forms of Japanese popular culture are everywhere: children’s anime, such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, as well as animated series for adolescents, such as Cowboy Bebop and Inuyasha, have become a normal part of growing up in the United States. Translations of manga of every style, genre, and intended audience may be found at main- stream bookstores and chains. The proliferation of online discourses about anime and manga, including the production of fan fiction (stories composed by fans about their favorite characters), which are disseminated via Web sites, chat rooms, and blogs, is truly staggering.
Levi traces the emergence and genealogy of “hybrid fandoms” in the United States that combine Japanese and American forms of fandom (including links to science fiction, fantasy, and comic book fandoms) with their respective styles of “cosplay” and other forms of interaction with the narratives and characters popularized by anime and manga. Although, she notes, such an explosion of interest in Japanese popular culture has not necessarily translated into a deeper understanding of Japanese society and history, rather than viewing the hybridity of American fandom devoted to anime and manga as simply a failure to appreciate Japanese cultural differ- ence, Levi analyzes the strategies of cultural negotiation that are at play in such intercultural encounters.
One of the most important points of intercultural contact for American anime fans is the practice and consumption of “fansubbed” anime. Levi takes a close look at the practices and ethics of fansubbing—the subtitling and illegal redistribution of Japanese anime by fans. Although their modes
SCREENING ANIME 9
of distribution may have evolved from videotape copies to DVDs to Internet filesharing, many fansubbers have gone out of their way to demonstrate their lack of interest in gaining profit from such copyright violations, even going so far as to burn their fansubs once a legal, subtitled copy becomes available from the company that owns the distribution rights. Rather than seeking profit, most anime fansubbers aspire simply to provide decent, accurate translations (in some cases, approaching annota- tions) before they are released commercially with subtitles that all too often are less precise and more domesticated for foreign audiences.15
Another important aspect of anime fandom considered by Levi is the dynamics of fan activism. Although “American fans of anime and manga are painfully aware that their importance to the Japanese industry is mini- mal,” since “they are not the main customers”—the Japanese audience is— that does not stop American fans from actively lobbying and waging organized campaigns targeting American networks and distributors to pick up or continue popular anime series, such as the fan campaign to rescue the anime Sailor Moon from cancellation. Levi expresses cautious optimism that, rather than resulting in a tsunami of Japanese cultural imperialism, the globalization of animation and comics, as well as the high degree of American fan participation in the dissemination of anime and manga, may yet result “in a surge of interest in East Asia as a whole,” as Chinese animation and Korean manga (mangwa) become more readily available.
In “The Advent of Meguro Empress: Decoding the Avant-Pop Anime TAMALA 2010,” Tatsumi Takayuki analyzes the boundary between three- dimensional cinema culture and two-dimensional anime culture that is displaced in the avant-pop anime TAMALA 2010, created by the Japanese rock ‘n’ roll duo “t.o.L” (trees of Life) in 2002. TAMALA 2010 tells the story of a young, female punk cat named Tamala, who flees to CatEarth after surviving a feline holocaust on her home planet of Edessa. While being raised in Meguro Ward, Tokyo, Tamala dreams of returning to her home on Edessa, incessantly postponing her nostalgic desire with the refrain, “Wait just a moment longer.” Tatsumi sees in this narrative of destruction and rebirth, of lines of flight and nostalgia, numerous half-encrypted references and meta-messages. As Tatsumi points out, TAMALA 2010 is a postmodern patchwork of citations, including references to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the stories of Philip K. Dick.
In addition to such literary and filmic reinscriptions, TAMALA 2010 recycles the landmarks of Tokyo’s cityscape, with particular attention paid to Meguro in Tokyo, using such geographical citations and their historical
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connotations to enframe Tamala’s story. One particular locale in Meguro, the famous spa resort Gajoen, situated between a Catholic Church and a love motel (it also served as an inspiration to Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away), blurs the boundary between the sacred and the secular in ways paralleled by the figure of Tamala herself. By using the town of Meguro as a “floating world not only between the sacred and the secular, but also between Eros and Thanatos,” Tatsumi argues that TAMALA 2010 “provides a perfect stage for the Death and Rebirth of our heroine Tamala.”
In addition to its many layers of citationality, both cultural and geo- graphic, TAMALA 2010 presupposes a notion of negative theology, which is first announced in the second half of the movie in a parody of an academic lecture, entitled “Circulation and Negative Theology in the Age of Capitalism: On the Affinity between Catty & Co. and the Ancient cult of Minerva.” This underlying system of negative theology, which is paradoxi- cally characterized by its simultaneous “lack of center and the transcen- dentalist privileging of the centerless,” functions as the engine of capitalism in TAMALA 2010, according to Tatsumi. The figure of Tamala, who is repeatedly murdered and reborn, with her image multiplied all over the planet, “thereby transcending the boundary between existing and not existing,” is interpreted by Tatsumi as the embodiment of this system—the “centerless center” of worldwide (feline) capitalism—and, at the same time, its parody.
Part II: Posthuman Bodies in the Animated Imaginary
The three essays comprising part II of this collection offer a series of engagements with posthumanism in anime by analyzing the status of human-machine hybrid formations in relation to changing visions of the city, cyborg politics and the transgression of boundaries associated with the liberal humanist subject, and the role of technology in the negotiation and formation of adolescent identity.
In her essay “Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives,” Sharalyn Orbaugh explores how humans have envisioned their relationship to technology and the physical environments they inhabit, examining the history of representa- tions of spatiality in narratives involving the hybridity of human-machine embodiments. She analyzes how the city is represented in relation to its other—“the wilderness, the unsophisticated provinces, or the suburbs, depending on the time period”—and “how changing visions of the city parallel changes in the way people conceptualize human embodiment.” In considering key narratives about cities and modes of embodiment,
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including such literary and cinematic texts as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Auguste, Comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1886), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its sequel Innocence (2004), Orbaugh furthers our understand- ing of how new modes of subjectivity emerged at various historical junc- tures in relation to cyborgs and cities, both real and imagined.
Orbaugh traces a genealogy that begins with modernist narratives that presuppose “a spatial model based on vision and on a colonialist imagi- nary, which emphasizes distance and distinction.” In the modernist stories of European writers such as Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, men of science set off on expeditions to the wilderness in order “to explore and often to colonize,” and then returned to the safe urbanity of the city. Next, Orbaugh considers exemplars of the late modernist model, which empha- sizes the haptic domain, the contiguity of spaces, and the interchangeability of elements. In late modernist narratives, rather than “traveling out from the stationary and unchanging city through the wilderness and back,” the focus shifts to “the dynamism of the city itself and the links between cities.” Rather than heading to the wilderness, Japanese writers, such as Mori Kgai, travelled to the cities of Europe and then returned to Japan with their new-found knowledge. The Italian Futurists figure prominently into this account because of their vision of the city as “an efficient, fast-moving machine” with “interconnecting networks (of communication and trans- portation),” traversed by human inhabitants who function as “the organic force inside the machines, interfacing with them at specific points (the telephone, telegraph, train, cinema), thereby animating them.” Mori Kgai’s translation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” into Japanese in 1909 ensured that the Futurist movement had a future in Japan, where writers such as Inagaki Taruho wrote stories that “glorified machines and the technologies of urban space.” Later, directors such as Fritz Lang and Tezuka Osamu showed the dark underside to this vision of the city: rather than empowering human beings across class lines, such ver- tically stratified urban machines set up zones of exclusion that reinforced class and social differences.
The last stage considered by Orbaugh is the postmodern model, which underscores a “collapsing of space and the ‘intercorporation’ of elements.” This last stage is illustrated through a detailed examination of the recent anime films of Oshii Mamoru, including Ghost in the Shell and its sequel, Innocence. With particular emphasis on Innocence, Orbaugh analyzes “the technologically negotiated merging of the organic human with the inor- ganic structures of urban life” and the uncanny effects that are produced thereby. What demonstrates the posthumanism of Oshii’s animated meditation is the ability of his characters not merely to tolerate the
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mechanical uncanny evoked by various dolls, automata, and androids, but to actively express sympathy for such inorganic beings. Precariously balanced as they are between the human and the nonhuman and always susceptible to becoming-other by the very “permeability of boundaries” that defines relations between the cityspace and its inhabitants, Orbaugh concludes that Oshii’s posthuman cyborgs, rather than demonizing artificial life, actually learn to love the mechanical uncanny.
In “Animated Bodies and Cybernetic Selves: The Animatrix and the Question of Posthumanity,” Carl Silvio extends Orbaugh’s reflections on the status of posthumanism in anime through the lens of The Animatrix (2003), a collection of anime short features based on the world of Matrix films. Given the indebtedness of the original Matrix (1999) to the distinc- tive visual style and narratives of anime, with the Wachowski brothers aspiring to create something like “live action” anime, Silvio suggests that The Animatrix may be considered “a metaphor for the complex and recip- rocal relationship between anime and global culture.” By remediating what was already mediated, the animators of The Animatrix put on display the “dialogical relationship between the anime genre and the rest of the world’s cultural production.”
In addition, Silvio contends that The Animatrix offers a nuanced critique of the Matrix trilogy’s privileging of “the idea of an embodied lib- eral humanist subject that remains discrete from, if related to, artificial life and intelligence.” In sharp contrast to the liberal humanist ideology of the Matrix trilogy, which Silvio thinks ultimately succumbs to technophobia, a number of the anime included in The Animatrix seem “to celebrate the idea of posthuman linkages between the human and the nonhuman and to revel in the placing of the ‘human’ within quotation marks.” Rather than finally privileging the material world over the virtual or the human over the machinic, as is the case in the Matrix trilogy, the anime of The Animatrix (e.g., in “Beyond” and “Matriculated”) explore “the idea that this virtual, simulated environment contains within itself and creates the very condi- tions for the imaginative rupture of everyday reason,” offering the possibility of demystifying and resisting the very categories and mechanisms of social control for which the Matrix is a metaphor. Silvio suggests that this crucial distinction is related to certain technical differences between the live action cinema of the Matrix trilogy and the animation of The Animatrix, partic- ularly the way in which the latter’s “level of abstraction between the form of filmic signifiers on the [animated] screen and the diegetic content of the narrative becomes more pronounced in moments where human embodi- ment becomes most problematic.” At the limits of humanity, where the boundary between humans and sentient machines becomes blurred insofar as both forms of intelligence come to be seen as forms of data processing,
SCREENING ANIME 13
we also confront the limits of live action film and the potential of anima- tion to push the envelope of what cinema is.
In “The Robots from Takkun’s Head: Cyborg Adolescence in FLCL,” Brian Ruh considers the relation between adolescence and parodic notions of the cyborg in the animated Japanese series FLCL (pronounced “Furi Kuri”), which premiered on Japanese television in 2000. The figure of the “monstrous adolescent,” as described by Susan Napier in her ground- breaking study Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke, is a common leit- motif that appears in numerous anime, but Ruh contends that FLCL is unique in underscoring the liminal period of adolescence as “a critical time for the formation of one’s identity, and . . . for negotiating one’s attitudes and interactions with technology.” During the course of the series, the twelve-year-old male protagonist Naota (whose nickname is Takkun) must learn to cope with robots and other machines that erupt from his head after he is struck by a guitar-wielding female alien. Ruh contends that in order to understand how Naota comes to terms with his cyborg identity and to determine the conceptual basis of how robots are depicted in FLCL, one must consider the history of robots as they have been represented in Japanese popular culture. Ruh also examines the ways in which the robots that emerge from the bodies of FLCL’s protagonists, such as Naota, are linked to culturally constructed concepts and practices associated with adolescence and emerging sexuality.
The power of the media is another issue that is taken up by Ruh in rela- tion to FLCL. Rather than depicting the media in a conspiratorial light as some sort of “ominous outside presence waiting to get people in its cold clutches,” Ruh argues that FLCL demonstrates “both how the media shapes our perceptions of reality and how we use the media to forge our own identities in daily life.” As the dissemination of Japanese media reaches a global market and anime becomes a distinctive flow in the transnational traffic of popular culture, Ruh’s essay underscores the importance of recon- sidering what is at stake as the status of Japan’s capital in the world market undergoes a transformation and becomes “more cultural than economic.” In this context, Ruh analyzes responses to FLCL from some of the more traditional outlets of American media, which railed against FLCL’s supposedly “extreme violence and sexual content—all being acted out by adolescent characters.” Ruh not only takes issue with the details of such critiques, but also demystifies what he views as the moralistic prudishness of which such responses are symptomatic. By using its idiosyncratically postmodern style to satirize such subject matter, Ruh contends that FLCL is “less a show containing sex and violence than a show about sexual and violent media.” However, Ruh acknowledges that the importance of this distinction is all too often lost on those critics who fail to understand “how
14 STEVEN T. BROWN
we use the media to construct our own identities” and remain largely igno- rant about “how young people interact with the media environment.” Rather than corrupting our youth, Ruh argues provocatively that anime such as FLCL may actually empower those viewers “who have similarly had to negotiate and incorporate mass media into their lives.”
Part III: Anime and the Limits of Cinema
The two essays of the final section bring into focus the distinctive ways in which anime pushes the limits of cinema, including analysis of such issues as the asymmetry between three-dimensional digital cinema and two- dimensional cel animation, how digital animation both repeats and revises the history of analog cinema, and the cinematographic techniques by which avant-garde animation demystifies the oppressive, abstract machines of Japanese modernity.
In “The First Time as Farce: Digital Animation and the Repetition of Cinema,” Thomas Lamarre considers how digital cinema (and digital anime, in particular) repeats the history of cinema—“cinema” understood as indexical, analog, and photography-based. Traditional anime is cel- based, but Lamarre investigates how computer-generated animation, as well as hybrid forms combining cels and computer-generated imagery, push the envelope of what anime is. Responding to the work of media theorist Lev Manovich, Lamarre critiques conceptions of cinema history that construe it as a “closed, coherent system,” “in which emergent forms are somehow fated and constrained to develop toward some kind of systemization—for reasons at once formal and industrial.” According to this view, which Lamarre calls “fatal repetition,” insofar as analog cinema is the “unacknowledged foundation and origin for digital cinema,” digital cinema is “fated to repeat the tragedy of cinema, to become a closed system,” with certain forms already predetermined.
Analyzing Sakaguchi Hironobu’s ground-breaking computer-generated anime Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Lamarre notes that it signals “the emergence of a new cinema in which the boundary between cinema and animation disappears.” In its aspiration for hyperreal digital animation, Final Fantasy incorporates cinema within anime, blurring the boundaries not only between digital cinema and digital animation, but, more importantly, between analog cinema and digital animation. Final Fantasy clearly aims to capture “cinema through animation,” but Lamarre questions whether this new cinema anime remains in thrall to the indexi- cal realism of analog cinema, or whether it does not pose “a challenge to the logic of origins by suppressing or multiplying places of production or
SCREENING ANIME 15
origination.” In its movement from the ideal of photorealism to that of hyperrealism, Final Fantasy seems to dispense with analog origins and “actual, analog-style, cinematic contact with reality.” In so doing, Lamarre argues that Final Fantasy creates a cinema without cinema—a cinema without the presumption of contact with the real—even if “it never quite seems to know how to evoke its difference from cinema, or where to situate this double vision, and thus to impart a sense of the importance of digital difference.”
In the second half of his essay, Lamarre introduces an alternative to fatal repetition, which he calls “serial repetition.” Rather than viewing the history of cinema as a closed system, with analog cinema serving as the foundation for digital cinema, serial repetition presupposes that by “repeating the potentializing tendency complicit with forms” of digital animation linked to festival and ritual repetition, a different conception of the relation between old and new media emerges in which cinema is “divergent at its origins” and “a new or renewed sense of the disruptive and transformative impact of cinema on perception and on community” comes into view. As an example of serial repetition, Lamarre discusses Rintark’s Metropolis (2001), which is “structured around a tension between digital animation and cel animation.” According to Lamarre, Metropolis evokes different ani- mation styles and media in the same work in order to move “away from a narrative logic of (historical) mediation towards one of (mediatic) coexis- tence.”At the diegetic level, Lamarre sees this hybridity embodied in the figure of Tima, who is a robot that “looks fully human yet also betrays an inhuman nature,” “a being who is quite literally torn between two possibilities, between two identities, two natures, and two worlds.”
Cinema Anime’s essays focus mostly on anime distributed via theatrical or DVD/VHS release or broadcast on television, but in her essay “ ‘Such is the Contrivance of the Cinematograph’: Dur(anim)ation, Modernity, and Edo Culture in Tabaimo’s Animated Installations,” Livia Monnet explores the limits of cinema in relation to the avant-garde art of Tabaimo, who is best known for her large-scale installations featuring short animated films showing ordinary characters in familiar Japanese architectural settings— such as a Japanese kitchen, public bath, or commuter train—whose every- dayness is placed into question by various acts of transgression. For example, in a domestic satire of Japan’s lengthy economic recession entitled Japanese Kitchen, a housewife is depicted decapitating her vegetable-sized automa- ton-reduced salaryman husband on the chopping board, giving him a domestic pink slip, as it were, for the dismal state of their domestic (and gendered) economy. In a scatological animated satire of Japan’s neonation- alism entitled Japanese Pedestrian Crosswalk, a Japanese schoolgirl dressed in stereotypical uniform squats in the middle of a pedestrian crosswalk
16 STEVEN T. BROWN
and defecates the Japanese flag, giving new meaning to the term “national expulsion.” A disturbing dramatization of Japan’s attempts to grapple with the growing problem of waste disposal and environmental pollution, the animated installation Japanese Public Bath: Men’s Bath shows a garbage truck pull up to a Japanese bathtub and dump bag after bag of refuse into a previously pristine bath.
By satirically manipulating some of the stock metaphors inscribing modern Japanese national identity and blurring the boundaries between the characters populating her anime and the spectators drawn to viewing her work from a voyeuristic position, Tabaimo’s animated installations manage to push the buttons of her audience and elicit emotions ranging from laughter to disgust, from shock to horror. Accompanied by a disso- nant soundtrack and stylistically inspired by Edo-period ukiyoe prints, the horror manga of Umezu Kazuo, Itk Junji, and Maruo Suehiro, as well as the poster art of graphic artists such as Yokoo Tadanori and Tanaami Keichi, Tabaimo uses highly grotesque and frequently eroticized anima- tions to satirize the surreality and ugliness of contemporary Japanese life, while exposing crucial social and political issues plaguing Japan’s ultra- consumerist, recessionary society. Serious problems such as the collapse of the nuclear family, massive unemployment and political corruption, the destruction of the environment, and the alienation felt by inhabitants of Japan’s hypercrowded cities all enter into the universe of Tabaimo’s animated installations.
Drawing on the work of philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, Monnet introduces the concept of “diagrammatic dur- (anim)ation” to talk about the way in which Tabaimo’s installations rethink cinematographic duration, time, and movement as animation, rendering “duration within/as animation (where animation stands simul- taneously for the medium and art of the animated film, as well as for the infusing of matter with ‘life’ and movement).” But Monnet concludes that, although such playful engagements with the elasticity of animated space and time and the parodic repetition of modernity and its sociopolitical metaphors may seem provocative at first, they conceal a much more con- servative, reactionary perspective on history that fails to establish a space for effective critique, much less political change.
Note on Japanese Names and Words: In the text, Japanese names are typi- cally given in Japanese word order (unless they have been Anglicized), that is, surname first and given name second. All Japanese words have been transliterated according to the Modified Hepburn system of romanization used in Kenkylsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary, except in cases in which there are already accepted English spellings.
SCREENING ANIME 17
Notes
- Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze,” trans. Marie Therese Guirgis, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366.
- From the series synopsis for Serial Experiments Lain. See Serial Experiments Lain, volume 1, DVD, directed by Nakamura Ryltark (Long Beach, CA: Pioneer Entertainment, 1998).
- Michel Foucault,“Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–19.
- Félix Guattari, “Machinic Junkies,” Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 101–05.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 510–14.
- Ibid., 514. 7. Cf. Susan Napier’s analysis of the “invisible” machines in Serial Experiments
Lain that “not only support but literally construct identity.” See Susan Napier, “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (November 2002): 418–35.
- Deleuze has argued in an essay entitled “Postscript on Control Societies” that we are moving away from disciplinary societies, which organize sites of con- finement, toward control societies with new forms of domination (involving incessant monitoring via electronic tagging and user-profiling), as well as new forms of resistance (such as computer piracy and viruses). See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82.
- Cited in “Anime and Manga Sales Growing Around the World,” ICV2.com, June 24, 2003, �http://icv2.com/articles/news/2953.html�.
- Yuri Kageyama, “Japanese Animation Catching on in U.S.,” Associated Press, December 10, 2004; “Anime and Manga Sales Growing Around the World,” June 24, 2003, �http://icv2.com/articles/news/2953.html�.
- Marc Bosche, “Nihon ni yoru hisokana shokuminchika,” Sekai (February 1997): 231–35.
- It should be pointed out that the transnational aspect of anime distribution also applies to its intraregional coproduction: e.g., the in-between frames (the transitional drawings between key frames), as well as inking and coloring, of many anime are produced by animators in Korea, Taiwan, China, and else- where in Asia. On the question of the “Japanization” of global culture,“mukok- useki,” and the status of Japanese popular cultural flows to indigenized Asian modernities, see Iwabuchi Koichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–50; and Ueno Toshiya, “Japanoido ktoman,” Yuriika (August 1996): 178–97.
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- See Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, esp. 15–19, 40–50; Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, “Asianizing Australia: Notes Toward a Critical Transnationalism in Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 16–36; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, eds., Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (London: Sage, 1999).
- “To the Samurai and Godzilla, With Love,” A.O. Scott, New York Times, September 12, 2003 (cited in this book by Napier).
- For a provocative look at the history of subtitling, its practices and ideological stakes, and how anime fansubbers are leading the way toward a new conception and practice of subtitling, see Mark Nornes,“For an Abusive Subtitling—Subtitles of Motion Pictures,” Film quarterly 52, no. 3 (1999): 17–34.
SCREENING ANIME 19
Part I
Towards a Cultural Politics of Anime
2
“Excuse Me,Who Are You?”: Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of
Kon Satoshi
Susan Napier
[M]en’s fascination with [the] eternal feminine is nothing but fascination with their own double, and the feeling of uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, that men experience is the same as what one feels in the face of any double, any ghost, in the face of the abrupt reappearance of what one thought had been overcome or lost forever.1
—Sarah Kofman
Why this interest in female characters?
I like women (laughs). . . . It’s because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can see only the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking . . . on the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it’s the opposite sex and I don’t know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe.
—Kon Satoshi2
In 1997 the director Kon Satoshi rocked the world of Japanese animationwith his first full-length film, Perfect Blue, a complex and stylish psycho- thriller about a pop idol whose decision to leave her career and become an actress leads to extremely violent consequences. Some critics paid it perhaps the ultimate backhanded compliment, suggesting that the film’s contemporary urban setting, sophisticated narrative, and highly realistic
visuals made it seem more like a live action film than a conventional anime. For the record, Kon goes out of his way to insist that he is proud of being an animator and plans to stick strictly to animation, echoing his mentor Ktomo Katsuhiro’s assertion that Perfect Blue is more interesting precisely because it is an animation.3 Indeed, certain of Kon’s cinematic preoccupations, such as the fluctuating relation between performance and identity, the tension between the ideal and the real, and, above all, the very porous line between illusion and materiality, seem to be perfect can- didates for exploration within the animated medium.
At the same time, however, it should be acknowledged that Kon’s oeuvre (which at this point consists of three films, the television series Paranoia Agent, and the screenplay for the Magnetic Rose sequence in Ktomo’s Memories) is very different from most of conventional anime in which the narratives often fall into the science fiction, fantasy, or comic romance genres, and the visuals—especially the depictions of human characters— tend toward what might be called “anime” style (e.g., multicolored hair, huge eyes, and simply drawn faces). Critics have noted Kon’s three-dimensional characters, complex plotting, and fascination with playing with cinematic conventions in a self-reflexive manner, all of which, as Time Asia notes, “expand the boundaries of the [animated] medium.”4 Other commenta- tors, rather than compare him to other anime greats such as Miyazaki Hayao or Oshii Mamoru, have chosen instead to discuss his work in relation to such live action auteurs as David Lynch, David Fincher, Bryan Singer, or Alfred Hitchcock.5
In my opinion the most fruitful director with whom to compare Kon is Hitchcock, and not simply because they both create thrillers. Indeed, Kon’s oeuvre, small though it is, is marked by a stunning variety of genres. Rather, it is the two men’s fascination with notions of spectatorship, per- ception, and what Tania Modleski calls the “dynamics of identification and identity,”6 usually mediated through an overt use of the gaze, and how these notions revolve around the complex positioning of women in their films, that make them particularly exciting subjects for comparison. That being said, it is also important to acknowledge that there are some major and perhaps even more exciting differences between the two directors. Kon possesses a strong social/sociocultural consciousness—several of his works are not only grounded in contemporary social issues but also serve as clear critiques of Japanese society—as well as what might be called a metacriti- cal consciousness—a fascination with illusion, materiality, and cultural memory that I do not see Hitchcock possessing to the same degree. Fur- thermore, while I agree with Modleski that Hitchcock is not “utterly misogynistic”7 and that “[Hitchcock’s] work is characterized by a thor- oughgoing ambivalence about femininity,”8 it must be acknowledged that
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many of the representations of women in his films are quite disturbing. While Kon’s works also show some ambivalence towards the feminine, on the whole the attitude displayed in his films is far more positive, an aspect that, as we will explore, probably has as much to do with the role of women in Japanese popular culture as it does with Kon’s personal biases.
Rather than attempt a full scale comparison of the two directors, there- fore, I would like to make use of several pertinent Hitchcock films, and some of the most interesting criticism aimed at Hitchcock, to illuminate a number of the most intriguing elements in Kon’s work. Not surprisingly, some of the criticism I will be using is feminist film theory, or at least related to it. For, in the case of both directors, it is their female characters—beautiful or grotesque, vulnerable or dangerous—who are of major importance in each director’s work. Moreover, both directors often focus on the female as performer. In Kon’s case, the performance is often a formal one with the female character in some kind of entertainment position, while Hitchcock’s characters are often “performing” domestically for their hus- bands or lovers (e.g., the unnamed heroine in Rebecca, Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo). However, in both cases, the “performance” is almost always aimed at a male audience. Finally, in both director’s work, the gaze (of the cam- era, of the male, of the audience) is a crucial element.
Ultimately, my comparison of the two directors, especially in their treatment of female characters, opens up some significant sociocultural differences between Japan and the United States of America in general. What might be called Kon’s obsession with the female seems at first to have strong elements in common with Hitchcock’s view, most notably in the disturbing sadomasochistic sequences of Perfect Blue. I would argue, however, that Kon’s characters (and also his implied viewer) tend to iden- tify more with the female, leading to the privileging of what I call a bisex- ual gaze—exemplified in the transvestite Hana in Tokyo Godfathers—but one that still subtly exalts the feminine over the masculine. This privileging of the female applies not only to Kon but also to Japanese culture in gen- eral insofar as the female as a cultural icon has increasingly come into ascendance in the postwar period (although it should be stressed that in political and socioeconomic terms, Japanese women have far less power than their American counterparts). In particular, the image of the young girl, or shkjo in Japanese, has attained iconic status in Japan over the last two decades as both popular culture and intellectuals have focused on her. As commentators such as John Treat and Sharalyn Orbaugh have explained, the shkjo has become a signifier of contemporary Japanese con- sumer culture in its obsession with the ephemeral and the material. In fact, Orbaugh even echoes Japanese commentators in positing shkjo culture itself as a “model of the Japanese nation”—“uncertain, mercurial, elastic”
PERFORMANCE, THE GAZE, AND THE FEMALE 25
and possessing a “slightly confused but seductive vulnerability.”9
The aspect of vulnerability is of particular significance in relation to contemporary Japan, underlining the fact that the country is intensely aware of its rather anomalous place among nations—economically power- ful but militarily vulnerable, with its centuries old traditions seemingly threatened from both within and without.
All of these aspects of shkjo culture—the vulnerability, the elasticity, and its quality of seduction—appear to be at work in some degree in Kon’s works, although, unlike many anime directors, he does not focus exclu- sively on the young girl but also treats more mature (albeit still vulnerable) women as well. Kon’s fascination with intriguing female characters and their complex and often problematic relation to illusion, memory, and performance is clear from the first anime for which he wrote the screen- play, the Magnetic Rose: Her Memories (Magnetic Rose: Kanojo no omoide) sequence in director Ktomo Katsuhiro’s 1995 anime trilogy Memories. Although the overall framework of Memories was overseen by Ktomo, Magnetic Rose contains many touches that forecast Kon’s own later films.
Set in a remote space station, Magnetic Rose is initially the story of two “space salvage agents,” Miguel and Heinz. Sent unwillingly (they are on a homeward journey, dreaming of having made enough money to build “houses in California”), to investigate a distress signal from a seemingly abandoned space station, they are surprised to hear an interstellar broad- cast of Madame Butterfly as they approach. Once on board, they are shocked to find within the station a simulated nineteenth-century European manor house inhabited by a beautiful female opera singer named Eva Friedel, who apparently retreated there after she lost her singing voice. Ultimately, the men discover that the opera singer, like the house, is also a simulacrum (actually, a hologram), although one that still retains a capacity for both violence and seduction. Full of bitterness toward her dead husband (whom it turns out she has murdered), the singer plays elaborate cat and mouse games with the two men, using the advanced technology of the space station to uncannily reflect their personal dreams and memories. Magnetic Rose works through a variety of trompe l’oeil sequences in which both viewer and protagonist are lured deeper and deeper into an uncertain world where the difference between simulacrum and reality becomes increasingly impossible to distinguish. In the work’s disorienting climax, Heinz essentially dies at the hand of his own memories, having come to life in the simulated form of the little daughter whom he left behind on Earth, who leads him on while the space station deconstructs around him.
Although the narrative is technically about the two men’s tragic adven- tures, it is really the feminine presence in Magnetic Rose that remains the
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most memorable aspect of the episode. From the haunting strains of Madame Butterfly (itself in many ways an opera about illusions based on the gaze between men and women), to the elusive figure of Eva who appears in turn both threatening and alluring, to Heinz’s little daughter who clutches her doll (itself an uncanny simulacrum), as she leads him to destruction, it is the female characters who stand at the nexus point between real and unreal, ultimately beckoning the men towards death.
The enigmatic female character who leads men into danger and illusion is familiar to us from such Hitchcock works as Vertigo and Rebecca. In fact, the wholesale destruction of the space station may remind the viewer of the burning of Manderley in Rebecca by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper whose identification with her late mistress causes her to go insane. Rebecca herself essentially haunts Manderley in the same way Eva haunts the space station, and both play on male dreams and desires for home—Rebecca makes a pact with Maxim that if he keeps up the charade of their marriage, she will make Manderley a show place. Eva’s character offers Miguel a vision of a beautiful mansion that accords with his dream of salvaging enough space junk to build a “house in California.” But Eva’s character, unlike Rebecca’s rather one-dimensional villainy, is both powerful and fragile at the same time. She has no Mrs. Danvers to channel her, nor is there a female protagonist (the unnamed heroine of Rebecca) to admire her, fear her, and desire to imitate her. Like almost all of Kon’s other female protagonists, she is alone. Furthermore, even though she is presented as an embittered murderess, she, unlike Rebecca, is given a motive for her evil behavior, her loss of “voice.” Loss of voice suggests loss of agency, and it is hardly a coincidence that she chooses her own aria from Madame Butterfly to summon help across the stars. By the time it reaches her, however, it is too late for help . . . or perhaps it always was.
The animated nature of Magnetic Rose also adds importantly to the narrative’s disorienting effect. The seamless transition between space station and simulated manor (in one beautiful sequence we see Miguel rushing “outside” to follow his mysterious hostess who appears like a will-o’-the- wisp on an emerald green lawn, only to find himself back in the space sta- tion again) causes the viewer to maintain the same confused point of view as the male protagonists throughout the entire sequence. Our gaze in this case is largely identified with the men, for whom Eva evokes a complex set of emotions—the desire for the lost home and the desire for mystery. The fact that both these desires can only kill, leaving the viewer with a sense of the emptiness of desire (perhaps not unlike Scotty’s frustrated desire for Judy/Madeleine in Vertigo, a desire that is also connected with memory), is underlined through the vivid animation, especially at the end. In the final sequence, Heinz dies surrounded by (simulated) rose petals—a clearly
PERFORMANCE, THE GAZE, AND THE FEMALE 27
feminine symbol—suggestive again of the danger that the imagination (the inauthentic) can wreak when linked with the feminine.
I have discussed the role of memory in Magnetic Rose elsewhere,10 but for the purposes of the present essay I would like to return to the question of memory in relation to the feminine presence in the episode. Stojan Pelko’s description of some of Hitchcock’s female characters, “that they persistently oscillate between presence and absence,”11is strongly applica- ble to Eva, as well as many of Kon’s other women characters. Indeed Eva, being a hologram, possesses (or is possessed by) absence as her most distinguishing feature. For much of the episode, the men do not even see her hologram but are led on simply by her voice. She, like the “houses in California,” is overtly an object of desire but one that is forever elusive. The fact that this desire is closely associated with memories—of home, love, culture, and family—makes its frustration all the more painful. Magnetic Rose is a deeply pessimistic meditation on the seductive dangers of nostal- gia, and this nostalgia is consistently linked to the feminine. Miguel’s libid- inous gaze at Eva and the lost Mediterranean world she represents is matched by Heinz’s fevered gaze at his daughter, who cries to him, “Now I can be with you forever, Papa.” Both male and female characters in Magnetic Rose are ultimately victims, subject to and objects of a nostalgic gaze that looks for home within a simulacrum. Eva’s construction is partic- ularly complex because though on the one hand she is performing for the male, on the other hand she is avenging herself against the male and her former audience.
In contrast to Magnetic Rose, the female characters in Kon’s three feature films are usually not as darkly presented, but they too are frequently performers who experience some kind of trauma that leads them to retreat into liminal worlds in which the real and the unreal mingle. This is partic- ularly obvious in Kon’s first film, the tour de force thriller, Perfect Blue. I use the term tour de force because the film’s brilliant use of animation and unreality creates a unique viewing experience, forcing the viewer to ques- tion not only the protagonist’s perceptions but his or her own as he/she follows the protagonist into a surreal world of madness and illusion.
Perfect Blue announces its preoccupation with perception, identity, and performance—especially in relation to the female—right from its opening sequence. Before any credits appear, the “camera” first focuses on a group of masked performers whom the Japanese audience would recognize as Power Ranger–type superheroes, who initially appear to be on a television show. But the “camera” soon pulls back to reveal that this is actually a stage performance, a warm up for the big show—Cham—a group of young girl “idols.”12 The film quickly cuts to a scene in which the viewer eavesdrops as the fans (all male) talk about Cham, especially Mima Kirigoe, the leader of
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the group who is said to be quitting. The film next cuts to a backstage view as Cham’s members mill around excitedly, full of preperformance jitters. As they finally go on stage, the focus stays on Mima but shows only her back. And, as the title Perfect Blue (in English) flashes across the screen, the film cuts again to Mima, this time in ordinary garb, seated on a train looking at her reflection.
This opening sequence establishes a number of important themes in the film. The first is that perceptions cannot be trusted. Again and again throughout the narrative, Kon sets the viewer up, sometimes by showing what appears to be a real sequence only to pull back to show that it is hap- pening on television or on stage. Often these scenes eerily echo or com- ment upon what is going on in the world of the characters; for example, a girl on a television screen says “I can’t do this,” just before Mima announ- ces her decision to retire. At other times, especially later in the film as the psychodrama heightens, Kon depicts what are apparently real actions, only to subsequently reveal that they are hallucinations, dreams, or paranoid projections.
The second theme, or perhaps constellation of themes, concerns identi- fication, the gaze, and the problematic role of the pop idol. These themes are signalled by the “fan boys” who discuss Mima in a disturbingly posses- sive way. One young man boasts of having captured Mima’s “voice” on an amateur recording, a rare prize, since she is not a lead singer. Another youth wanders around selling a fanzine devoted to the group. All the while a sinister looking group of potential troublemakers who apparently inter- rupted a previous Cham show look on. These shots underline Mima’s vulnerability to her (apparently entirely male) fan base, a position that will become even more problematic with her decision to leave singing to become a “serious” television actress, something which the fans in this scene are already uneasy about. As the film progresses it is clear that this decision is pivotal for the plot, as the more or less harmless obsession of the generic fan boys transforms into a psychotic overidentification on the part of two other characters, Mima’s mentor Rumi, an older woman who was herself a former pop idol, and a grotesque looking concert security guard who, as his fan-obsession mounts, begins to call himself “Mimania” (a play on “Mima” and “Mania”). To Rumi and Mimania, Mima’s decision to abandon her innocent and cute pop idol persona is not simply a disap- pointment, it is a betrayal.
The third collection of themes, revolving around performance and (female) subjectivity, are previewed by the film’s backstage eavesdropping on the girls’ genuine preperformance selves, followed by the cut to Mima in full costume on stage. We see Mima only from the back at this point, underlining her role essentially as a puppet without a personality. The final
PERFORMANCE, THE GAZE, AND THE FEMALE 29
cut before the title appears seems to show Mima’s true, nonperformer identity, as she sits quietly in normal clothes on the train, but the fact that she is actually staring at a reflection of herself in the train window suggests that even this “true” identity is vulnerable to the gaze of others, including her own (see figure 2.1).
In fact, as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that it is Mima’s own confused subjectivity, combined with the attacks (both psychological and physical) on her identity by Rumi and Mimania that is responsible for her descent into incipient madness. The actual genre of Perfect Blue might be described as “urban Gothic” wherein a young girl is menaced by a vari- ety of dangers in a dark, convoluted, and forbidding environment. Typical of many Gothics, these dangers include an insane and possessive older woman, Rumi (shades of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca), and a deformed, insane male, Mimania (who descends from the “mad monk”-type of the original literary Gothic, The Castle of Otranto). Typical of a Gothic heroine, Mima at the beginning is young, unformed but somewhat ambitious. But, even at the earliest point, ambiguity arises concerning her ambitions: Is it really Mima who wants to give up singing or is she doing this under pressure from her (male) manager and agent?
The diegesis provides a number of hints in different directions. After Cham’s final concert, Mima returns to her tiny apartment where she immediately rips down the poster of Cham decorating her bedroom wall.
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Figure 2.1 Mima stares at a reflection of herself in the train window, evoking questions about the vulnerability of her “identity” to the gaze of others (Perfect Blue).
Soon afterwards she receives a phone call from her mother, taking her to task for quitting and reminding Mima how she had herself always wanted to be a singer. Mima responds strongly, however, asserting that she is truly committed to becoming an actress, leading the audience to assume that she genuinely wishes to break free from her mother/family and develop her own voice. Even when an anonymous fax comes out of her machine a few minutes later accusing her of being a traitor, Mima seems unfazed.
Later scenes create an increasing atmosphere of uncertainty, however. In her first foray as an actress in a television series, Mima’s only line con- sists of “Excuse me, who are you?” She is shown repeating this nervously to herself in the studio just as a letter bomb meant for her explodes in her manager’s hand. The implication is that not only is Mima unsure of who she is but that such questioning is dangerous to herself and others. As the series (significantly titled Double Bind) continues, her doubts begin to increase. Although she goes out of her way to affirm her willingness to do a rape scene (much to the horror of Rumi), the traumatic nature of the actual filming causes her to break down after it is finished. Alone in her apartment, she sobs that she only agreed so she “wouldn’t cause trouble to anyone.”
Not coincidentally, shortly thereafter Mima begins to hallucinate. Previously, she had discovered that an unknown person had created a Web site called “Mima’s Room,” which contains frighteningly accurate informa- tion about her thoughts and activities. As she moves increasingly toward psychosis (caused at least partly, the viewer is led to presume, by Rumi drugging her, although this is not clear until the denouement), she begins to see the Mima on the computer screen talking back to her. The computer Mima announces that “the real Mima is writing this” and castigates her as a “soiled” woman. The film cuts back and forth between Mimania who is doing the actual writing of “Mima’s Room” and Mima talking to the com- puter screen, indicating that the threat is both real—Mimania is clearly deranged—and within her head, a projection of her guilt and shame onto the Mima in the computer.
As the film reaches its denouement, the action begins to spiral out of control, emphasized by an ever more frequent use of jump cuts and scenes in which the audience cannot tell whether the action is really occurring, or if it is in Mima’s own mind, or if it is taking place on the television series in which several scenes (including a speech by a female doctor about how “illusions can’t take on a life of their own”) eerily echo Mima’s deepening psychosis. The outer “reality” becomes even more sinister as all the men involved with Mima—her agent, her manager, and the writer of the televi- sion series—are horribly murdered and mutilated, each one left with his eyes gouged out. Finally, on the day of the wrap party for Double Bind,
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Mima, in a classic Gothic/horror scene, is menaced by Mimania in an empty auditorium as he accuses her of “pretending to be the real Mima.” Barely escaping his murderous actions, she is “rescued” by Rumi, only to wake up in Rumi’s apartment, which she discovers is an exact replica of her own except still with a Cham poster on the wall. Rumi appears wearing a replica of Mima’s idol costume and proceeds to attack her with a knife, saying that she is the “real Mima.” For the first time, Mima responds with a strong affirmation of identity: “I am me!” (Watashi wa watashi yo). In an extended hallucinatory chase sequence, Mima escapes the apartment fol- lowed by Rumi, who is finally stopped by an oncoming truck. Rumi is not killed, however. In Perfect Blue’s final scene we see Mima, looking quite sophisticated and in control, visiting Rumi in what appears to be an insane asylum.
Perfect Blue is a complex film raising a number of complex questions for analysis. One of the key questions is certainly the role of the gaze. As should be obvious from the previous account, much of the film’s action is determined by the variety of gazes directed at Mima. Even before we see her, we hear about her as the object of the gaze of various fans who wish to possess her, one by recording her “voice,” another by discussing her in print, others by interpolating themselves into her concert by disrupting it. In one striking image early on, the focus shifts to the male audience all with their cameras at eye level, consuming Mima through the lens. As the film continues, it provides more and more examples of would-be possession: to Mima’s agent and managers, she is largely a cash cow whose move into acting is stage managed—where she will be all the more an object of the gaze—for what seem to be purely financial reasons. At other moments the film shows scenes of fans commenting on her (sometimes criticizing her lack of friendliness) or simply consuming her visually, as in a later scene when fans buy up magazines containing nude photos of the new, “sophisticated” Mima.
The most threatening of the male gazes belongs, of course, to Mimania, who not only wants to possess her but also wants to be her (intriguingly, Mimania’s long hair gives him a feminine aspect, although this is belied by his hulking figure). Mimania, presumably under Rumi’s direction, creates the “Mima’s Room” Web site in an attempt to possess her technologically, as he seems to know more about Mima than she herself does. In another scene he is shown tearing up the magazines in which her nude photos appear. Most obviously, he asserts that the “real Mima” is writing the Web site and accuses her of being a fake.
The voyeurism, scopophilia, and paranoia so evident in these scenes would surely not be out of place in a Hitchcock movie. Mima’s manipulation by her manager and agent is reminiscent of Madeleine/Judy’s orchestrated
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transformation into what Modleski calls a “living doll”13 in Vertigo, or Alicia’s performance for government agents in Notorious. All three are examples of what Mary Ann Doane describes in terms of “the desire to be looked at” being transformed into “the fear of being looked at”14—perhaps especially in Mima’s case since she is the only one of the three who started as a professional performer.
There are a number of crucial differences between Kon’s and Hitchcock’s vision, however. The first is the fact that, without exception, none of the male characters in Perfect Blue is attractively presented. Mima’s fanboys are typically nerdy looking otaku (geeks), her agent and the other men sur- rounding her in the entertainment industry are shallow money grubbers, and Mimania is a pathetic grotesque. Furthermore, Mima’s male control- lers are all brutally murdered, reversing the usual horror film/thriller convention of the female victim. They therefore stand in sharp contrast to the typical male protagonist in a Hitchcock film who, while often psycho- logically unhealthy, usually exhibits a high degree of authoritative masculine presence.
In this regard, the male characters seem more related to the male actors in horror films described by Carol Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: that is, unattractive, even degenerate specimens with whom, she suggests, the viewer (whether male or female) is most unlikely to identify. Instead, they are much more likely to identify with the character whom Clover calls the “Final Girl”: the intelligent, active (and often sexually innocent) woman who triumphs over the hideous male threat—in other words, Mima.15
But Perfect Blue is far more complex than a conventional horror film, as is evidenced by the fact that the film contains a variety of other gazes. One of these belongs to Rumi, Mima’s mentor, who appears to be the real brain behind the attacks on Mima. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is Rumi’s twisted gaze that is the most important one in the movie. In many ways, Rumi is a more complex echo of Eva in Magnetic Rose. A former pop idol herself, who has become too old and too heavy to con- tinue, Rumi’s obsessive identification with Mima as pure and sweet pop idol leads to her own psychosis and the orchestration of murderous attacks on both Mima and the men who manage her career. In a sense, her violent actions can be rationalized by her as an attempt to protect Mima—or rather the Mima whom she idealizes and with whom she identifies—from the destructive gaze of the male. Surely it is no accident that in the case of the murder victims, it is always their eyes that are gouged out. Not only can this be seen as the enactment of a castration fantasy but it is also a very effective way of preventing them from ever looking at Mima again, even in death. It is also possible that it is Rumi who instigates Mimania’s resolve to
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cut up the magazines containing Mima’s nude pictures, another way of protecting Mima from voyeuristic stares. Rumi thus could be seen as enacting a female revenge fantasy, destroying the male gaze forever.
The only problem with this interpretation is that Rumi is presented as clearly insane. She can no longer tell illusion from reality and she herself wants to dress up as Mima—in other words, become herself the object of a gaze which she still seems to crave. Rather than protecting Mima, her desperate overidentification with Mima puts her into jeopardy. Instead of seeing Rumi as a powerful female, then, it seems more accurate to describe her as the final victim of a world in which illusions really do take on a life of their own. That this world is largely a creation of the men who control the entertainment industry is never explicitly stated, but the fact that the people who have the final say over Mima’s career are all male cannot be ignored.
Perfect Blue contains one more gaze to be explored—that of Mima looking at herself. The early scene where she pensively watches her reflec- tion in the train window, just after her final performance as a pop idol, is suggestive perhaps of her uncertainty as to where her identity is headed. In fact, for much of the film Mima appears to embody what Japanese popu- lar culture offers as the ideal woman of male fantasy. Cute, innocent (she is never shown with a boyfriend) and accommodating—a classic shkjo in other words—she seems for much of the film to be simply a puppet upon which the characters around her project their fantasies. At some level, however, Mima does have a degree of agency with regard to her transfor- mation. Although the film shows ambivalent moments, it also shows her willingness to change, as in the scene where she rips the Cham poster off the wall, suggesting that she, at least, is no longer willing to gaze at herself in pop idol form.
The question then becomes: is her new self-image a genuinely empow- ering one? Throughout much of the film the answer is ambiguous, at best, because as an actress she is still not in control of her own image and is still very much at the mercy of the gaze of others. Indeed, the rape scene that she is talked into acting in is particularly disturbing, as her manager and agent appear to equate the notion of a woman undergoing sexual violence with maturation. The end of the movie seems to offer a more positive assessment, however. In the final scene we see an unaccompanied Mima, looking more grown-up and confident, visiting Rumi in the mental insti- tution. No longer the object of a male gaze, she is, in fact, the subject of female speculation as a group of nurses wonder if she is the “real” Mima. Their uncertainty suggests that Mima is finally in charge of her own image. Perhaps to underline this change, Mima is shown wearing sunglasses that reflect—nothing.
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In psychoanalytic terms, one could argue that Mima has gotten herself out of the “double desire” that Modleski and others suggest traps the female who identifies with both mother and father. Perfect Blue allows the resolution of this double Oedipal conflict through having both a male and a female villain. Rumi can thus be seen as the mother who is not only jealous of her maturing daughter, but is also the one under whose suffocating gaze the daughter is unable to grow up. The controlling men in Mima’s life must also be escaped. In an interesting contrast to a more conventional denouement where the “daughter” then finds her own version of a father to marry (as in Hitchcock’s Notorious, for example), Mima is revealed at the end of the film to be totally alone and apparently well satisfied with her condition.
Writing in the French anime journal Otaku, one critic has suggested that Perfect Blue is “above all a critique of the consumer society of contem- porary Japan,”16 and goes on to suggest that the film is a reflection on the system by which the Japanese are brought up to develop a persona, essen- tially a mask behind which they hide their real selves. Although I agree that Perfect Blue brilliantly illuminates the pressures and complexities of being an object of desire in a world of entertainment, I would suggest that one of the film’s strengths is that it goes beyond critiquing Japanese society to become a subtle study of the attempt to find oneself in a postmodern realm where illusion and reality commingle in ways that threaten the autonomy of the individual. In some ways, Rumi might even be seen as Mima’s own alter ego, embodying the constraining social gaze that does not allow young girls in Japan to go beyond the limits of shkjo-hood.
Kon’s next film, Millenium Actress (2002), brings together elements of both Magnetic Rose (the power of memory, the nostalgic gaze) and Perfect Blue (the audience and the idol, the power of illusion), but embodies them in one of the most original films ever to come from the Japanese animation industry, what the New York Times calls a “headlong cartoon love letter to the grand tradition of post–World War II live-action Japanese cinema, from samurai epics to urban domestic dramas to Godzilla.”17 As with Perfect Blue, the film is also a cineaste’s dream, telegraphing themes in a highly self-reflexive manner, and, with its stunning visuals totally mediated through an admiring gaze, embodying even more than Perfect Blue, the sheer pleasure of looking. In many ways, in fact, the film is the mirror image of Perfect Blue. Whereas in the previous film Rumi and Mimania collaborated to create a destructive and pathological gaze, Millenium Actress depicts the creation of a positive collaborative gaze between two men and a woman.
Millenium Actress purports to be the biography of famous film star Fujiwara Chiyoko, who mysteriously retired at the height of her fame in
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the 1960s. However, the star is fictional, and the narrative of her story becomes not only the narrative of an actress and her audience, but also the story of Japanese cinema and, even, of Japanese history as well. The title Millenium Actress refers to the thousand years of Japanese culture that Chiyoko’s films reference, but the actual events in the film (and even these are mediated through the gaze of memory) span a roughly seventy-year period from prewar Japan to the present day.
The film opens with a vaguely Kubrickesque shot of stars, a large planet, and a space station, then zeroes in on a female astronaut who, despite a male astronaut’s entreaties, insists on boarding a rocket ship saying, “I said I’d go to him.” Shortly thereafter, an ominous rumble reveals that this scene is actually taking place on a television monitor being watched by a middle-aged man, whom the viewer later discovers is Tachibana, a docu- mentary filmmaker. The film jumpcuts again to a sign hanging over what appears to have been a major film studio, Ginei Studio, whose facilities are being demolished as we watch. The camera focuses on Tachibana standing above the rubble, speaking a voiceover about Fujiwara Chiyoko who, he suggests, provided the prime star power during Ginei’s years of operation. As the credits roll, the film cuts back and forth between Tachibana and his young cameraman traveling across a city and an attractive woman moving through a variety of old-fashioned guises and settings. By the end of the film, the viewer will recognize these latter images as actual scenes from Chiyoko’s films and life. Finally, the viewer sees the duo toiling up a bamboo-covered hill on their way to visit the actress, while the young cameraman, clearly a generation too late to be a fan, whines,“she’s no longer a performer.”
In fact, we are very much back in the world of performance, but, in this case, unlike Perfect Blue, the relationship between the idol and her audience is seen as creative, enriching, and ultimately empowering to both. These opening scenes are notably reminiscent of the opening in Perfect Blue, with the same confusion between reality and the media, and the same emphasis on the male gaze. As the film develops, however, it becomes clear that Tachibana’s gaze is a positive one that ultimately entwines with Chiyoko’s own gaze at her past to produce a unique vision of 1000 years of Japanese culture. Or, as Kon himself describes his aim: “[Tachibana] tells his story along with her [Chiyoko’s] story . . . . We developed the structure in such a way so that only when the two stories overlap, the entire view of this film appears in front of your eyes. When you listen to Chiyoko’s story alone, you can see only her subjective view of the story. But, when Tachibana’s story comes into the scene, you obtain a full-scale perspective.”18
Initially, however, the story mainly belongs to Chiyoko (although, importantly, it is narrated by her to a visibly agog Tachibana and his
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obviously bored young cameraman). Starting with her decision to go into acting, she recounts how she was discovered by a director at a young age (presumably in the early 1930s), but was discouraged from becoming an actress by her repressive mother (clearly a more conventional echo of Rumi in Perfect Blue). Circumstances change, however, when she unex- pectedly encounters a left-wing protester to whom she offers refuge from the police in her family storehouse. She and the protester, who is also an artist, develop a bond and he promises to show her the skies of his native Hokkaido. Instead, he is discovered and forced to flee, leaving behind a memento for Chiyoko, a key which he claims to be “the key to the most important thing in the world.” Learning that the artist has probably disap- peared in Manchuria, at that time a colony of Japan, Chiyoko quickly agrees to take a role in a film to be shot there and the audience next finds her traveling en route to Manchuria where she meets a number of actors such as the older woman Eiko, who will play important roles throughout her life.
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