Three Japanese Novels
In the past couple of months I have read three Japanese novels in translation, a statement about the recent past that in an earlier stage of my life would have carried effectively no independent semantic value—the way “the sun set in the west this evening” carries none—and that even now is not exactly remarkable. The one that I liked best was also the first one I read, The Emissary by Tawada Yōko. British readers got this book as The Last Children of Tokyo, but The Emissary has the virtue of actually attempting to translate the Japanese title, Kentoshi. The Emissary is a science fiction novel that at points reminds one of something like On the Beach or a hypothetical prequel to The Chrysalids, a quiet look at the day-to-day in a dying world, or at least a dying Japan. The tone is laid-back and almost cheerful, and one hopes that this book’s popularity in translation—Margaret Mitsutani won the National Book Award for it—finally killed off the wisdom once conventional in the West that Yokohoma Kaidashi Kikō’s pace, tone, and structure are impressive achievements. To be sure, The Emissary and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō in fact both are impressive, I might even dare to say “great,” books, but not because those aspects are unique or even particularly unusual for Japanese science fiction of this school. Also like many of these kinds of books, The Emissary abruptly picks up narrative steam at the end, then abruptly stops. I still find this jarring whenever I encounter it, and it helps me to think of Japanese science fiction novels that do this as if the last few pages were ghostwritten by Neal Stephenson. Sometimes, as with Ōhara Mariko’s Hybrid Child, this doesn’t help, but that is because Hybrid Child does this for the first time a hundred pages or so in and then does it every twenty or thirty more pages until the book finally ends. Its page count is over twice The Emissary’s and it, in my opinion, sucks. The Emissary pointedly does not suck, which is why my mother, not much of a science fiction reader to say the least, read it on my recommendation and absolutely loved it as well.
Mr. Miyagi’s America
The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.
Divine Right of the Girlboss Downline
When I was growing up in the late 2000s as what people call a “transfeminine” person, an identity that I would later start, and then stop, publicly claiming for reasons that I do not care to discuss, I watched an awful lot of bad anime. I watched plenty of good anime too, and as I wrote in my essay “Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa” I think a strong argument can be made that the medium, and especially its fandom, were better and healthier fifteen years ago than they are now. Even so, plenty of crap was being put out in the 2000s, some of which was uninteresting, stagey, quasipornographic schlock. There was plenty of stagey, quasipornographic schlock that was interesting, too—I still wholeheartedly enjoy Black Lagoon, and I’m told even Elfen Lied holds up if you watch it in the right frame of mind—but that is not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is a deliberately sedate, very conservative series, one that is shockingly long for how little happens in it and was shockingly popular for how niche one would expect its appeal to be. I speak of Maria-sama ga miteru, usually translated Maria Watches over Us, a hypnotically slow-paced and minute series about not-quite-lesbian not-quite-Catholic students at a posh girls’ high school. It aired in four seasons between 2004 and 2009, it adapted the first two-thirds or so of a serialized novel series with the same title that came out between 1998 and 2012, and I find little to say in its favor except that it commits to its offputting premise wholeheartedly and understands the characters and relationships that result exceptionally well.
Takasawa Keiichi’s “Kimono”: An Artistic-Cultural Treatise from Occupied Japan
Cultural relations between the United States and Japan in the twentieth century are today best remembered for two periods of hostility. In the 1940s the countries were enemies in World War II, and in the 1980s the strong postwar cross-Pacific alliance was strained due to manufacturing and trade policies that in some ways prefigured today’s rivalry between the US and China. Although President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro were both personally and ideologically close, many Americans thought of Japanese people in insecure, envious, and hostile terms.
However, between these two periods, there was a flowering of American Japanophilia influenced partly by American servicemen’s experiences in Japan during the prolonged Allied occupation of the country. The 1950s saw the Japanese printmaker Wada Sanzō (whose “Greenhouse Workers” from his Occupations of Shōwa Japan series hangs in my parents’ living room) win an Academy Award for costume design and the actress and singer Umeki Miyoshi win one for Best Supporting Actress. Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder admired (what they knew of) Japanese Buddhism, and D.T. Suzuki became a more famous and respected figure stateside than in his home country. It was in the earliest days of this midcentury Japanophilia that Takasawa Keiichi wrote and illustrated Kimono: A Pictorial Story of the Kimono.
Heyday Heisei and Rewatch Reiwa
The year is 2022, and anime is in decline.
I don’t think I know anybody my age who seriously denies this. Friends of mine who are in my age cohort—the ages of, let’s say, twenty-five to thirty-three, people who were in their late childhood or adolescence during the international anime and manga glut of the early to mid-2000s and who populated college anime clubs around the same years I did during the first three-quarters of the Obama administration—seem to be unanimous in the opinion that the medium and its fandom aren’t what they once were. Current high school and college students still entertain and enthrall themselves with My Hero Academia or whichever generation of Precure we’re currently on, and I don’t think the medium is dead or is no longer producing anything of value; each of the past three or four years has produced at least one series that I’ve enjoyed. Even so, there have been subtle but noticeable changes in both the content and the reception of anime over the second half of the 2010s and now into the 2020s, and many of those changes are making it difficult for people who’ve long been in media fandom to maintain interest in what’s currently coming out of Japan. In this essay I will seek to diagnose some of those changes.