From wooden cyborgs to celluloid souls: Mechanical bodies in anime and Japanese puppet theater

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Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 729-771

  Bolton, Christopher A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247370294     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10-3-729     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.
2. Oshn Mamoru, Ghost in the Shell, subtitled videotape (Manga Video, 1997);
3. Carl Silvio, "Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell " Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 1 (March 1999): 54-72;
4. Sharalyn Orbaugh,"Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Pop Culture Experiments in Subjectivity" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, Calif., March 2000);
5. Susan J. Napier, Anime from "Akira" to "Princess Mononome": Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 103-116.
6. Paul Claudel, "Connaissance de l'Est" suivi de "L'oiseau noir dans le soleil levant" (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 196.
7. All translations from Claudel are my own. For an alternative English translation see Jacques Petit and Jean-Pierre Kempf, eds., Claudel on the Theater, trans. Christine Trollope (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972), 50-52.
8. Donna Haraway, "Cyborgs at Large," interview by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Social Text 25/26 (winter/spring 1990-91 ): 12, 11.
9. Shirö Masamune, Kōkaku kidötai: The Ghost in the Shell (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991),
10. Oshn Mamoru, interview, Internet Voice Magazine Alles 6 (November 1995) http://www. express.co.jp/ALLES/INDEX/6index-j.html (9 August 2000); my translation.
11. Silvio, "Refiguring the Radical Cyborg," 72.
12. Although Tatsumi's article can serve as an intellectual point of departure for what follows, I actually encountered it while finishing this essay, and the details of our approaches differ. See Tatsumi Takayuki, "Hitotsu de wa nai saibōgu no sei" [The cyborg's multiple gender] and "M. batafurai, aruiwa," in Saibōgu femimzumu, ed. Tatsumi Takayuki and Kotani Mari (Tokyo: Trcville, 1991), 8-22, 214-241.
13. Hozurni Ikan, Naniwa miyage [Souvenir from Naniwa], excerpted in Nikon koten bungaku taikei [Collected works of classical Japanese literature], vol. 50, Chikamatsu jōruri shū (gc) [Chikamatsu's jōruri (part 2)] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), 356,
14. translated by Donald Keene in Anthology of Japanese Literature from the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 386. Here and elsewhere, for readability I have modernized the orthography in my transcriptions of the classical texts.
15. Chikamatsu, Kokusen'ya gassen, in Chikamatsu jōrurt shū (ge), 227-292, translated by Donald Keene as The Battles of Coxinga in Major Plays of Chikamatsu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 195-269.
16. Donald Keene, Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 5-6.
17. Yūda Yoshio, Jōruri shi ronkō (Studies on the history of jōruri] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1975), 151-171.
18. For example, see Chikamatsu, Shinjū ten no Amijima, in Nikon kpten bungaku takei, vol. 49, Chikamatsu jōruri shū (jō) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1959), 383,
19. translated by Donald Keene as The Love Suicides at Amijima in Major Plays of Chikamatsu, 420.
20. Keene, Anthology, 386-387;
21. Hozurni, Naniwa miyage, 356. I have slightly altered Keene's translation, which has "inanimate tree."'
22. Jane Marie Law, Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Awaji Ningyō Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30-59;
23. Karakuri Ningyō: An Exhibition of Ancient Festival Robots from Japan (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1985).
24. Hozurni, Naniwa miyage, 357.
25. Ernst Jentsch, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny," trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2, no. 1 (April 1995): 12, 11;
26. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,' " in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 218-252.
27. Friedrich Kittler, "Romanticism-Psychoanalysis-Film: A History of the Double," trans. Stefanie Harris, in Literature Media Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), 99.
28. Specifically visual realism is obviously a slippery issue where anime is concerned. I discuss this more systematically elsewhere, in the context of another Oshn film about a different species of cyborg. See Christopher Bolton, "The Mecha's Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime," Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (November 2002).
29. Roland Barthes, "Leçon d'écriture," Tel Quel 34 (summer 1968): 28-33,
30. translated by Stephen Heath as "Lesson in Writing," in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 170-178;
31. Barthes, L'empire des signes (Geneva: Editions d'Art Albert Skira S.A., 1970), 63-82,
32. translated by Richard Howard as The Empire of Signs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 48-62.
33. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 54.
34. For a high structuralist reading of Bunraku and other puppet theaters see Jirí Veltrusky, "Puppetry and Acting," Semiotica 47, no. 1-4 (1983): 69-122.
35. Supplementary material, Ghost in the Shell, DVD (New York: Manga Video, 1998).
36. Oshii, interview.
37. Shirō Masamune, "2029: The Outlook on the Period," in Ji anarishisu obu "Kōkaku kidōtai" (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995), n.p.
38. Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes," in A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), xxv;
39. Heinrich von Kleist, "On Puppet-Shows," trans. David Paisey, Comparative Criticism 14 (1992): 143-44, 146
40. Hozumi, Naniwa miyage, 358;
41. translated by C. Andrew Gerstle in Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu (Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1986), 184.
42. Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Tade kuu mushi (Tokyo: Shinchō Bunko, 1951)1 26-27,
43. translated by Edward Seidensticker as Some Prefer Nettles (New York: Knopf, 1955), 24-25.
44. Jean-Louis Barrault, Souvenirs pour demain (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1972), 291,
45. translated by Jonathan Griffin as Memories for Tomorrow (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 247-48.
46. Barrault, Memories for Tomorrow, 248.
47. Claudel, "L'oiseau noir," 193-194.
48. Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 156, 165.
49. Susan Sontag, "A Note on Bunraku," Threepenny Review 16 (winter 1984): 16.
50. Karatam Kōjin, '"One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (summer 1988): 615-628;
51. Sakai, Voices of the Past, 148.
52. Napier, Anime, 111 -112;
53. see also Silvio, "Refigurmg the Radical Cyborg," 67-69.
54. Haraway, "Cyborgs at Large," 20.
55. Keene, Four Major Plays, 5;
56. Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, "Recollections of the Bunraku Puppets," in Bunraku: The Art of the Japanese Puppet Theater, ed. Donald Keene (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1965), 11.
57. Tanizaki, '"Recollections of the Bunraku Puppets," 12.
58. Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles, 23;
59. Sontag, "Note on Bunraku," 16.
60. For Sakai, narrative, like death, is a necessary anonymity or stasis against which living individual characters must define themselves. This rereading of Chikamatsu is similar to Paul de Man's rereading of Kleist. De Man connects the violence of Kleist's sometimes gruesome text on puppets with the violence of a critic who must impose meaning on the text. See Paul de Man, "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 263-290.
61. Gunji Masakatsu, Kabukino bigaku (The aesthetics of Kabuki] (Tokyo: Engeki Shuppansha, 1963), 131-153.
62. Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy, 120-123;
63. Gunji, Kabuki no bigaku, 145.
64. Chikamatsu, Kasaneizutsu, in Chikamatsu jōruri shū (jō), 87.
65. Haraway, "Cyborg Manifesto," 176.