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Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture . By Steven T. Brown . New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2010. ix, 256 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).
Book Reviews--Japan
In Tokyo Cyberpunk, Steven Brown analyzes feature-length and serial anime and live-action films that engage with unsettling questions about what it means to be (post)human in a time and place not so distant from the present. Brown and the works upon which he directs his primary focus render everyday human experiences uncanny as they address questions of subjectivity, agency, and the possibility of resistance in hyperconnected worlds populated by robots, gynoids, ghosts, cyborgs, and disembodied humans running amok.
Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Brown reads these texts "rhizomatically." That is, rather than offering a linear, hierarchical narrative analysis, Brown views these films and anime "tangentially through their rhizomatic connections with other anime, other films, other works of art, and other discursive formations" (p. 9). This approach seems particularly apt for many of the complicated works of Japanese film and anime engaging with the troubling implications of posthumanism. In the introduction, Brown offers Otomo Katsuhiro's highly complex and influential feature-length cyberpunk anime Akira (1988; based on a manga serialized in 1982-90) as one such example. Akira, he writes, "encourages rhizomatic reading by evoking the processes of nonhierarchical connections" through "diverse smaller narratives, codes, and memes, offering a horizontal image of...