Full Metal Apache

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 12 08:59:17 CDT 2006


Tatsumi, Takayuki.  Full Metal Apache:
   Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and
   Avant-Pop America.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.

Takayuki Tatsumi is one of Japan's leading cultural
critics, renowned for his work on American literature
and culture. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fan's
love of both Japanese and American art and literature,
he is perhaps uniquely well situated to offer this
study of the dynamic crosscurrents between the
avant-gardes and pop cultures of Japan and the United
States. In Full Metal Apache, Tatsumi looks at the
work of artists from both sides of the Pacific:
fiction writers and poets, folklorists and filmmakers,
anime artists, playwrights, musicians, manga creators,
and performance artists. Tatsumi shows how, over the
past twenty years or so, writers and artists have
openly and exuberantly appropriated materials drawn
from East and West, from sources both high and low,
challenging and unraveling the stereotypical images
Japan and America have of one another

Full Metal Apache introduces English-language readers
to a vast array of Japanese writers and performers and
considers their work in relation to the output of
William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, H. G. Wells, Jack
London, J. G. Ballard, and other Westerners. Tatsumi
moves from the poetics of metafiction to the complex
career of Madame Butterfly stories and from the role
of the Anglo-American Lafcadio Hearn in promoting
Japanese folklore within Japan during the nineteenth
century to the Japanese monster Godzilla as an
embodiment of both Japanese and Western ideas about
the Other. Along the way, Tatsumi develops original
arguments about the self-fashioning of “Japanoids” in
the globalist age, the philosophy of “creative
masochism” inherent within postwar Japanese culture,
and the psychology of “Mikadophilia” indispensable for
the construction of a cyborg identity. Tatsumi's
exploration of the interplay between Japanese and
American cultural productions is as electric,
ebullient, and provocative as the texts and
performances he analyzes

http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=21382&Bmain.item_option=1&Bmain.item=6438

Pink Godzillas, postfeminist cyborgs and the
rent-a-family market
Takayuki Tatsumi, Japan's leading cultural critic,
puts his country's popular culture under the
microscope, and finds that the tables have turned for
the West

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jun 11, 2006,Page 18 ...

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2006/06/11/2003313006

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