Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Post-Contemporary Interventions) [Paperback]

Takayuki Tatsumi (Author), Larry McCaffery (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions | Publication Date: June 27, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Full Metal Apache [is a] brilliant, paradigm-smashing study by Japan’s hippest literary critic and cultural commentator.” —Larry McCaffery, from the foreword

“Full Metal Apache is a genuinely exciting and powerful text, incredibly rich in both material and ideas. Takayuki Tatsumi’s overall theme is the complex and dense dynamic between Japan and America (and often the West in general), and he investigates this dynamic in ways and with material far fresher and more critically invigorating than a standard analysis of ‘influences’ would be.”—Susan J. Napier, author of Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation

“Full Metal Apache is a marvelous literary mediation of postoriental aesthetics and the transactions of cybercultures. Takayuki Tatsumi cites synchronicity over mimesis, a mighty tease of cultures, and his inspired critique of the chimeric emperor, gaijin fabulations, scrap thieves, ghost stories, and metafiction is extraordinary and masterly.”—Gerald Vizenor, University of California, Berkeley

“I have always thought that Takayuki Tatsumi had (and still has) the most interesting lines into whatever it is that I’ve been doing with fiction, culture, and technology. He showed up before 99 percent of American academics had ever heard of me and seemed immediately to know what I was talking about—often before I did myself.”—William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition

About the Author

Takayuki Tatsumi is Professor of English at Keio University in Tokyo. He is the author of many books in Japanese, including Lincoln’s Bullet; A Reading of 2001: A Space Odyssey; Slipstream Japan; New Americanist Poetics; A Manifesto for Japanoids; Metafiction as Ideology; and Cyberpunk America.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books; annotated edition edition (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822337746
• ISBN-13: 978-0822337744
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,356,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars controls of the Tatsumi mecha, June 7, 2010

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S. Hall "Assistant Professor of Communication... (NW Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

In Tatsumi's early career, he was interested in cyberpunk, and you can still see some of that interest shaping his approaches in Full Metal Apache. Whereas cyberpunk had some fascination with coincidence, you can see where Tatsumi has refined this particular vector in his research and moved to synchronicity. This is not in the exact Jungian sense of the word, although it is related in the sense that meaningful associations may be manifested through conceptual frameworks. It is this construction of new theory that lead to the J.G. Ballard-esque condensed criticism that you find in Full Metal Apache, a book I highly recommend. If you read any of Tatsumi's considerable work, you will quickly see, usually by the end of the first page, that his critical apparatus harvests from a wide variety of sources and he begins constructing an intertextual mecha, an assemblage of seemingly unrelated components that are worked into something that, like those magnificent powered suits, slips on easily and magnifies the user's agency in the world.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A stimulating examination of cross-cultural ferment, August 7, 2006

By 

Eileen Gunn (Seattle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

This book is the cultural critic's equivalent of a richly textured and nuanced novel. It is full of startling juxtapositions and imaginative leaps; it can transform the familiar into the strange and wonderful; and its point of view is witty and ironic and generous. It is as valuable to me for its insight into the complex relationship between Lafcadio Hearne and Japanese folklore as it is for its explication of the intricacies of twenty-five years of contemporary Japananese/American post-post-modernism. As I read it, I looked forward with pleasure to re-reading it with deepened understanding.

5 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Difficult, Dry Read, July 25, 2006

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Made in DNA (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Paperback)

When I first heard of this book, I preordered and awaited it breathlessly. When it came earlier than I expected, I was thrilled. After I opened the pages, I found myself emerged in a dry, difficult-to-follow, academic book that is full of more quotes from other books than it has original text.

I am not saying that Takayuki Tatsumi isn't knowledgeable on his subject, quite the opposite. I think perhaps he is too close to the subject to be able to write to a layman audience and it shows.

My difficulties with the book ranged from it's style to references. Perhaps it is more for the academic minded; it was definitely published via an academic press, and definitely reads like a dissertation. I believe the author is somewhere between 10 and 15 years older than myself, creating a gap in the information streams in which we were exposed to. He makes reference to far too many movies/books/relevant figures (authors, playwrights, directors), etc, that I am simply not familiar with. And while normally this is not a problem, he fails to explain to my understanding who these people and their works are. I felt in the completely dark throughout this book.

But perhaps the worse part was, it was a slow, painstaking read for the 200-odd pages of half-page text that graced the pages. It didn't help that I would have to stop again and again to consult online references to who people or their works were.

Normally, I would give this kind of book only 1 star, but it covers two subjects I am very fond of: Japan and cyberpunk. So it gets an extra star, for anyone NOT deeply interested in these subjects, I recommend to steer clear away. This is not a casual read by any stretch of the imagination.