Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 141 the subjects of cultural unease, saying, “loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in the modern era, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves (qtd. Napier 113). Sōseki and other contemporary authors have helped to develop a subtle language of the monstrous fantastic as a reflection of postmodern unease in Japanese society. Distorted references to traditional monster characters reflect a loss of clear continuity in the Japanese identity and unease about change, isolation, and the passage of time. As anthropologist Marilyn Ivy explains, the popular media that has come to symbolize modern Japan continues to erode society’s confidence in its own identity. She argues that “[a]s culture industries seek to reassure Japanese that everything is in place and all is not lost, the concomitant understanding arises...that such reassurance would not be necessary if loss, indeed, were not at stake” (10). In her opinion, story and fabrication help to compensate for this modern loss of identity by creating a new sense of idealized nationalism: “Through the loss of urban Japan’s rural roots…the ideal of native place has expanded to become a more capacious metaphor, one both multiple and generic.” (104). In some sense then, being Japanese involves loyalty to this new homeland of the mind, peopled as it is with monsters. New depictions of the monstrous in Japanese art, aesthetics, and life have developed in connection with new, popular, or consumer-oriented experiences or media. In her study of global acceptance of the kawaii (cute) aesthetic, Janice Brown explains that the upbeat appearance and pessimistic undertones in new Japanese cultural production highlights the darkness and unease present in the work of the most celebrated popular artists. Takashi Murakami, for example, accounts for the mixture of horror and cuteness in his work by explaining that “the Japanese have refused—or rather, have been refused—the chance to grow up (qtd. Brown 4). Brown concludes that the ambiguous role of the monstrous within the cute may be the central element of the contemporary Japanese fantastic, arguing that the combination of the “violently sinister” and the cute or infantile has become the central symbol of Japan’s defiance toward redefinition by contemporary global pressures despite being itself a “small and vulnerable” cultural force (5). The concept of rendering international cultural pressures as monstrous or supernatural challenges to identity has precedent in postmodern Japanese literature. Authors like Hyao Miyazaki and Haruki Murakami have used the monstrous fantastic as a means to comment on postmodern Japan. Perhaps the master of the sinister kawaii , director Miyazaki often uses morally ambiguous characters within a context of the monstrous fantastic to symbolize modern influences on Japan. In Spirited Away , for example, Miyazaki initially associates the character of No-Face with pitiful loneliness and gratitude toward the protagonist, Chihiro, but as the movie progresses, No-Face grows into a monstrous symbol of consumerism and mass culture, inspiring incontinent greed in the bathhouse workers and ultimately eating them alive. With Chihiro’s heroic and sacrificial effort to resist his destruction and remove him to a wholesome environment, he becomes a useful yet still pitiful figure ( Spirited Away ). Both Alistair Swale and Shiro Yoshika explain that Miyazaki’s fantastic characters and places are explicitly nostalgic, in that they combine elements of the idealized past with elements of contemporary Japan and explore the ways in which the past has contributed to the present state of culture. As Hiroshi Yamanaka puts it, Miyazaki’s treatment of Japanese culture through the lens of the fantastic “offers a new form of pop-