Culture of desire and technology: Postwar literatures of science fiction in the United States and Japan

This dissertation analyzes postwar fantastic literatures of the US and Japan, focusing on the science fiction genre. Through comparisons of fantastic texts from the US. and Japan, it examines how postwar Japanese society has formed popular fantastic narratives with backgrounds of war, industrialization, computerization, and postmodernism, and how writers have strategically employed this rhetoric of fantasy and science fiction to express the limits and possibilities of gender and ethnicity that bound their social roles and writings.; The dissertation's overall argument is developed in three steps. First, I question the concept of "Japanese science fiction" as a genre, and by briefly examining Oguri Mushitaro's Kokushikan satsujinjiken [Murder at Black Death Mansion] and Yumeno Kyusaku's Dogura magura [Dogra Magra], propose to reconfigure popular fantastic fiction as texts that seek Japanese identity in the creative failures to imitate authentic Western models of detective fiction and science fiction. Second, by analyzing postwar fantastic narratives that shed light on Japan's war memories, such as Numa Shozo's Kachikujin Yapu [Yapoo, the Human Cattle], Komatsu Sakyo's time parallel stories, and Miyabe Miyuki's Gamotei jiken [The Gamo Mansion Case], I suggest that the tropes of science fiction assumed in Western theories are often reversed and used for opposite effects in postwar Japanese science fiction. Lastly, I focus on gender issues in science fiction novels and shojo manga (visual novels for girls) by examining issues of androgyny and reproduction in science fiction texts by Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, and Ohara Mariko, in comparison to texts by Ursula Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr. I then question gender and ethnic identity in Japanese cyberpunk texts such as Noa Azusa's Baberu no kaori [The Flower of Babel] and Kanbayashi Chohei's Sento yosei Yukikaze [Battle Fairy Yukikaze].; These comparisons demonstrate that philosophies of liberation and subversion embedded in, or applied to, American science fiction are often employed in Japanese science fiction for different, or opposite, effects. The fantastic texts that "fail" to emulate authentic Western models have actively constructed postwar Japanese identity by inventing new tropes of fantasy and thereby re-imagining the locus of Japanese uniqueness.