A portrait of popular Japanese literature trends leading into the early 2000s and the ascent of otakudom
Among Westerners, being into “Japanese culture” is more or less just a euphemism for liking anime. An anime convention, as one 2009 poet put it, would be the right place for anyone who likes Japan period. And while anime culture is very much a dominant force in Japanese popular culture proper, the story is obviously more complicated than the occidental perspective indicates.
This should come as no surprise, but the creative voices behind many animated masterpieces, the same ones that have pushed Japanese culture to the forefront of outsiders’ imaginations, were influenced by more than just other anime. It isn’t like Japanese TV is just endless One Piece reruns, after all. Among the other media to consider are live-action dramas, the output of the Japanese film industry, non-otaku focused literature, the media of nearby Asian neighbours such as China and Korea, and not to mention the monolithic pop culture of the West (especially the United States).
Even if otaku culture has earned a reputation for being somewhat incestuous in its inspirations — especially after the rise of a certain light novel series — it has always existed in a wider cultural context which can never be truly be replicated for outsiders. However, even if it cannot be replicated, those of us in the West can take some of the steps that can be taken to understand it as best as we can. After all, filling in the context that is not necessarily obvious to most people is one of the many purposes of analysis.
Anime as a medium, in terms of Japanese-made animation, is closing in on being a century old. However, this does not mean otaku are a century. Anime culture and otaku culture are hardly synonyms. While Japanese animation, comics, and other mediums have always had distinct characteristics which separated them from foreign media, apprehending the entire cultural history of Japan is beyond the scope of this post. If we wanted to understand the full ancestry of Japanese literature, it would necessitate a discussion on classical Chinese literature right through to all of the trends of modern literature. Instead, let’s talk about the word otaku.
Sci-fi and fantasy in and around the 80s
The term “otaku” arose in the 1980s as a playfully caricatured insult to describe the perverts and deviants that took their fandom too seriously; it was especially used in the hardcore manga community. By the end of the decade, the term shot into popular consciousness, especially after the so-called “Otaku Murderer” incident in 1989.
This neologism coincided with a summit of a new golden era of expressive and vocal fandom across the world. The early 1980s had seen the rise of massive sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars in the West, and Mobile Suit Gundam in Japan. In addition, the post-Star Wars boom in sci-fi films and the rise of cable television in the 1980s ensured that previously obscure franchises such as Star Trek exploded beyond their cult following to become genuine cultural sensations. In the West, this was also the decade of Dungeons & Dragons, not to mention a boom in new and bizarre fantasy fiction such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Discworld.
Basically, the West was itself going through a revolution in nerd culture. And the post-Gundam Japanese landscape was not going to be left behind during an economic boom. Works such as Akira and Macross, and even less obvious titles such as Saint Seiya. which are still so highly regarded today are closely associated with this time period. It was also a period that saw the rise of many classic shounen manga such as Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Not to mention the ascendency of Hayao Miyazaki’s films that brought Japan to national prominence.
From the 1980s onwards, being a nerd in Japan meant having an exquisite palette of dynamic science fiction and fantasy to chew on. The decade that followed, the 1990s, is largely seen as the beginning of mass Japanification of Western media consumption, as many of the products of this new age of nerd culture were imported to American shores. What should be obvious is that while much of the appeal of Japanese media among Western consumers was the ways it is unique and different, it was also successful because of the ways it was familiar. It was culturally foreign, but still comfortably part of the golden age of sci-fi and fantasy nerd culture that was global — and arguably continuing to this day.
However, there was one thing Japanese teenagers were reading after the 1980s that was decided mystifying to Western youths. In a phrase, the genre was long dead over here, and just recently revived in Japan.
The honkaku mystery renaissance — a 1990s sensation
(See also: my post on a more complete history of Japanese mystery fiction.)
Even before the mass revival of mystery novels in Japan, it was a far less dead genre than in the West. Sure, over here old ladies continued to read their Agatha Chrsitie novels, and every now and then a good thriller or police procedural made a splash on the New York Times best-sellers list, but mystery was a background genre to most Western teenagers during the 1990s. It had next to no impact compared to the continued surge of sci-fi and fantasy. I am sure many of those reading this post experienced this for themselves — even if you didn’t, watching Harry Potter take our culture hostage probably gave you enough of an idea.
Back to the discussion of mystery, it had quite the following in Japan. Its readership did skew older, but respect for the classic Western mysteries of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction remained strong throughout the post-war period. In addition, Japanese authors pioneered a modern style of realistic crime drama as influenced by J-horror, called shakai (social) mystery.
Later, among young people, while Japan continued with the trends that had led to the continuing nerd culture boom there was also a parallel sensation taking over booksellers. This was the honkaku mystery renaissance. In 1987, mystery author Yukito Ayatsuji made his debut with the hit The Decagon House Murders. As an explicit reimagining of the classic island murder premise of Agatha Christie’s own classic And Then There Were None, it merged the strictly formalist modernism of classic murder mystery with the postmodern concerns of irony and metatextual analysis. While it did not reinvent the wheel, it was a roaring success, and brought more attention to the classic genre of whodunits among Japanese critics.
The following decade saw a wholesale revival of the mystery genre. Writers such as Ayatsuji himself, Alice Arisugawa, Taku Ashibe, Rintarou Norizuki, Natsuhiko Kyougoku, Kenji Takemoto, Kiyoshi Kasai, Ryuusui Seiryouin, and Hiroshi Mori continued to bring a distinctly modern and Japanese flair to the whodunit premise. One additional thing separated this boom from earlier shifts in the mystery genre: These writers, and their readers, were remarkably young. No longer were mysteries the exclusive domain of elderly Agatha Christie enthusiasts. This new boom in orthodox-style (honkaku) mysteries — called neo-orthodox (shinhonkaku) — as well as a return to classical whodunits by younger readers, led to the genre becoming one of the dominant trends among book savvy Japanese youths during the 1990s.
Intersection with otakudom
While there was a clear relationship between popular literature and the interests of otaku culture, they were still very distinct entities during the 1990s. While sci-fi and fantasy novel series that appealed to otaku, such as Slayers, did have a major impact, the nexus that currently exists between otaku and the so-called light novel industry had yet to form. Despite this, the particular history of the 1980s and 90s had formed a sort of genre boiling pot that would prove decisive: The 1990s saw the continued rise of manga and anime that were meaningfully similar to the fantasy and sci-fi stories that had preceded them. The global nerd culture boom meant that Japanese writers also enjoyed the unique and varied films and novels being produced in the West. And the honkaku mystery renaissance had exposed young readers to a new style of modern stories that were metatextually dense, yet realistic.
Plus, in the middle of the decade, all of Japan collided into the cultural behemoth of Neon Genesis Evangelion. All that remained was to see what the next generation of young adult writers would do with all of these influences.
In February 1998, Kouhei Kadono’s debut novel Boogiepop and Others: Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh was released to critical and commercial acclaim. The work was not just enjoyable on its own terms, though it was, but it also represented the total synthesis of the various ingredients that had been left to simmer in the Japanese popular zeitgeist for the preceding twenty years.
Boogiepop’s setting is an urban fantasy with strong sci-fi influences — exactly the kind of thing that would prove to be a winning formula for otaku audiences and nerd culture more broadly. In the post-Evangelion era, Boogiepop’s meditative and narration driven storytelling would prove deeply appealing, allowing it to even tap into the specific early 2000s Evangelion-esque zeitgeist that was given the neologism sekai-kei (world system). It owed much of its realistic, meditative style to preceding shinhonkaku mystery writers such as Natsuhiko Kyougoku. Not to mention its complex, anachronic plot structure that slowly unfurled a deeper mystery about the world, a style that was reminiscent of the style of writers such as Yukito Ayatsuji and Kenji Takamoto.
In essence, a story about high schoolers that combined the scale of more fantastical genres with the style of grounded urban mysteries was exactly the right mix needed to bring otaku culture and the wider Japanese cultural mindset in line with one another. The Boogiepop series that was born from this first novel was a genuine phenomenon, reaching a circulation of almost five million. And Boogiepop was not alone in pushing this new style of mystery-influenced fantasy to the forefront. During the same year as Boogiepop made its debut, Fuyumi Ono (the wife of Yukito Ayatsuji, interestingly) released the supernatural mystery-horror novel Shiki. Subsequently, in late 1998, Kinoko Nasu self-published the mystery fantasy series Kara no Kyoukai, which explicitly combined the Japanese style of denki fantasy with shinhonkaku mystery plotting.
A pattern was afoot. If we were to define a “light novel” as a novel aimed at young adults, that also sought to capture the “otaku” audience that had formed during the nerd culture boom since the 1980s, the runaway success of Boogiepop was the moment that light novels really begun. The various disparate threads of pop culture that were swirling about the Japanese zeitgeist were coming together to form a coherent sense of the kinds of tropes that were “in” for Japanese readers. In other words, it started to become possible to talk about the kinds of novels that appealed to otaku and anime fans as a real and discrete category.
So, what did Yuki Nagato and Light Yagami read?
In December 2004, Kadokawa Sneaker Magazine published a reading list composed by Nagaru Tanigawa to represent the one hundred favourite novels of Yuki Nagato, a character in Tanigawa’s Haruhi Suzumiya series. It is perhaps the most illustrative piece of paratext ever made in terms of representing the taste of otaku in the early 2000s. It demonstrates what interested them, and how their interests came to define the massive anime boom that shot us to the place we are today.
The very first novel on the list is Ellery Queen’s classic Western whodunit murder mystery The Greek Coffin Mystery. The second is Dan Simmons’ late 90s sci-fi epic Endymion. And coming in third is Kenji Takemoto’s own 1990s postmodern meta-mystery shinhonkaku masterclass Apocryphon of Ouroboros. These three examples — classic mystery, modern sci-fi, and modern mystery — form a vignette that reveals the fundamental character of the rest of the list. And by extension the literary taste of the otaku creators of the 2000s.
Indeed, one can see the lineages of all sorts of modern Japanese media trends if they look closely at this list and the history it represents. While one can immediately see the influence of science fiction classics such as Barrington J. Bayley’s Collision Course, a time travel novel that is on the list, on the complex intertwining timelines of the Haruhi Suzumiya series itself, it is also reasonable to suggest that the several intertwining subplots of Natsuhiko Kyougoku’s Box of Mouryou was arguably an even stronger influence. Without such elaborate mystery novels as a basis, the way that the various time travel plots of Haruhi Suzumiya unfurl over several distinct story-arcs might have never come to be.
The influence of these titles reaches far beyond the early 2000s themselves, and into the modern annals of anime history. It is difficult to imagine the scientific mysteries of the Seishun Buta Yarou series coming to be without the mystery genre revival that brought novels such as The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov to the attention to young Japanese readers, not to mention the importance of the master of the science mystery, Hiroshi Mori, who debuted in 1996.
Tanigawa’s list also features more recent mystery writers that were contemporaries of Haruhi Suzumiya in the post-Boogiepop era, such as The Childish Darkness by Outarou Maijou. Not to mention science fiction classics such as Ringworld by Larry Niven. In essence, it neatly represents the complex tapestry of interests that led to the unique variety of otaku media that took the world by storm. We can see exactly what kind selection of novels that Japanese authors of the early 2000s expected their audience and their characters have read from.
Good stuff