TY - JOUR
AU - Lewis, Diane, Wei
AB - Abstract This essay situates the Japanese film Kūki ningyō/Air Doll (Koreeda Hirokazu, 2009) and the manga upon which it was based, Gōda tetsugakudō: Kūki ningyō/Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll by Gōda Yoshiie, within the context of discourses on precarity in contemporary Japan. In Air Doll, a blow-up sex doll comes to life and tries to find love, but fails to connect with alienated Tokyoites. Whereas Gōda’s original manga focuses on dysfunctional masculinity and the artificial management of emotion in late-capitalist society, Koreeda’s film adaptation deals more broadly with miserable singles, broken families, and a pervasive sense of disconnection. In the film, the air doll’s acquisition of an identity through imitation is contrasted with the unhappy function that role-play, repetition and substitution play in real people’s lives. The movie begins as a lightly comic and largely affirmative depiction of mimesis as learning, transformation and aspiration. However, imitation soon becomes a trope for emptiness and failure. Gōda’s manga critiques the role that rigid gender roles play in late capitalism, but Koreeda’s emphasis on the air doll’s ‘emptiness’, her failure to find love, and the collapse of the family evince a melancholic attachment to heteronormative ideals that played a central part in Japan’s postwar high-growth economy. Close analysis of both texts reveals how Koreeda’s use of live action performance and other original contributions rework the manga’s themes. Since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991, Japan has experienced an ongoing mixture of slow growth and recession. What was originally referred to as the ‘lost decade’ (ushinawareta jūnen) has now become ‘two lost decades’ (ushinawareta nijūnen), punctuated by the 11 March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. As recent data shows, Japan’s economy remains shaky. With an ageing population and declining birth rate, GDP per capita is on the rise, but scholars and activists argue that Japan is a divided society (kakusa shakai) in which more educated, regular employees are relatively protected while an increasing number of nonregular workers are more vulnerable to redundancies, wage cuts and declining incomes.1 Neoliberal policies are seen as threatening social cohesion. In 2001 Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) introduced ‘structural reforms’ that removed labour protections and taxes on the most wealthy, while promoting a neoliberal ethos of self-responsibility (jiko sekinin). From 1996 to 2004, changes were made in the Workers Dispatching Law, increasing the number of temporary staff (haken shain) dispatched to companies by temp agencies. In 2013 the Labour Contract Law was revised so that workers employed on renewable short-term contracts for more than five years would be promoted to permanent employment. Yet even this provision, which was designed to increase worker job security, has led to more limited-term contracts and mass firings as employers try to evade the law.2 The widespread casualization of labour has consequently damaged Japan’s image as a ‘all middle-class society’ (ichioku sōchūryū) and led to a discussion of an ‘employment ice age’ (shūshoku hyōgaki), in which even university graduates have trouble finding or holding onto jobs. These conditions have spawned a wealth of representations of precarity and the ‘precariat’ (purikariāto) in literature, manga, television and film. The Japanese film and manga Air Doll are key texts within a growing corpus of popular media representations of precarity in Japan. Both the film and manga tell the sad Pinocchio story of a blow-up sex doll that comes to life but fails to connect with human beings. However, while the original, late-1990s manga uses this story to highlight the relationship between normative gender roles and Japanese capitalism, the 2009 film adaptation by Koreeda Hirokazu, Kūki ningyō/Air Doll, is an elegy for the collapse of the nuclear family and a warning of what the future holds for Japan’s children. In placing value on the child and framing precarity as a crisis of heterosexual reproduction, the film Air Doll presents a version of what Lee Edelman terms ‘reproductive futurism’. It is a text in which the child is ‘the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’ and ‘whatever refuses this mandate […] must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends’.3 Nonprocreative forms of pleasure and sociality are imagined as empty, selfish and abject. Gōda Yoshiie’s Gōda tetsugakudō: Kūki ningyō/Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll was originally serialized in the manga magazine Biggu komikku orijinaru/Big Comic Original from March 1998 to November 1999.4 Instalments appeared from between twice a month to once every two months, varying in length from ten to forty pages. These were later published as a book that was subtitled in English: Gôda’s Philosophical Discourse: ‘The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl’. Rather than forming a single multi-episode story arc, each instalment of the manga introduces a new character in a stand-alone vignette. In the manga, the air doll’s story is just one episode in a series of stories that examine men who are failed by the strategies they use to manage their emotions. These characters suppress negative feelings that interfere with efficiency in the workplace, or they artificially simulate happiness and optimism, belying the harsh realities of more pressure, more work, more risk and diminishing returns in recessionary Japan. Focusing on bad affect and uncontrolled outbursts of emotion, Gōda reveals the pressure on men to conform to ideals of male stoicism and self-sacrifice. He shows how gender ideals and social norms are used to ensure the smooth functioning of Japanese capitalism and portrays how self-management techniques are an extension of workplace controls over feelings and identity. For Gōda the air doll represents the plight of a society in which men are compelled to contain or dispose of their emotions, resulting in forms of emotional damage and blockage. In contrast, in his 2009 film adaptation Air Doll, Koreeda depicts the air doll as an abandoned child in a society that can no longer successfully reproduce itself. By focusing concern on the traditional family and the plight of the child, Koreeda’s film reflects a far more conventional discourse on precarity. The film mourns the loss of family stability without exploring why subjects have no choice but to conform to social norms if they are to flourish. Unlike Gōda, Koreeda does not question the strict gendered division of labour within the heterosexual family. Although both the film and manga are dark, the film thus evinces a melancholic attachment to heteronormativity that the manga does not. This essay examines the historical context for the film and manga, comparing how these two versions of the text engage with discourses on ‘precarity’ in Japan. Whereas the manga focuses on dysfunctional masculinity and the artificial management of emotion in late-capitalist society, Koreeda’s film deals more broadly with the dissolution of the traditional family and the pervasive sense of disconnection in post-bubble Japan. My analysis will examine this shift in focus across the two texts, as well as discuss the role that live performance and cinematic techniques play in Koreeda’s adaptation. The term précarité was first used by European sociologists and anti-poverty activists in the 1970s. It reflected a shift towards increasingly deregulated and flexible forms of capitalist accumulation in late-stage capitalist or post-Fordist societies, which meant an increase in irregular work.5 In France the term was used to draw attention to the increasing vulnerability of groups that were not usually viewed as at high risk of poverty. Together with the concept of the ‘new poor’, the concept of precarity redefined how poverty was conceived.6 Precarity suggests the danger that poverty poses to all of society by undermining its cohesion. In the 1970s US economists argued that labourers could be divided into primary and secondary markets, with unequal employment opportunities, wages, working conditions, protections and opportunities for advancement.7 This ‘dual labour market’ model explains how stability and instability can co-exist within an economy wherein some workers – typically lower-educated, blue-collar, female, elderly, ethnic or racial minority, immigrant and/or nonregular workers – are far more exposed to hardship and stuck in lower-paying, less-skilled or nonpermanent jobs with fewer prospects of upward mobility. The model attempts to explain how intractable poverty can persist in what seems to be a healthy economy, since deregulation does not affect all segments of the labour market equally. These arguments have had an enormous influence on labour studies and activism,8 and are alive today in debates about the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘sharing economy’. The notion of a dual labour market was echoed in the concept of the société duale that emerged in 1980s France,9 as well as the concept of the gap or divided society (kakusa shakai) that appeared in 1990s Japan.10 In the 2000s Amamiya Karin, a leading anti-poverty activist and former lead singer of the ultranationalist punk band The Revolutionary Truth, popularized the term purikariāto (precariat – a portmanteau of ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’) to describe forms of impoverishment and uncertainty that are linked to the increasing casualization of labour.11 As noted by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, in contrast to the class-based definition of the proletariat, the term precariat refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalized, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers or so-called self-employed persons. But its reference also extends beyond the world of work to encompass other aspects of intersubjective life, including housing, debt, and the ability to build affective social relations.12 In Japanese popular culture, representations of precarity often centre on furīta (freeters; men or unmarried women who work part-time or are searching for part-time work), haken (dispatched workers), NEET (those ‘not in education, employment or training’), hikikomori (shut-ins), parasaito shinguru (parasite singles; young people who will not or cannot move out of their parents’ homes by their late twenties) and otaku (obsessive fans of anime, games and manga). Such characters have become increasingly common in contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture as the workforce transforms and as changes emerge in family structure, gender roles and consumption patterns. Scholars such as Tomiko Yoda, Anne Allison and Gabriella Lukács have argued that the post-bubble period is characterized not only by a contracting economy but also by shrinking expectations. Ordinary Japanese can no longer hope to achieve the middle-class dream of domestic prosperity or ‘my home-ism’: a happy marriage that includes children, homeownership, and a high standard of living that is reflected in consumer purchases. These material and social incentives used to encourage productivity in the postwar period, and the gendered division of labour within the Japanese family enabled a high rate of economic growth. Writing of the height of ‘Japan, Inc.’ in the 1970s and 1980s, Allison observes, Japan wasn’t a welfare state and the government allocated little in the way of social provisions (which is still true today). Rather, it was the corporation and the family that figured as the de facto welfare institutions. Given a family wage to have and support a family, workers were taken care of but also wedded to the workplace – a dynamic that extracted labour from male workers and also their unpaid wives in managing the household, the children, and any attached elderly so that the breadwinner could give all to his job.13 Thus in popular representations of precariousness, precarity is often framed as a failure of masculinity and a danger to the traditional heterosexual family, despite its roots in the economic downturn and corporate restructuring. It is believed that freeters (young men and unmarried women who float between part-time jobs) delay dating, marriage and childbirth to pursue individual self-fulfilment or until they can achieve economic stability,14 while the ‘shut-in’ hikikomori reject all social ties. Allison observes, ‘Along with replaceable work and workers is the rhythm of social impermanence: relationships that instantaneously connect, disconnect, or never start up in the first place’.15 In this way, representations of precarity reflect anxieties surrounding Japan’s declining birthrate and rapidly ageing population, as well as an increasing sense of alienation and loss that is far more difficult to quantify. The gendering of precarity as dysfunctional masculinity also reinforces conventional ways of understanding the difference between men’s and women’s work. Women’s labour may be precarious in the sense that women are streamed into lower-paying jobs with fewer opportunities for advancement, and they constitute the majority of the irregular labour pool. This precarity, however, does not represent a challenge to social expectations and gender norms. Although seventy per cent of women workers are irregularly employed and eighty per cent of haken workers are female,16 studies suggest that large numbers of women prefer (or are pressured) to pursue part-time work rather than full-time employment due to family responsibilities.17 It remains typical for Japanese women to leave the workforce after their first child. In 2011 (not long after Koreeda’s Air Doll was released), seventy-four per cent of educated women left their jobs after having their first child, compared to thirty-one per cent in the USA and thirty-five per cent in Germany.18 This is why, Gabriella Lukács and Ritu Vij argue, representations of precarity in Japanese popular culture are typically male, though feminized, coded as consumers rather than earners, or marked as failures for not conforming to the traditional male ideal.19 Gōda Yoshiie’s manga Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll focuses on men who struggle to resolve conflicts between their emotions and social expectations. His stories solicit uncomfortable sympathy for characters who obey social protocols at the cost of suppressing or faking emotion. In Gōda’s tales, the attempt to strategically manage emotion (typically by denying it) usually results in a stunning return of the repressed. By the time this happens, any attempt to produce an authentic and proportionate response to the situation inevitably fails. The characters’ emotions become distorted, being too little, too late or inappropriate. These parables suggest that compulsory ‘happiness’ and pretended good feelings can only result in monstrosity. The fourth instalment of Gōda’s manga, ‘Kūki ningyō’ (‘Air Doll’), published in August 1998, tells the story of a blow-up sex doll named Jun (purity). Jun also appears briefly in the inaugural instalment, ‘Watashi o aishite kudasai’ (‘Please Love Me’), which sets the tone for the entire series by offering glimpses of various unlovable, vulnerable or emotionally dysfunctional personae who all ask, ‘Please, won’t somebody love someone like me?’ (figure 1). In ‘Air Doll’, Jun works part-time at a video store where she hides feelings for her male co-worker, ‘F’, who pretends to be a heartbreaker but has never been in a relationship. ‘F’ pays little attention to Jun, until one day she snags her arm on a nail (figure 2). In the scene that first attracted Koreeda’s interest, Jun’s body ripples and flattens, and her useless legs flip up and fold beneath her as she collapses in the video aisle. ‘F’ saves Jun’s life by quickly sealing the tear and filling her with air, in an intimate resuscitation that brings their bodies together in an act resembling cunnilingus. This is depicted in a two-page layout that emphasizes the awkwardness and intensity of their unexpected intimacy (figure 3).20 In this spread, ‘F’ has removed all of Jun’s clothing – her skirt, shirt and work apron – except for her tennis shoes. Six of the nine frames show ‘F’ between Jun’s legs or leaning over her body. The characters’ faces are only partially visible, when they are visible at all, and in every frame that Jun’s expression can be seen, her arm is lifted to cover her face. Significantly it is only in the three frames that do not show a wide view of this interaction that the characters appear to make eye contact. However this mutual gaze – if that is what it is – is disrupted by the gutter, or white space, between the frames. This heightens the sense of an ironic and painful disconnect between two characters in an uncomfortably intimate relation. The sound effects of the air entering Jun’s body (fuuuu) and the vibrations of the plastic as she unfurls (zu zu zu) only emphasize the silence between them. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide ‘Please Love Me’: Jun, the blow-up doll from the first instalment of Gōda Yoshiie’s manga Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide ‘Please Love Me’: Jun, the blow-up doll from the first instalment of Gōda Yoshiie’s manga Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll. Fig. 2 View largeDownload slide In the fourth instalment, ‘Air Doll’, Jun’s accident reveals her true form. Fig. 2 View largeDownload slide In the fourth instalment, ‘Air Doll’, Jun’s accident reveals her true form. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The intense intimacy of the resuscitation only emphasizes Jun’s vulnerability and the characters’ disconnection. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The intense intimacy of the resuscitation only emphasizes Jun’s vulnerability and the characters’ disconnection. When the crisis has passed and Jun is fully inflated, she asks her co-worker to hold her. He demurs, disguising his embarrassment as concern. On the way home, Jun wonders if ‘F’ will keep her secret. She vows she will never inflate herself again now that she has been filled with his breath, even if this means dying, and she goes home. Later that night her owner, unaware of Jun’s double life, notices the gash in her arm, throws her out with the trash and replaces her with a new model. Gōda’s manga is made up of short vignettes, so it would be very difficult to call Jun the manga’s central character even though she is referenced in the title. The air doll is nevertheless an important rhetorical figure, emblematic of the kinds of tools used for the artificial management of emotions that are depicted in other episodes. In addition, the air doll embraces the vulnerability from which the primarily male characters in Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll attempt, unsuccessfully, to shield themselves. Jun is the only principal character in the manga who is not gendered male. She is a ‘female’ mass-produced commodity that is marketed to male consumers, the product of a system that seeks to standardize the forms and techniques of male desire. Her consciousness and emotions, which seem excessive and even disruptive to her instrumental purpose, identify her with the male predicament in Gōda’s stories. ‘Negatibu shinkingu’ (‘Negative Thinking’), in the May 1998 special issue of Big Comic Original, is a typical example, in which a robotic loan officer struggles with maintaining the right attitude for his job (figure 4). The robot’s boss orders him to put profit first, but his feelings of responsibility and empathy make this difficult, so he goes to a clinic and has his negative emotions disabled through modifications to the ‘emotional control device’ that is affixed to his arm (figure 5). After ridding himself of fear, anger, anxiety and remorse, the robot is successfully able to turn down a neighbour’s request for a loan. The neighbour’s business is destroyed, but thanks to his modified emotions the loan officer is completely indifferent and disavows responsibility for the neighbourhood’s decline. When he returns home, his wife informs him that their daughter has been molested, to which he responds breezily: ‘Don’t worry, just pretend you were bitten by a dog. Cheer up!’ Mother and daughter look on with shock as the robot pumps his fist in the air, triumphant: ‘I have a totally positive attitude now!’ (figure 6). Fig. 4–5. View largeDownload slide ‘Negative Thinking’: a loan officer struggles to maintain the right attitude, so his ‘emotional control device’ is modified to overcome feelings of empathy. Fig. 4–5. View largeDownload slide ‘Negative Thinking’: a loan officer struggles to maintain the right attitude, so his ‘emotional control device’ is modified to overcome feelings of empathy. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide This positivity leads him to make light of his daughter’s abuse. Big Comic Original, May 1998. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide This positivity leads him to make light of his daughter’s abuse. Big Comic Original, May 1998. In ‘Ikari’ (‘Fury’), which appeared in the November 1998 special issue of Big Comic Original, an appliance salesman lives by the motto ‘It’s best not to get angry’. He repeats this mantra while ignoring the screams coming from an alley where a man is being beaten by thugs. The motto inures him to the abject apologies he has to make to angry customers at work (figure 7). A concerned co-worker notices this excessive obeisance and advises that it is better to take a stand, since it is not only customers who heap on the abuse but also their company that exploits them, and they need to set a good example for their children. Later the salesman learns that his son is being bullied in middle school, and wrestles with how he should respond without violating the code that has allowed him to coexist with others in an antagonistic world. In the end, rather than redeeming himself by standing up for his son as might be expected, the salesman becomes a bully. He grabs the baseball bat from the thugs that lurk in the alley and goes after his son’s tormentors. Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide ‘Fury’: a salesman’s mantra, ‘It’s best not to get angry’, leads him to excessive humility and passivity. Big Comic Original, November 1998. Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide ‘Fury’: a salesman’s mantra, ‘It’s best not to get angry’, leads him to excessive humility and passivity. Big Comic Original, November 1998. Besides the air doll, the nonhuman figures that appear in Gōda’s manga are either gendered male or associated with dysfunctional masculinity. In one story, a rationalizing robot convinces the young girl in his care that he needs to be thrown out. To her horror, he dismisses her affections and attempts to dispel her anxiety with a sales pitch that emphasizes how new robot models are more advanced and cost effective. In another story, animal costumes become popular among salespeople and spread throughout the general public. The cuddly animals have diminutive nicknames and cute trademark gestures. They smooth commercial transactions and spread good cheer, even though the masquerade itself is portrayed as humiliating and feminizing. Despite the variety of characters in Gōda’s world, Jun is the only character who offers a female point of view, which is used to highlight the male predicament. After Jun’s brush with death in the video store, she witnesses female suffering everywhere around her – specifically, women suffering because of men. For the male characters in Gōda’s world, feeling authentic emotion is threatening while performing emotion, which is what their jobs require, is self-alienating. In contrast, the ‘Air Doll’ episode suggests that women belong to a gendered community that is fostered by the public display of their common experiences and shared feelings, even if those feelings and experiences are unhappy. First Jun collides with a crying woman who, face buried in her hands, cannot see where she is going. A man calls after the woman as she flees, and when she does not respond he turns on his heel, muttering dismissively, and lights a cigarette. Next the bottom row of frames on the page shows three sad young women. Each frame says ‘setsunai’, meaning ‘heartbreak’. The opposite page is divided evenly into a symmetrical three-by-four grid in which nearly every image is a closeup of a disconsolate young woman in tears (figure 8). It seems that Gōda’s objective in Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll is to make male unhappiness and emotional dysfunction just as visible as female suffering in order to foster an ‘intimate public’ for men. In general his manga emphasizes the emotional dimensions of precarity in recessionary Japan. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide The many faces of female suffering, in Gōda’s ‘Air Doll’. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide The many faces of female suffering, in Gōda’s ‘Air Doll’. The term ‘intimate public’ comes from Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint, in which she writes, ‘An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express these people’s particular core interests and desires’.21 In some cases these mass-mediated counterpublics offer opportunities to foster community around negative affects that exist in tension with mainstream values and prerogatives. For Berlant, commercial women’s culture is a primary example. Analysing pamphlets, books and films, Berlant theorizes how emotional media extends ways of belonging that may be organized around shared feelings of being downtrodden, rejected, devalued or disappointed. She emphasizes, however, that even though these commodity cultures are shaped in reaction to the dominant, they are not necessarily transgressive. In fact intimate publics may be defined by their members’ aspirations to normativity. Thus public intimacy builds community identifications through shared feelings, insider recognition and ‘magnetizing’ fantasies.22 Within Gōda’s stories, feeling rarely brings men and women closer together. In most instances feeling precipitates crisis, and subsequent attempts to manage crisis by diverting, displacing and dissimulating emotion only make things worse. Considered in this context, Jun’s character serves primarily as a foil for exploring what men are compelled to repress. It seems Gōda is not interested in exploring femininity as carefully as masculinity. Jun’s function as ‘an air doll for dealing with desire’ is relevant for Gōda’s examination of male emotional regulation but superfluous to Jun’s own story and irrelevant to her desiring subjectivity. Her purpose as a sex toy for modulating and releasing desire is antonymic to her own suffusion with emotion. In other words, Jun’s instrumentality is for others, not for her. In Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll, Gōda associates women with feeling and depicts the regulation of desire and commodification of affect as feminizing, but he never shows women policing and dissimulating their own desire. By putting dysfunctional masculinity on display, Gōda addresses Big Comic Original’s male readers as an ad-hoc community with shared unhappy experiences.23 Featuring the air doll as the single female protagonist in Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll allows Gōda to achieve three things. First, it highlights the theme of male dysphoria in a mass-mediated, service-driven, technologically advanced society where the regulation of affect is necessary for ‘getting along’; second, it examines how emotional controls create social fractures and pathological masculinities; and third, it hints at the important role that women play in keeping emotion going and managing affect. The fact that the only principal female character in Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll is a blow-up doll should not be over-interpreted to mean that Gōda views women as sex objects. If anything, the inclusion of a blow-up doll as the only ‘female’ character is evidence that Gōda is not concerned with women per se, but interested instead in emotion and abject forms of feminization. What happens, then, when the air doll is portrayed by a flesh-and-blood actress in a live-action, feature-length narrative film? Koreeda’s film retains the theme of emotional mismanagement while providing a deeper exploration of Jun’s own experience of being an instrument for regulating desire. The film also introduces narrative subplots that elaborate on the sex doll’s function as a substitute for human relations. In the film Jun is called Nozomi, which means ‘wish’ or ‘hope’. Nozomi (Bae Doona) slowly discovers that she was meant to be a lifelike imitation whose principal virtue lay in not being human. Once Nozomi realizes this, her life begins to fall apart. In Koreeda’s film, the innocent and childlike Nozomi’s plight symbolizes the fraying of human relationships and the failure of the heterosexual family, a crisis that threatens Japan’s future by endangering the child. As we have seen, Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll examines the regulation of emotions – the ways in which men are expected to conserve, sell, suppress, reciprocate or act on feelings – within the context of a precarious Japan. Gōda’s stories suggest that the desire to please and to be loved are cheapened within a service-oriented economy and mass-mediated urban culture, as well as damaged by shrinking horizons of opportunity and inescapable economic pressures. Affects are commodified. Good feeling is regimented. Real human connection, increasingly difficult to attain, becomes that much more precious and that much more inconvenient. Real feelings gum up efficiency and rational decision-making. In Gōda’s world it is not so much the ability to feel and express love as the spectacle of humiliation and the return of the repressed that belatedly (and tragically) prove one's humanity. Koreeda’s film adaptation de-emphasizes Gōda’s theme of strategic emotional regulation, instead shifting focus to lonely singles and the power of fantasy. If Gōda depicts a crisis of Japanese masculinity, Koreeda’s focus is the collapse of the Japanese family, with Nozomi’s story as a thread that connects glimpses into the unhappy lives of an eastside Tokyo neighbourhood. Koreeda takes the basic arc of Gōda’s manga – air doll works at video store, longs for co-worker, nearly loses her life, shares intimacy, experiences loneliness and is thrown away – and adds more back-story, with new characters and original scenes. Koreeda’s world is populated by both male and female misfits, most of whom are looking for hetereosexual romance or family, though Air Doll never shows a single functioning family unit. The film makes room for a fuller consideration of female precarity, but only by framing that precarity in terms of the decline of the traditional family. Koreeda’s precarious female subjects are also marked by a failure to achieve the heteronormative ideal. These characters include a female hoarder who gorges herself on food, a girl who is a child of divorce, and an ageing female concierge who obsesses about her appearance. Koreeda’s film is less a critique of fraught masculinity than a portrait of lonely Tokyo singles who are unable to connect, are without family, and fail to reproduce. The film suggests that these individuals lack the coherence offered by family and thus are condemned to live sad and lonely lives, all their kindness ‘wasted’ on strangers for whom they are forced to perform in self-alienating service jobs. Nozomi’s innocence and vulnerability provides a counterpoint to these lonely lives. In Koreeda’s Air Doll, children and childlike characters provide a ready-made moral framework for judging the far-reaching social consequences of the solipsistic lives of precarious subjects. We see the air doll inexplicably come to life and experience wonder as she learns about the world, imitating the people she meets. Mimesis is initially linked to repetition and learning, and allows Nozomi, like a child, to gain mastery of her surroundings. At the video store she takes careful notes on her co-worker Jun’ichi’s (Arata) and manager’s film recommendations, as well as recording general observations about life. After some initial trouble with everyday interactions, Nozomi eventually learns proper social protocols and is able to behave increasingly ‘naturally’. Her feelings for Jun’ichi are reciprocated, and they date each other before Nozomi’s true identity is revealed. As Nozomi learns more about human problems, however, she loses her innocence and falls into despair. She goes to meet her maker and is confronted by a warehouse of air dolls who, like her, are designed to be discarded after use. The video store manager (Iwamatsu Ryō) notices that Nozomi is flustered when her owner, Hideo (Itao Itsuji), comes into the video store. This leads the manager to believe that Nozomi is cheating on Hideo with Jun’ichi, and he blackmails her into having sex with him in the storeroom. When Hideo realizes that Nozomi has come to life, he chases her away, revealing that he never wanted the hassle of a real-life relationship. After Jun’ichi is accidentally killed in a sex act gone awry, Nozomi takes herself to the garbage, removes the tape covering her tear and lets herself deflate. Interspersed among these scenes, short vignettes show alienated Tokyoites unable to cope with day-to-day life. Much like Nozomi, these characters use fantasy and role play to manage their complicated feelings; yet while Nozomi uses play to engage with the world and learn from humans, the human characters use fantasy to insulate themselves from reality. In Koreeda’s film, just as in Gōda’s manga, the air doll serves as an organizing motif, but here it is specific physical and functional features – her hollowness, her mimetic qualities, her function as a substitute – that seem to interest Koreeda. He poses Nozomi next to statues, mannequins, blow-up sex dolls and children’s dolls (figures 9–12), and depicts her as a hybrid and mutable body by using a mixture of live-action performance and props. He develops the themes of the film by using performance situations that could not have been staged in the still, graphic medium of manga, at least to the extent that these scenes make use of corporeality and live performance. The introduction of female characters and motifs related to childhood help refocus the film’s critique around the failure of the modern family rather than the emotionally troubled masculinity that is the focus of Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll. Koreeda draws particular attention to the materiality of Nozomi’s body (especially its emptiness and sterility) in order to reveal the film’s real investment: Nozomi’s counterpart, the human child. These elaborations turn Air Doll into a Pinocchio story in which a toy desires to become a human being. Air Doll can also be compared to Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (1987), a film about angels who observe and record the history of Berlin.24 Eventually one of the angels, Damiel, develops a desire to know what it is to feel, love and live a physical existence. He becomes human and falls in love with a trapeze artist. (Nozomi’s note-taking and the video rental store ‘Cinema Circus’ are reminiscent of Wenders’s film.) However, if Wings of Desire is ultimately concerned with the possibility of communicating experience and the relation of the visible to embodied knowledge, Air Doll emphatically denies Nozomi the full, embodied humanity and understanding achieved by the angel Damiel. Figs 9–12. View largeDownload slide Nozomi is posed next to mannequins, statues and different kinds of doll, in Kūki ningyō/Air Doll (Koreeda Hirokazu, 2009). Figs 9–12. View largeDownload slide Nozomi is posed next to mannequins, statues and different kinds of doll, in Kūki ningyō/Air Doll (Koreeda Hirokazu, 2009). Nozomi remains a ghostly body. On a date with Jun’ichi, before he knows what she is, Nozomi’s own shadow nearly betrays her. Under the lamplight her shadow appears translucent, stiff and strangely buoyant; it is the shadow of her air doll form. Whereas Wings of Desire concludes with the physical consummation of an ideal love, the love scene in Air Doll compulsively repeats Nozomi’s near-death experience, as Jun’ichi inflates and deflates her again and again. In the grisly conclusion of their lovemaking, the imagined reciprocity of desire is revealed as impossible: Nozomi attempts to ‘let out Jun’ichi’s air’ so she can revive him by blowing into his mouth; instead, he bleeds to death. In Air Doll performance is reflexive. It is not only central to the film’s exploration of identity but also draws attention to the constitution of the fiction itself. When Nozomi is in her ‘human’ form it is impossible to discern that her body is not human. It is only Bae/Nozomi’s use of imitation, her stiff posture and awkward movements, and her studied use of facial expressions that give visible form to the fact that Nozomi is pretending to be human. Bae’s performance in Air Doll is expressive and blank, drawing attention to the use of her body as a medium. The actress’s ethnicity and nationality have drawn both interest and criticism, with some commentators questioning the casting of a Korean actress as a sex doll given the history of Japanese colonialism and forced prostitution of Korean women during World War II.25 Japanese reviewers remarked that the actress’s ‘broken English’ made her more believable as a doll, while expressive eyes and a pliant, sensuous body contributed to the warmth and vitality of her performance.26 In Air Doll it is the sense of watching both the actress and the character create performances that prompts us to think about how bodies construct fictions and where performance begins and ends. Nozomi’s performance of ‘human’ cannot be extricated from Bae’s performance of ‘doll’, and it is only via one that we can perceive the other. Koreeda’s decision to use both a live actress and a blow-up doll draws attention to the corporeality of Nozomi’s body and the many layers of ‘performance’ in the film. The alternation and, at one point, integration of Bae’s body with that of an actual plastic doll heightens our awareness of her body as material to be used by the director. Nozomi’s attempts to impersonate humans are not only the source of much comedy and pathos, they are also a constant reminder that Bae must perform a reasonable impersonation of a doll. The use of the actress’s body and props underscores the difference between Nozomi’s hollow, synthetic, manmade and inflatable body and the flesh-and-blood body of human beings. This difference plays an important role in Jun’ichi’s death and Nozomi’s realization that she will never truly be ‘human’. The film poses the question, is the difference between ‘doing’ and ‘pretending’ as clear as the difference between Nozomi’s plastic Ur-form and her flesh-and-blood limbs? Koreeda suggests that the relationship of performed fiction to reality is not so much a separation as a doubling. In performance, act and enacted, ‘doing’ and ‘playing’, coexist. To borrow Donald Crafton’s phrase, we might say that Nozomi has a ‘dense performativity’ in that her character is produced through many varied and overlapping means: ‘Nozomi’ is a synthetic being who has been created with the use of a human actor, prosthetics and props; she is modelled on a manga character; she requires Bae to speak a second language and make expressive use of her lack of fluency; and she is shown pretending and imitating throughout the film.27 This dense performativity contributes to the film’s capacity to provoke reflection on the meaning of fantasy, role play and personhood. It also underscores the nature of our engagement with cinematic fiction – in particular, the spectator’s ability to suspend disbelief and move between the poles of absorption and distanced viewing, as we experience events happening within the film with both credulity and incredulity. Performance is also foregrounded through the use of repetition, imitation and role play. Nozomi and Jun’ichi’s dinner date provides a wonderful example of the centrality of performance to Koreeda’s film. This scene comprises a series of interactions in which relations between people are organized by fantasy alignments and maintained by repetitive performances. In some cases these fantasies are private, while in others they are selectively shared. The scene enumerates the many forms of role play, fantasy and dissimulation in which we engage in everyday life. Due to the complexity of this scene, it is worth examining its construction in detail before analysing its articulation of Koreeda’s central themes. Nozomi and Jun’ichi are seated near a father (Maruyama Tomomi) and his young daughter Moé (Naraki Miu), two of the unhappy minor characters who appear throughout the film. It is Moé’s birthday, and snippets of their conversation reveal her father trying pathetically to assert his presence in his daughter’s life. He is having trouble keeping up with her changing tastes and behaviour, putting him at a disadvantage to Moé’s mother (his ex-wife), with whom he shares custody. At the same time Moé’s father shows genuine concern for his daughter’s self-esteem, telling white lies to make excuses for his wife’s absence from their celebration and reassuring Moé that her mother is thinking of her on her birthday. The scene begins with a tracking and panning shot of the entire room as we hear Moé’s father encouraging her to eat her vegetables. The camera tracks laterally towards their table, maintaining its distance and panning to the right to reveal Nozomi and Jun’ichi (figure 13). The camera then jumps the 180-degree line, punctuating a shift in focus as it continues to track towards Nozomi and Jun’ichi’s table, now from the opposite direction (figure 14). Jun’ichi eats while Nozomi sketches. He observes her, and leans across the table to study her drawing. She playfully snaps her drawing pad towards her body, but is soon distracted by the conversation of the nearby father and daughter. Nozomi looks off-screen as we hear Moé’s father gently scold her, ‘Moé, you know that’s not a comb’. Moé responds, ‘But Ariel was doing it’. The camera jumps back over the 180-degree line to show what is transpiring between father and daughter at the moment that Moé’s father asks, ‘Who?’ Figs 13–15. View largeDownload slide The camera pans and tracks, emphasizing the unsettling distance between father and daughter, in Air Doll. Figs 13–15. View largeDownload slide The camera pans and tracks, emphasizing the unsettling distance between father and daughter, in Air Doll. Moé’s father is shown from a slightly low angle in an over-the-shoulder shot from Moé’s point of view as he watches his daughter brush her doll’s hair with a fork. Due to the shallow depth of field, only the father is in focus (figure 15), while the camera never stops panning as it tracks. The roving camera emphasizes the unsettling distance between father and daughter, as well as the tense contrast between her confidence and his nonplussed expression as he tries to understand who she means by ‘Ariel’. Just as the father says, ‘Oh, Ariel. Right. She was doing it, wasn’t she’, the camera begins panning back towards Moé while continuing to track in the opposite direction towards her father. She is now the focus, as she says, ‘Daddy, you wouldn’t know. I watched it with mommy.’ A beat later, the camera quickly tilts up and pans right, following a waiter who approaches and passes behind their table from off-screen left. Yet the camera never adjusts focus, maintaining focalization with Moé even as it tracks, pans and tilts towards the father and waiter during their interaction, as the father requests a beer and ‘what I asked for earlier’, which turns out to be Moé’s surprise birthday cake. As the continued focus on Moé indicates, camera movements at this point in the scene simply register the father’s distraction without taking on his point of view. After the lines exchanged between father and waiter, the camera immediately and swiftly pans back to Moé, who is now the centre of the scene. She takes advantage of her father’s shift in attention to lob one of her carrots onto the floor with her fork. She then resumes combing her doll’s hair and feigns complete involvement in this activity while pretending to chew. We hear the father affecting surprise off-screen – ‘Oh! You ate your carrot! Fantastic!’ – and there is a reverse cut to a wide-eyed Nozomi, who has just observed Moé’s charade. Nozomi immediately impersonates the sham with an exaggerated and wooden pantomime: she picks up her own carrot with her fork and quickly brings it to her mouth before launching it away with a swift flick of the wrist, all the while stiffly staring straight ahead in Jun’ichi’s direction. Nozomi puffs out her cheeks and makes an exaggerated show of ‘chewing’ and ‘swallowing’ before glancing back towards Moé. A shot/reverse-shot pattern is used to establish eye contact between the two: Moé winks and Nozomi winks back (figures 16 and 17). Even before the twice-repeated ploy and exchange of conspiratorial glances, Moé and Nozomi’s activities establish a connection between the two characters. Nozomi sketches Jun’ichi, and Moé plays with her doll, imitating Ariel from The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989). Nozomi pulls the pad away from Jun’ichi’s inquisitive gaze, and when Moé’s father pretends to know who Ariel is, Moé insists that he does not. Both characters use ‘copying’ to organize and stabilize their worlds. They use copycat behaviour to affirm their identities and set personal boundaries, for example when Nozomi protects her drawings and Moé rejects her father’s attempt to lay claim to knowledge that he does not have. Copying establishes a bond between the pair, giving each of them confidence in the face of awkward and undesirable experiences, such as eating carrots. Figs 16–17. View largeDownload slide Moé and Nozomi establish eye contact through a shot/reverse-shot pattern, in Air Doll. Figs 16–17. View largeDownload slide Moé and Nozomi establish eye contact through a shot/reverse-shot pattern, in Air Doll. At the conclusion of this scene, the waiter comes out with Moé’s birthday cake and Jun’ichi explains the ritual to Nozomi, who learns that the unique life of each human being is commemorated with a celebration of the day that they were born. Moé’s father fibs about the birthday cake, suggesting it was Moé’s mother’s idea. The birthday ritual underscores Koreeda’s point that there are imaginary ways of organizing time, reality and experience in which we all participate. These rituals can be linked to other elements in the scene – Nozomi’s use of copying to establish her identity and relationships with others, or Moé’s imitation of the Disney film – since these are performances, instances of ‘twice-behaved’ or ‘restored behaviour’ that are used to commemorate, to propose alternate realities, to test, to demonstrate or to make visible social relations and community values.28 Nozomi and Moé’s ‘performances’ reveal a reflexive relationship to the self: Nozomi theatrically pulls her drawings away from Jun’ichi’s gaze; Moé pretends to be Ariel; Moé pretends to eat her carrot; Nozomi copies Moé’s charade. In each of these scenarios the performer is both ‘herself’ and ‘not herself’. As Richard Schechner points out, performing ‘is behaviour that is “put on”’ – sometimes in multiple layers.29 Some performances may be for others’ benefit, such as Moé’s fake chewing and her father’s fib, but this is not necessarily the case. This notion that performance need not require an audience is one aspect that distinguishes Schechner’s concept of performing from other theories of performance. In Disney’s The Little Mermaid, the film referenced in the dinner-date scene, the mermaid Ariel longs to become human, collects human artefacts, and daydreams about the human world. After saving a human prince from drowning, she makes a deal to exchange her voice for real legs. In order to remain human, however, Ariel must first receive a ‘kiss of true love’ from the prince. During their first dinner together, Ariel picks up a fork and attempts to use it as a comb, drawing stares from other diners. Air Doll begins in this fashion, with a lightly comic but largely affirmative depiction of mimesis as learning, transformation and aspiration. This continues until the midpoint of the film, when ‘imitation’ becomes a trope for failed families and imperfect substitutes. The turning point of Air Doll is a scene in which Nozomi is rebuffed by protective mothers, who are disturbed by the strange girl fawning over their children. This is one of several scenes in the film where Nozomi is marked as other because of her inability to properly reproduce. After the mothers leave, an old man (Takahashi Masaya) who has witnessed Nozomi’s spurning offers this bleak assessment of the women’s cruelty towards her: Say, do you know a bug called the mayfly? The mayfly dies a day or two after it gives birth. So its body is empty. No stomach or intestines. It’s filled with eggs instead. It’s a creature that’s born only to give birth. Humans aren’t so different. Pointless … Nozomi identifies very literally with what the old man says, confessing, ‘I’m empty too’. This admission inspires the old man to recite a poem, but he cannot remember the words. He stutters, ‘“Life is”, let’s see, “Life is …”’. Nozomi repeats these words verbatim, simply reciting them without comprehending that the old man’s speech is imperfect, hesitant and open-ended. Her tragic flaw is presented as her empty repetition and simulation of the real, which is presented in stark contrast to real life’s creation and sexual reproduction. Notably, the ailing old man is also presented as one of the film’s flawed characters, a former substitute teacher (‘always an empty substitute’) who has no family and is dying a lonely death (kodokushi). Koreeda is not totally unironic in his treatment of characters’ desire for completion. Directly following this scene, we hear Nozomi reciting the poem ‘Life Is’, by Yoshino Hiroshi, over a montage sequence that shows different characters literally ‘filling the hole’ in their lives. Life is Made so that no one of us, by ourselves, is complete on our own So it seems For flowers too Having a pistil or stamen alone is Insufficient An insect or a breeze must come To play matchmaker between pistil and stamen In life, everything Contains within itself an absence That is to be filled by an other. The world is probably The sum of others However No one Knows Nor are we told To fill the absence in each other We are all of us scattered Our relation to each other is indifference Sometimes We cannot even bear the relation we are given This is the way The world is constructed, flimsily – Why? 30 The poem wistfully comments on Nozomi’s ‘emptiness’ and the mechanical aspects of her existence for others as a sex doll. The lines about ‘male’ and ‘female’ flowers that are in themselves incomplete reflect Nozomi’s desire to have a more fulfilling relation to an other. In the montage sequence that accompanies the recitation of the poem, Nozomi makes detailed drawings of flowers in her sketchbook, reflecting her reproductive fantasies. At the same time, the other images that make up the poem’s visual accompaniment make the sexual relation synonymous with very banal forms of ‘fulfilment’. It is not clear whether these images are supposed to be ironic (neither the music nor Nozomi’s voice suggest parody or cynicism): the neighbourhood policeman pumps air into his bicycle; the video store manager fixes himself a lonely breakfast by digging a hole in his rice and pouring in an egg; the latchkey child Moé lets herself into an empty house; a nameless hoarder-gorger character fills up her empty shopping trolley with junk food. Earlier shots of the blow-up doll being inflated, used and cleaned would fit seamlessly into this narration. Yet we cannot simply interpret Air Doll as a caustic portrait of the contemporary, single, urban Japanese male, whose job it is to serve others while at home he serves himself, for as the ‘Life Is’ montage indicates, Air Doll also features portraits of female anxiety and childlike vulnerability. It broadens Gōda’s satirical focus on masculinity. In the last scene of the film, Nozomi’s fate and the problems of Japanese society are explicitly linked to the plight of children. The child of divorce Moé finds Nozomi among the rubbish. She takes the ring from Nozomi’s finger and puts it on her own hand, leaving her toy doll with her in exchange. The trade reaffirms the connection between Nozomi and Moé, already strongly established in the dinner-date scene, and links Nozomi to the abandoned doll. This scene drives home the air doll’s associations with empty (non-reproductive) sex, the impossibility of self-fulfilment, and an empty existence without family or children. So while Koreeda’s film offers a deep exploration of the expressive materiality of the body and the role of fantasy in everyday social interactions, in comparison to Gōda’s manga it articulates a far more normative discourse on gender, sexuality and the family, defined above all by reproductive futurism – a heteronormative natalism that holds sexual reproduction as key to human flourishing while othering alternative attachments, desires and lifestyles. The air doll’s body serves as a locus of attraction and a medium for expression in both the manga and film, but Koreeda’s rendering of this body attaches new meanings to the air doll. In the process, Air Doll becomes a mournful, and rather conventional, critique of lonely singles and failed families. Vij has argued that by representing precarity as a danger to masculinity, fertility and the traditional family structure, Japanese popular culture has displayed a ‘singular failure of imagination in overcoming the present crisis’ of neoliberalism. Such representations double-down on normative social scripts and affective investments that cannot solve the current impasse and may even stand in the way of happiness.31 Vij argues that ‘the project of rethinking and rebuilding social and economic order in Japan (and elsewhere) must necessarily be a feminist one’ that challenges ‘the continuing sway of a dominant structure of reproductive heteronormativity’ that has already been effectively destroyed by the corrosive effects of late capitalism and neoliberal policies.32 Similarly Allison argues that Japan’s sense of precarity is not related simply to employment and social mobility but to the expiration of the ‘postwar social contract’: Guided by a principle of reproductive futurism, my-home-ism provided the roadmap to aspirational normativity: working hard, investing in children (who were then expected to invest in caregiving their parents), and building progressively toward a future that included a here and now of material prosperity.33 The postwar heteronormative family, with its strict division of labour between men in the workforce and women in the home, allowed Japan to reduce welfare spending. Stay-at-home mothers cared for children and the elderly, and provided cheap, flexible and disposable labour in jobs that were secondary to their ideal roles as homemakers. This postwar ideal of lifetime employment in a salaried job for the husband and total dedication to children and home for the mother seems increasingly unattainable. Young people are delaying relationships, marriage and children in the face of job uncertainty and poor financial and social resources. And yet they still desire the ‘normal life’ that represents the ‘good life’, even though that lifestyle has been dismantled by neoliberal reforms.34 Koreeda’s Air Doll exemplifies the failure to think beyond the reproductive family and embrace alternative forms of sociality, which Allison and Vij argue is a major obstacle to re-envisioning hope, home and belonging in contemporary Japan. This is in sharp contrast to Gōda’s original manga, which scrutinizes the role of inflexible gender norms in exacerbating the social and emotional dimensions of precarity when men fail (or are failed by) those ideals. Comparing the manga and film versions of Air Doll demonstrates how the unique capacities of each medium are used to make the air doll emblematic of specific engagements within their story-worlds, while producing two very different responses to the problem of precarity in Japan. Gōda’s manga questions the rigid gender norms that underwrote high-economic growth, while Koreeda’s film emphasizes the air doll’s ‘emptiness’, her failure to find love, and the collapse of the family, typifying a melancholic attachment to the heteronormative social organization that helped drive Japan's ‘economic miracle’. Both texts portray life as full of humiliation, disappointment and the pain of our insufficiencies: we want to be loved for who we are, but instead we are desired for the role we play in other people’s fantasies, something which inevitably means we remain substitutes for the unattainable. Footnotes 1 Yoshimichi Sato, ‘Stability and increasing fluidity in the contemporary Japanese social stratification system’, Contemporary Japan, vol. 22, no. 1 (2010), pp. 7–21. 2 See Hifumi Okunuki, ‘“Five-year rule” triggers “Tohoku college massacre” of jobs’, The Japan Times, 27 November 2016, <http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/11/27/issues/five-year-rule-triggers-tohoku-college-massacre-jobs> accessed 29 November 2018. 3 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 3, 11. 4 Gōda Yoshiie, Gōda tetsugakudō: Kūki ningyō/Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2000). 5 Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 6. 6 See Sarah Haßdenteufel, ‘Covering social risks. poverty debate and anti-poverty policy in France in the 1980s’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 41, no. 1 (2016), special issue ‘Risk as an Analytical Category: Selected Studies in the Social History of the Twentieth Century’, pp. 201–22. 7 See Peter B. Doeringer and Michael J. Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, MA: Heath Lexington Books, 1971). 8 See, for instance, Michael Anselme and Robert Weisz, ‘Good jobs and bad: a differentiated structuring of the labor market’, Acta Sociologica, vol. 28, no. 1 (1985), pp. 35–53. 9 Ibid., p. 214. 10 See Barbara G. Holthus and Kristina Iwata-Weickgennant (eds), Contemporary Japan, vol. 22, no. 1/2 (2010), special issue ‘Mind the Gap: Stratification and Social Inequalities in Japan’. 11 See Amamiya Karin and Fukushima Mizuho, Wākingu pua no hangeki: We are the precariat (Working Poor Strike Back: We Are the Precariat) (Tokyo: Nanantsumori Shokan, 2007), and Amamiya, ‘Naze ima puroretaria bungaku ka’ (‘Why proletarian literature now?’), Kokubungaku, January 2009, special issue ‘Saidoku – puroretaria bungaku’ (‘Re-reading Proletarian Literature’), pp. 7–16. 12 Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, ‘Kirino Natsuo’s Metabola, or the Okinawan stage, fractured selves and the precarity of contemporary existence’, in Iwata-Weickgenannt and Roman Rosenbaum (eds), Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), p. 25. 13 Allison, Precarious Japan, pp. 10–11. 14 For more on positive and negative images of ‘freeter’ lifestyles, see Gabriella Lukács, ‘Workplace dramas and labor fantasies in 1990s Japan’, in Ann Anagnost, Andrea Ari and Hai Ren (eds), Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 231. 15 Allison, Precarious Japan, p. 8. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 On the difficulties of interpreting this data, see Kaye Broadbent, Women’s Employment in Japan: The Experience of Part-time Workers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), p. 68. 18 Anne Stefanie Aronsson, Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), p. 17. 19 Lukács, ‘Workplace dramas and labor fantasies’, pp. 157–60; Ritu Vij, ‘Cinematic narratives of precarity: gender and affect in contemporary Japan’, in Iwata-Weickgennant and Rosenbaum (eds), Visions of Precarity, pp. 127–28. 20 Gōda, Gōda tetsugakudō, pp. 58–59. 21 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 11. 23 The target demographic of Big Comic Original is young adult men. Mass-market Japanese manga magazines are classified by age and gender rather than genre, although in actuality readers do not necessarily belong to these demographic profiles. 24 This is also noted by Tai Hajime of the Cinema 5 theatre in Oita – in an article for the Asahi daily newspaper in which he called the film the ‘sex doll version of Der Himmel über Berlin’ – ‘Kūki ningyō: Muku na me de mita gendai shakai’ (‘Air Doll: contemporary society viewed through innocent eyes’), Asahi shinbun, Tokyo morning edition, 12 November 2009, p. 28. 25 See, for example, Peter C. Pugsley, Exploring Morality and Sexuality in Asian Cinema: Cinematic Boundaries (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), p. 107. 26 See, for example, Yanashita Kiichirō’s comment in ‘Kūki ningyō: Kokoro o motta rabudōru’ (‘Air Doll: the sex doll who had a heart’), Asahi shinbun, Tokyo evening edition, 25 September 2009, p. 2: ‘Though her Japanese is not quite fluent, this handicap is used to her advantage. Her halting, poorly formed words convey the unsteadiness of the newborn doll.’ Yanashita goes on to compare Bae’s full-body acting and pantomime to silent film performance, concluding, ‘Silently accepting her destiny as a doll who is toyed with by selfish men, who treat her as an object, Bae Doona is a veritable modern Lillian Gish, the glorious, eternal heroine of solemn tragedy.’ 27 Donald Crafton, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013), p. 18. 28 See Richard Schechner, ‘Restoration of behavior’, in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 36–116. 29 Ibid., p. 121. 30 Yoshino Hiroshi, ‘Inochi wa’ (‘Life is’), in Kaze ga fuku to (When the Wind Blows) (Tokyo: Sanrio, 1977) (my translation). There are three more stanzas in the poem that are not included in the film. 31 Vij, ‘Cinematic narratives of precarity’, p. 179. Vij draws on the analysis of affective attachments in Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 34 For a brilliant analysis of this impasse, see Berlant, Cruel Optimism. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - From manga to film: gender, precarity and the textual transformation of Air Doll
JO - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjy061
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/from-manga-to-film-gender-precarity-and-the-textual-transformation-of-9yXv6K6DNJ
SP - 99
VL - 60
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -